[ginger]

A hypersyllable after the rhyme...I never would have thought of that. Since the hypenation would create an enjambment, a listener probably wouldn't hear the split anyway, so why not keep the word on the same line? Do you know of any examples off hand, Carol? My guess is that it wouldn't fly, at least on Erato, in a poem with mostly full rhymes.

[Carol Taylor]

Hypersyllables follow rhymes all the time. It's called a feminine ending. The operative question is whether you can rhyme on the penultimate syllable of a feminine ending against a masculine end rhyme. I've done it myself, not in a tight form like the ovillejo but in looser verse with occasional rhyme. I don't have an example off-hand of somebody famous doing it. The hypersyllable can actually wrap to a headless iamb on the next line with no interruption of the meter and no hyphen.

Carol

[Michael Cantor]

Carol -

Is this what you mean?

Creative rhyming of an ending trochee
offers chances for a female line
to be more masculine; put on a cloak
of clever smoke and lose that closing whine.

Michael

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited June 16, 2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

This hijack is getting really interesting.

I think the trouble is that there are different reading styles for different readers. Some people read a line-break as if it were a full stop. Others read it as nothing more than a carriage return on a typewritten page, something invisible that's not supposed to be noticed.

I'm really interested in this because the original ending of "The Music Box" over in the Deep End was:

the music box-
's golden key
and there
in socks
danced merr-
ily

Unfortunately, this invited loud protests, at least from one reader, who couldn't stand the idea of a hyphen before an apostrophe, telling me that if I dropped the apostrophe and just let the s stay on that line, people would still read it with the sound as I intended.

So it became:

the music box's
golden key
and there
in socks
danced merr-
ily

However, the above comment was incorrect, because Tony didn't read box's/socks as a full rhyme, or drop the feminine 's ending to the next line.

I think I'm going to put the hyphen before the apostrophe back in, because I wanted the line-breaks to be read as the jerky winding down of a music box, which that does. Even if it makes for peculiar punctuation.

The Ovillejo raises the interesting question of whether such hyphenations are proper, since they serve the same as line-breaks do to tell the reader where to pause to stress the rhymes. Even if the stress comes in the middle of a line because of the enjambment generally necessary in such a tight form.

Simply avoiding such constructions isn't much of a solution if you intend to read the poetry, where the hyphens aren't read but the line breaks are--or aren't, depending on the reader.

Kevin

[graywyvern]

i think a hyphenated line ending is okay if you really
mean to pause in the middle of a word. if not, a hyper-
metric syllable is necessary & this is no terrible
fault (though it does tend to make it look like you
should be writing blank verse instead). this is a
special effect, for joking mostly. and i think it is
not suitable for picture-poems, either. THAT MAKES IT
TOO EASY. keep working till you can say what you want,
in the space you have. otherwise, wghat's the point of
attempting a form?

[Roger Slater]

<FONT >
OLD


Lately I've been told
I'm old
and other depressing stuff.
Enough!
You need not tell me so.
To know
that I have lost the glow
of youth, of course, is sad.
Whatever you would add,
I'm old enough to know.
</pre></FONT f>



[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited June 17, 2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

graywyvern,

Thanks. That was pretty much what I thought first time, since I actually did want the pause for effect. Though as for the picture-poem effect, that was just a felicitous happenning when I took my nonce stanzas and centered them, which made them look somewhat like toe shoes en point, or music box keys, or rag dolls. But I've found in reading that pausing before the apostrophe makes it sound like the music box ratcheting down those last couple notes of the tune, so I think it's what I want.

Kevin

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Devotion

I stood beside her grave.
I gave
a prayer, then killed a dove.
My love
was dead. The spell I chose
arose
unbidden in my throat while crows
croaked counterpoint: “Life! Death! Blood! Birth!”
My lady crawled up from the earth.
I gave my love a rose.

[Alder Ellis]

re. the hyphenation question, I happened to come across this the other day:

There is no tracing
The leaps and scurries with which
He braids his long castle, ra-
Cing, by gap, ledge, niche

This is a stanza from Part 2 of Richard Wilbur's "A Wall in the Woods: Cummington" (in "Mayflies")

In an interview (which led me back to the poem) Wilbur comments:

"I wanted, then, to avoid metrical regularity in Part 2, so as to embody something of the 'fluent skittering' of a chipmunk who weaves his way through and along a rough old stone wall, unpredictably appearing and disappearing. Further to emphasize that unpredictability, I decided that, in the third line of each stanza, the rhyme should vary in placement and strength: thus in the first stanza 'guff' rhymes with a non-terminal 'duff', and in the fourth stanza the first syllable of 'Cyclopean' rhymes with the third syllable of 'sentry-like.' The rhyme of 'tracing' with 'ra-/cing, which you note and find disturbing, is part of the same high-jinks: in splitting the latter word, I felt as if I were seeing a chipmunk vanish around a rock." ("Richard Wilbur -- in Conversation with Peter Dale")

I laugh at the last sentence every time I read this paragraph -- to think of such an accomplished & sophisticated craftsman envisaging a certain formal twist as a chipmunk vanishing around a rock.

Anyway, the funny thing in the present context is that Wilbur is splitting the word, not to achieve a rhyme, but to displace or break up a rhyme.

On the other hand, it's possibly interesting that Wilbur's intention (to convey a chipmunk's skittering) is similar in principle, in being wittily mimetic, to that of Kevin's "mer - rily" split (to convey a music box's winding down). Neither instance, I think, is quite reducible to a "light verse" device. (BTW, Kevin, I'd go back to hyphenating "box -'s".)

And now back to your regularly scheduled ovillejo...

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Thanks, AE.

That's very interesting, and it's nice to see someone like Wilbur doing it too.

I think part of the reason why light and children's verse can get away with more is that no one takes it seriously, so all the fussy, old fashioned or just plain peculiar tricks can be done without anyone getting concerned with them detracting from "serious" verse.

Since they also cause discomfort or unease in some readers, of the sort that usually prompts mild amusement, they often have an extra degree of use in light verse.

Will be changing it back.

I'm wondering how much of this is the workshop vs. print syndrome, where something someone will nit in a workshop will pass right by even the most picky reader or critic, on the "Well, if it was good enough for X editor, it's good enough for me, and the author must have meant for it to be that way."

But now, as you said, back to the Ovillejos.

(Which I just transposed and wrote as "ovijellos." Ah well, caught it, as I did the essay in high school where, in quoting Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," I wrote the end couplet as "But I have promises to keep/and miles to go go before I sleep." Crossed out the extra "go" but as my teacher said, "My, that adds a whole new layer of meaning....")