[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I'm reposting this over from Marion's "A Dreamer's Tale" thread at the Deep End, so as to not hijack her topic with a longer discussion:

Kevin: Chaucer and so have no trouble with long strings of couplets. Stanza breaks should mesh with sense breaks,

This is a curious statement and brings us into the argument about whether poetry is a spoken or a written form. If it is continuous, how do you see it as couplets?

And I am fascinated by the second sentence. And I think this thread is the place to discuss this, as it relates to the poem in this thread. I had a taste of Chaucer,not a whole meal, and frankly, I think I feel like most people who do not have the equivalent of graduate training in English literature: I feel like an outsider to the joke, and feel a twinge of resentment.

Be that as it may, I would challenge Kevin to support the statement that stanza breaks should mesh with "sense breaks." I think my own craft would benefit from an understanding of the validity or the fallacy of that theory.

Humbly awaiting feedback,
Roy

Not very "humbly" if you're using words like "challenge," "fallacy" and "theory."

But, to explain, first, it's not a "theory" -- it's a literary convention and fact. There are exceptions to the rule, but those are exceptions, not invalidations of the rule itself. And the literary conventions go back thousands of years.

But, to explain, the term "couplets" can be confusing because it can refer to one of two things:

1. Two lines rhymed together, but otherwise part of a continuous poem, as with the two final lines of a Spenserian or Shakespearean sonnet, or any of the pairs of rimes in Marion's poem "The Dreamer's Tale" over at the Deep End, or for that matter, most of the Canterbury Tales.

2. An individual stanza composed of two lines, which, in rimed verse, by its nature is a rimed couplet.

With Marion's poem, as with Chaucer's, it's a piece of narrative verse. Since it's very short, it's done as a single stanza made from multiple couplets, the same as a very short story is usually printed as a single paragraph made of multiple sentences.

Basically, you break a stanza where you'd break a paragraph, and you break a canto where you'd break a chapter. Of course, poetry is a tricky beast, and poets like to play tricks with it, so it is possible to have a sentence run over the stanza break, though this is usually only done when there is some natural twist or turn in the sentence and the stanza break can serve to emphasize the transition.

For example, in a sonnet, you have the octave (a stanza of eight lines, in the Shakespearean sonnet rimed ABABCDCD, technically formed from two quatrains) followed by the sestet (a stanza of six lines, which in the Shakespearean sonnet is composed of a quatrain and a couplet, EFEFGG). Many times you'll see poets separate these two stanzas for emphasis of the volta (the logical turn in the subject matter of the sonnet) and on rare occasions you'll even see the concluding couplet set off by itself, but I have never seen the octave set as two separate quatrains because part of the rules of the sonnet is that the first eight lines need to be unified in subject matter, and as such, the stanza needs to be unified as well, not split randomly.

If you look at my Umunum Song over at the Deep End, you've got a poem composed of AABB quatrains. After experiments, I settled on quatrains of fourteeners because of the logical breaks between the subjects of each quatrain, like the breaks in paragraphs in a formal collegiate essay. But as with paragraphs, to a certain extent, where to break them is a matter of the poet or the author's judgement. If a paragraph is particularly long, it's often best to break it into subparagraphs, but you still do that where there are logical turns in the sense, not just wherever you think it will be aesthetically pleasing from a typesetting angle.

The continuous stanzas of a work done all in couplets can be wearying to read for some folk, but read aloud, they sound fine, and if printed in a book, the page breaks, illustrations and occasional typographical ornament (this last inserted at a scene break, if there is one) will generally make it all work properly.

On computers, however, what we look at is a continuous scroll, which can be tiresome, but is no reason to go inserting random breaks into something meant for other print forms.

P.S. It should be noted that Chaucer himself, rather than break the Tales into stanzas, merely indents the text at the start of a new paragraph in the narrative verse, the same as would be done with a page of a modern novel.


[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited March 11, 2005).]

[Roy Carr]

Kevin: Not very "humbly" if you're using words like "challenge," "fallacy" and "theory."

Roy: OK, have it your way. No humility, but curiosity.

Kevin: But, to explain, first, it's not a "theory" -- it's a literary convention and fact. There are exceptions to the rule, but those are exceptions, not invalidations of the rule itself. And the literary conventions go back thousands of years.

Roy: Evolution is a theory. That we exist is a theory. There are no facts, especially in poetry, and no matter how old a convention is, it is originally based on some theory. So don't be offended by "theory" the way literalists are offended by "myth."

Kevin: But, to explain, the term "couplets" can be confusing because it can refer to one of two things:

1. Two lines rhymed together,

Roy: OK, that makes sense, the rhyming is what makes them a couplet, that is acceptable.

Kevin: but otherwise part of a continuous poem, as with the two final lines of a Spenserian or Shakespearean sonnet, or any of the pairs of rimes in Marion's poem "The Dreamer's Tale" over at the Deep End, or for that matter, most of the Canterbury Tales.

2. An individual stanza composed of two lines, which, in rimed verse, by its nature is a rimed couplet.

With Marion's poem, as with Chaucer's, it's a piece of narrative verse. Since it's very short, it's done as a single stanza made from multiple couplets, the same as a very short story is usually printed as a single paragraph made of multiple sentences.

Basically, you break a stanza where you'd break a paragraph, and you break a canto where you'd break a chapter. Of course, poetry is a tricky beast, and poets like to play tricks with it, so it is possible to have a sentence run over the stanza break, though this is usually only done when there is some natural twist or turn in the sentence and the stanza break can serve to emphasize the transition.


Roy: Yes, and "random" cuts can often turn up something emphasized that the poet did not realize, adding to the meaning; if it works, it works.

Kevin: For example, in a sonnet, you have the octave (a stanza of eight lines, in the Shakespearean sonnet rimed ABABCDCD, technically formed from two quatrains) followed by the sestet (a stanza of six lines, which in the Shakespearean sonnet is composed of a quatrain and a couplet, EFEFGG). Many times you'll see poets separate these two stanzas for emphasis of the volta (the logical turn in the subject matter of the sonnet) and on rare occasions you'll even see the concluding couplet set off by itself, but I have never seen the octave set as two separate quatrains because part of the rules of the sonnet is that the first eight lines need to be unified in subject matter, and as such, the stanza needs to be unified as well, not split randomly.

Roy: That's fine. We accept those rules when we accept rigid, time-tested form, trusting that it will turn up something of a disturbance of words within words that we hope for if we follow the rules.

Kevin: If you look at my Umunum Song over at the Deep End, you've got a poem composed of AABB quatrains. After experiments, I settled on quatrains of fourteeners because of the logical breaks between the subjects of each quatrain, like the breaks in paragraphs in a formal collegiate essay. But as with paragraphs, to a certain extent, where to break them is a matter of the poet or the author's judgement.

Roy: That last sentence makes enough sense to give rise to free verse eventually.

Kevin: If a paragraph is particularly long, it's often best to break it into subparagraphs, but you still do that where there are logical turns in the sense, not just wherever you think it will be aesthetically pleasing.

Roy: That may be true, but in most working poems there is an underlying unconscious rhythm of image, word, or thought, or emotion, or all of these, such that if you cut the poem's lines in to a certain way, that rhythm is revealed.

Kevin: The continuous stanzas of a work done all in couplets can be wearying to read for some folk, but read aloud, they sound fine, and if printed in a book, the page breaks, illustrations and occasional typographical ornament (this last inserted at a scene break, if there is one) will generally make it all work properly.

On computers, however, what we look at is a continuous scroll, which can be tiresome, but is no reason to go inserting random breaks into something meant for other print forms.

Roy: You have made this perfectly clear. I believe, however, that the look on the page should be to clue the reader how to breathe and pause when "decaliming" the poem or even whispering it. We should read them all aloud, and how they sound best aloud should be reflected on the page.
That is a THEORY and an OPINION which, like an umbilicus, most everyone is entitled to. I accept our literary tradition, and feel that formal metrics should be mastered before venturing into "free" forms. That is why I, and I believe most of us, spend so much time on "The Deep End."

This has been informative, Kevin.

Not so humbly,
Roy

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Roy,

Glad to be of assistance.

For note, my objection to the word "theory" is because of the religious right's recent attempts to equate "scientific theory" with "cockamamie theory." Doing the same with "prosodic theory" makes me bristle even more.

With both scientific theory and prosodic theory, the theories are the explanations for the huge and substantial body of evidence and results of thousands of years of experiments. Likewise musical theory, mathematical theory and the theory of relativity. They're not just silly, untested ideas that someone came up with last Tuesday.

By the same token, I use "myth" to mean "interesting old story that not many people believe these days" and not "disproven lie," if simply because most myths have some significant truth behind them, psychological if not literal.

Inserting extra line breaks into a structured stanzaic form to emphasize various words that were formerly hidden within the line is kind of like beating a ukelele with a hammer -- you may get a few interesting and even the occassional pleasing sounds out of it, but you end up with a smashed ukelele.

Yes, there are experiments that work -- nonce stanzas, for one; skeltonics, for another -- but a lot of things end up just looking broken and ugly. And when they're broken and ugly, they don't work any magic.

Let me explain a bit more, and yes, I'm going to get into an abstruse bit of theory here: incantation, enchantress

What's the root of those words? Cant, chant -- language, singing. When Tim says something "sings" to him, that's what he's talking about. There's a certain pattern of rising and falling notes, of repeated sounds, that sings to the heart and affects the emotions more than mere base words can do. An enchantress's incantation is exactly that: a song to weave her spell around you, even when done as a spoken word performance.

Listen to a tape of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech sometime. Listen to the way he's punching the words, accenting them, inflecting them. That's the incantatory voice. It's what's locked into the simple iambic dimeter of "i HAVE a DREAM"

There's another old rule of magic, often (stupidly) overlooked: The Rule of Three. It's most often stated as "Thrice spoken, once fulfilled." You speak something's name three times, you conjure it up or you send it away. Having something's name gives you power over it.

Yes, yes, an old, silly myth, suitable for writing versions of Faust but... Think. What is the sound of dread? What is the sound you make when you wake in the night, paralyzed by night terror, struggling to make a sound? Your upper teeth touch your lower lip as you shiver.... Fffff...

Listen: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself...." Thrice spoken, once fulfilled. A banishment charm, by the ancient rules. Phobos has been called by name.

It may sound silly, but frickatives are frightening and frigid, which is why the proper name for "goose pimples" is "frisson." You conjure up memories and emotions with the echoes of their sounds, since the mind is suggestible.

Admittedly, I'm wandering a bit far afield from stanzas and stanza breaks, but as with line breaks, periods and commas, they affect how a poem is said, where the pauses are, and what's not said is as important as what is said, if not more so. It's timing. A "dramatic pause" or a "break for laughter" are just that: You conjure up an emotion, you need to give it somewhere to grow and blossom.

And yes, if you crack open a line to expose some powerful word in the middle and thereby give it extra emphasis, you may create an effect, but the reason that powerful word was hidden in the middle of the line may have been to foreshadow and add power to the word at the end of the line or stanza and pulling it out will make the rest of the line fizzle.

Over at the Deep End, you've got a lot of people listening for the frisson, trying to hear what will make the line sing. Beating a ukelele with a hammer is not it.

And before someone accuses me of bashing FV, I'll say that grabbing a FV poem and binding its feet into a blank verse slipper would wreck it just as equally.

[Roy Carr]

formal metrics should be mastered before venturing into "free" forms. That is why I, and I believe most of us, spend so much time on "The Deep End."

This has been informative, Kevin.

Not so humbly,
Roy





Kevin Andrew Murphy

Roy,
Glad to be of assistance.

Kevin, by your leave, I would like to continue this as dialogue.
Roy


Kevin: For note, my objection to the word "theory" is because of the religious right's recent attempts to equate "scientific theory" with "cockamamie theory." Doing the same with "prosodic theory" makes me bristle even more.

Roy: I, too can be reactionary to the winds that blow around us, but that is what it is, reactionary. They don't understand that "myth" may be the only truth there is, and a faulty myth will lead to faulty truth, as has occurred with the various "theories" of Christianity, with all its reactionary churches: the New Church of the Old Gospel, then the Newer Church of the Old New Church, then they got mad and etc until they founded the Holy Church of the Frozen Chosen. To quote Bly, "The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved."
But that is no reason to make a religion of established prosodic theory. While your knowledge of music is admirable, there are those who can play a piano by ear who have never been tutored, and who have never read one note of sheet music. And is their music any less music?
So theory and myth are just another word for projections of perceived truth, whether in analytic language or in poems.


Kevin: With both scientific theory and prosodic theory, the theories are the explanations for the huge and substantial body of evidence and results of thousands of years of experiments. Likewise musical theory, mathematical theory and the theory of relativity. They're not just silly, untested ideas that someone came up with last Tuesday.

Roy: Scientific "truth" is rigorously tested by experimentation, having a hypothesis and designing a way to prove or disprove it. Prosodic theory is an organism that has evolved by trial and error, with the test being how it is received and perceived by a listener or reader, educated in prosody, or not. It has had "revolutions" when one school of poets challenged the previous poets. Tastes change in image, rhythm, line length, spacing, sound, texture of wording, roots of words, and on and on. That it is time tested means that the organism is today as it has evovled, and it doesn't mean that it can't evolve further.

Kevin: By the same token, I use "myth" to mean "interesting old story that not many people believe these days" and not "disproven lie," if simply because most myths have some significant truth behind them, psychological if not literal.

Roy: I use myth to mean the group of poems and stories by which a society keeps its sanity, by entering that edifice of word and story and freeing their unconscious, shadow side that has so much to do with our behaviour, our happiness, our enlightenment. I believe that myth is the only real truth that we are capable of grasping. DNA-->RNA-->protein is fact, but not truth. Facts allow clever and infinite manipulation of the environment by man without revealing to him what he is about. Only through myth that is poetically "spot-on" can man free his soul. Christian myth has been so literalized and terror-filled that it no longer reflects the battles in the unconscious of today's man and woman, unless one is able to cut to the true poetry and ignore all the interpretative criticism, ie, the dogma.
It was Hebrew poetry translated to Greek and then to us through King James 17th century English, then to modern English in some versions. And what can we say about poems when they are translated? They are not the same poems anymore.

Kevin: Inserting extra line breaks into a structured stanzaic form to emphasize various words that were formerly hidden within the line is kind of like beating a ukelele with a hammer -- you may get a few interesting and even the occassional pleasing sounds out of it, but you end up with a smashed ukelele.

Roy: Interesting image, but not necessarily spot-on poetic. Breaking lines may be more like taking a smaller or larger bite of your steak so you can enjoy the differnce in the texture of the meat as you chew, letting the steak sauce pique your taste buds a little differently, or not using any steak sauce, but adding a little more pepper and salt to that particular bite.

Kevin: Yes, there are experiments that work -- nonce stanzas, for one; skeltonics, for another -- but a lot of things end up just looking broken and ugly. And when they're broken and ugly, they don't work any magic.

Roy: While I can relate to that, we must remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and magic is in the mind of the believer. I think rap is ugly, but it is very popular, and when one gets into it, I am certain that some of it is actually poetry.

Kevin: Let me explain a bit more, and yes, I'm going to get into an abstruse bit of theory here: incantation, enchantress

What's the root of those words? Cant, chant -- language, singing. When Tim says something "sings" to him, that's what he's talking about. There's a certain pattern of rising and falling notes, of repeated sounds, that sings to the heart and affects the emotions more than mere base words can do. An enchantress's incantation is exactly that: a song to weave her spell around you, even when done as a spoken word performance.

Roy: Now you are talking my language. And I notice you did not say one thing about stanzas or line cuts.

Kevin: Listen to a tape of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech sometime. Listen to the way he's punching the words, accenting them, inflecting them. That's the incantatory voice. It's what's locked into the simple iambic dimeter of "i HAVE a DREAM"

There's another old rule of magic, often (stupidly) overlooked: The Rule of Three. It's most often stated as "Thrice spoken, once fulfilled." You speak something's name three times, you conjure it up or you send it away. Having something's name gives you power over it.

Yes, yes, an old, silly myth, suitable for writing versions of Faust but... Think. What is the sound of dread? What is the sound you make when you wake in the night, paralyzed by night terror, struggling to make a sound? Your upper teeth touch your lower lip as you shiver.... Fffff...

Listen: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself...." Thrice spoken, once fulfilled. A banishment charm, by the ancient rules. Phobos has been called by name.

It may sound silly, but frickatives are frightening and frigid, which is why the proper name for "goose pimples" is "frisson." You conjure up memories and emotions with the echoes of their sounds, since the mind is suggestible.

Admittedly, I'm wandering a bit far afield from stanzas and stanza breaks, but as with line breaks, periods and commas, they affect how a poem is said, where the pauses are, and what's not said is as important as what is said, if not more so. It's timing. A "dramatic pause" or a "break for laughter" are just that: You conjure up an emotion, you need to give it somewhere to grow and blossom.

And yes, if you crack open a line to expose some powerful word in the middle and thereby give it extra emphasis, you may create an effect, but the reason that powerful word was hidden in the middle of the line may have been to foreshadow and add power to the word at the end of the line or stanza and pulling it out will make the rest of the line fizzle.

Over at the Deep End, you've got a lot of people listening for the frisson, trying to hear what will make the line sing. Beating a ukelele with a hammer is not it.

And before someone accuses me of bashing FV, I'll say that grabbing a FV poem and binding its feet into a blank verse slipper would wreck it just as equally.

Roy: Well, you were at your most eloquent and truthful when you got away from stanzas and line breaks and started talking about what poetry really is: inspired speech. And how we bring that about is a function of the heart of the speaker, and the heart of the poet intertwined.

All else is so much math that we do while we hope for the muse to bring us that frisson, that chant.

Again, an inspiring talk, Kevin, and I hope you find my mockingbird answers somewhat stimulating as dialogue.

Sincerely,
Lynn

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Roy (Lynn?),

I'm not certain if you heard what I was saying: Yes, poetry is inspired speech; Yes, you conjure thoughts with certain musical sounds...but the line breaks, the stanza breaks, the commas, the periods, the m-dashes and semicolons and ellipsis marks and all those -- those are the notations we've developed to tell the reader where to pause, how to pause, how to be silent so that others may listen, and in that moment of silent listening, dream.

And with prosodic theory: All the words are just names put to things that already exist. A few days ago I learned a new word: chiasmus. A week before, I used one in my Umunum Song, not knowing what the prosodic device was called, just that I'd seen it on a few rare occasions before and it suited my needs.

However, that said, this is a workshop. A child does not need to know what a noun is to say "mommy," even though that word is indeed a noun. But a poet or any other writer who is wishing to talk craft with his fellow writers needs to know what a noun is, as every sentence has them, and it saves time when we're talking about craft to tell someone to "find another noun," rather than "another word of the same sort as 'mommy,' not that I know what those are called." Chiasmus? A rarer beast, so not as necessary, but still nice to know the name for if one comes up in conversation.

I was writing in perfect meters--and complicated ones too--before I knew the names for the proper notation. Once I learned, I used the formal words to describe them, since it would be silly to do otherwise.

As for tastes changing and styles changing, nonsense. The bones are still the same. You say you don't understand rap? Here, look at a perfectly popular rap song:

Woke up quick at about noon
Just thought that I had to be in Compton soon
I gotta get drunk before the day begins
Before my mother starts bitchin' about my friends
About to go and damn near went blind
Young niggaz on the pad throwin' up gang signs
I went in the house to get the clip
With my Mac10 on the side of my hip
I bailed outside and pointed my weapon
Just as I thought, the fools kept steppin
I jumped in the fo' hit the juice on my ride
I got front and back side to side
Then I let the alpine play
I was pumpin' new shit by NWA
It was "Gangster Gangster" at the top of the list
Then I played my own shit, it went somethin' like this...

What is that? It's accentual tetrameter, mostly anapestic tetrameter with some substitutions, many of them interesting. It's rimed in the same couplets as Chaucer would understand, and the rimes themselves are either perfect rimes or ordinary slants of the sort favored by Emily Dickinson.

This may be a new musical style, but it's not new poetry. And as for it being a new musical style, all you need to do is watch the iPod commercial where the girl's hard-pounding hip-hop song is synched to the folk in the cowboy hats doing country line dancing and it matches perfectly because the songs have the same base-beat--and there's the one with the guys break-dancing to the country song too.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And everything old is new again.

[Roy Carr]

Rapping With Kevin

Reams of rhymed words
are not inspired speech
though it may have punch
when he starts up his screech
and cursing's just that
heavy handed meat
for the listener to chaw
while he witnesses defeat

of beauty by the beast
who's just in from the street.

If I carry a gun
yes that would be fun
to put the kick of my poem
to somebody's groin
and it doesn't matter
if his lines try to flatter
themselves by being couplets

or sestets or octaves or quatrains or triolets
he chants as he pleases
about his romance with violence

he chants to please
others with his dysease
To call it verse

(I won't call for a hearse)
To call it poetry
Well, that's a kind of adultery


The challenge is to rescue mankind from the grips of insanity
And that won't be done by extolling profanity
And praising murder and drive-by's and gangs
We need to get down to much better things
That language can do
To redeem this foul zoo
If x beats to a stanza will do it
Then I am exactly with you


Roy (Lynn)



[This message has been edited by Roy Carr (edited March 12, 2005).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Umm... interesting topic but this seems like a private dialogue which might be better taken to PM. And please note that this is not a forum for posting one's own verse except as it is specifically germane to the discussion in question.

In terms of Marion's poem, it is one continuous block because it is a narrative in decasyllabic couplets in conversation with Chaucer, who also is printed in a continuous block.

And besides other good reasons, back when paper and parchment were very expensive, it would have been absurd to put in a lot of blank space. (I agree of course that in a long narrative a little blank space helps the reader.)

I disagree, however, that stanzas work like paragraphs and should be units of sense. They can be and often are, but sense and syntax can just as easily play against such structures, as with enjambments over lines. I find it sophisticated and exciting. The master of this is Philip Larkin. This is one of my favorite of his stanza breaks, from the end of his lovely poem "At Grass" about old race horses:

Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowds and cries--
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With bridles in the evening come.


This sort of extreme enjambment can be very effective. Here it is as if "they" are indeed breaking away, slipping their names. I just love this.

I wonder if others have favorite examples of such "extreme enjambments"?

cheers,

Alicia

[Roger Slater]

Alicia, I was thinking of Larkin myself when I saw the topic. In Christopher Ricks' book on Bob Dylan, he digresses into a discussion of Philip Larkin's "Love Songs In Age," and most of the discussion has to do with the fact that each stanza enjambs into the next, and the final line of the poem is the only sentence whose ending corresponds with a stanza ending. I'm too lazy to type out Ricks' entire discussion, but here's part of it:

"The point of ruinning one stanza into the next is more than to create pregnant pauses, more even than to imitate the musical interweaving of love songs. It is to create the austere finality of the conclusion. Only once in this poem does a full stop coincide with the end of a line or with the end of a stanza. This establishes the fullness of the stop, the assurance that Larkin has concluded his poem and not just run out of things to say. The same authoratative finality is alive in the rhyme scheme. Larkin's pattern (abacbdcdd) allows of a clinching couplet only at the end of a stanza. He then prevents any such clinching at the end of the first two stanzas by having very strong enjambm ent, spilling across the line-endings. The result is that the very last couplet is the first in the poem to release what we have been waiting for, the decisive authority of a couplet, rhyme sealing rhyme in final settlement."

It's also worth noting that Larkin believed in reading poems off the page, and not in hearing them recited, and so the stanza enjambment for him was a visual way of controlling the flow as well as an auditory way.

[Roy Carr]

I am coming to an understanding, I believe about these forums.

We are not to discuss anything on individual poets' threads other than their poems, no matter what interesting or challenging issues these poems lead to.

We are not to discuss anything on the other threads that may be considered "heated" or that offends the sensibilities of established members or moderators. We are not to talk in verse when we can talk in prose, even though these forums appear to be dedicated to verse.

We can always just go back to e-mailing each other without having forums at all.

Continue to correct my misperceptions about what a literary circle is supposed to be about, and what free speech and censorship is about.

A little confused and miffed,
Roy Lynn Carr, MD

[Mark Allinson]

Well, this is turning into a strange thread. Why it didn't go to "General" in the first place is a mystery, since it seems to concern our own practice, rather than any focus on "mastery".

Anyway, since it is here, I wanted to second Alicia's comments rejecting the notion of stanzas as units of sense. I sometimes like to write through the stanza breaks, especially if there is some degree of narrative energy building up. And since this thread already has many "non-mastery" type poems in it, I will use these examples from my translation:


Meanwhile the other gods, high on Olympus, met in assembly,
awaiting the speech of the father of all; gravely distressed,
recalling the hale and handsome Aegisthus, killed by Orestes,
son of Agamemnon, Zeus began, and spoke to them passionately:
"Shameless, the way these men blame the gods; and from us only

they say come their miseries. Yes, but their recklessness adds to their suffering,
compounding their pains far beyond that apportioned: look at Aegisthus,
greedily stealing the wife of Atrides, murdering the warlord
returning from victory, knowing full well that it would mean ruin.
We had even sent Hermes to tell him: 'don't commit murder;

don't take his wife. Revenge will descend from the son of Agamemnon
that day he matures and longs to go home' - so Hermes had warned him,
wishing him well on behalf of us all. But would he listen?
No, now he pays and suffers the consequence, reaping the vengeance."
Clear-eyed Athena now drove home the message: "Son of Cronus,

surely he goes to a death he well earned. Let such men suffer so.
But Father, please hear me, I grieve for Odysseus, still in his agony,
far from his family, lamenting his fate on his wave-torn island,
hidden among the vast ocean wilderness, home of a goddess,
daughter of Atlas, the deep-dwelling Titan who shoulders the sky.


------------------
Mark Allinson