Ask the Poet Guy

[teknight]

Dear teknight:

Poet Guy's shoulders, while not broad, are used to bearing the weight of unanswerable (or not-exactly-answerable) questions.

You ask many questions, some of which are simply (though knavishly) answered, some of which are more difficult. Let's review them, in order:

How does one improve one's poetry?

Poet Guy can recommend only work—first, that you read a lot of poetry, especially poetry recognized as good poetry (though he cannot help much with that distinction) while trying to understand the techniques and themes that make that poetry interesting to the reader; second, that you write a lot of poetry, even if it is bad (which almost all of it will be), as it is Poet Guy's conviction that practice in writing poems, assuming that that practice is done seriously and with the aim of analyzing one's writing for technique and content, is one of the few exercises that can help improve one's poems.

Others may, and perhaps will, disagree, but you asked Poet Guy and that's his opinion.

Is there a process?

Yes. It is called Commitment.

Are there books?

Yes, actually a lot of books. Books may be more helpful for some people than others. Poet Guy has found Ted Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Robert Pinsky's The Sound of Poetry, Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook, and Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days helpful, though simply reading a lot of good poetry and thinking about why it is good is perhaps as helpful.

Exercises?

Yes. See above.

Is poetry improvement a vague statement, since, it's not exactly something you can measure...well, barring public reaction, I guess?

Strictly speaking, yes. What does "improvement" mean? Publication in an online 'zine? Publication in Ploughshares? A Nobel Prize? Personal satisfaction?

Poet Guy thinks you should think over your goals in writing poetry. That will likely help you with how you will judge your progress.

PG

谢谢你，老师。 (thank you, teacher, in Chinese...the email notification of your update has a chinese character in it, here: "...recommend only work—庸irst, that..."
No clue why, but I found it...weird.
Thanks for unraveling the quagmire.

 

[PoetGuy]

谢谢你，老师。 (thank you, teacher, in Chinese...the email notification of your update has a chinese character in it, here: "...recommend only work—庸irst, that..."
No clue why, but I found it...weird.
Thanks for unraveling the quagmire.

Dear teknight:

Poet Guy is neither teacher (in Chinese or any other language) nor quagmire unraveler. He is simply a person willing to have an opinion and share it with others.

If that counts for wisdom in modern society, so be it, but Poet Guy hopes that you will take his comments as simply Advice from Someone You Do Not Know and treat it accordingly.

PG

 

[twelveoone]

I know, I know, phrase it as a question...like that old dumb quiz show.
So what do you think?
Some damn good stuff, so much better than a mere month ago.
First time I saw a poem about a pool hall since TaraBlackwood back in the old days. It was kind of nice reading about a different kind of balls over in NPR.
Kudos

 

[PoetGuy]

I know, I know, phrase it as a question...like that old dumb quiz show.
So what do you think?
Some damn good stuff, so much better than a mere month ago.
First time I saw a poem about a pool hall since TaraBlackwood back in the old days. It was kind of nice reading about a different kind of balls over in NPR.
Kudos

Dear twelveoone:

While you have posed a question to Poet Guy, it is unclear as to what specifically you are asking. Poet Guy thinks about many things, not all of which he wishes to communicate to that small part of the world that is the Poetry Feedback & Discussion forum. However, he will presume that you perhaps are asking as to what he thinks about the increased activity, both in poems posted and in comments thereon, in the Literotica New Poems.

Poet Guy is pleased with this increased activity, though he will be a lot more pleased if there is at least as much activity there this coming November. He is especially pleased to see activity from some poets (either as poems or comments or both) who have been largely missing from the forum in recent times.

Poet Guy could try to write a poem about a pool hall, even though he is not sure he has ever been inside one, but then he has never been to Barcelona, either.

Kudos yourself.

PG

 

[twelveoone]

Semi rhetorical question, semi pointer, from one traveler in the "dark woods" to another. What do you know about Abraham Cowley? I suspect despite our vast divergence, given enough time, we meet. Cowley may be why.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Poet guy, do you ever dangle your participles, even to tempt fish to nip at their heels?

 

[PoetGuy]

Semi rhetorical question, semi pointer, from one traveler in the "dark woods" to another. What do you know about Abraham Cowley? I suspect despite our vast divergence, given enough time, we meet. Cowley may be why.

Dear twelveoone:

Abraham Cowley? Well, as best Poet Guy might know, he might think that twelveoone is referring to Abe "Bulldog" Cowley, right guard for the Massillon Tigers in a very early (American) football league. If twelveoone meant Abraham Crowley, he might have thought that twelveoone was referring to the younger and less successful (or notorious) brother of Aleister Crowley, who was granted the living of St. Mary Mead from the mid 20s to the 40s, which said Crowley served well, though ineffectually, before succumbing to a liver ailment during the war years.

If twelveoone means the cavalier poet, then Poet Guy's knowledge is maybe Thisbe, and not much else.

PG

 

[PoetGuy]

Poet guy, do you ever dangle your participles, even to tempt fish to nip at their heels?

Dear PandoraGlitters:

Poet Guy only ever intends to dangle his participles in the privacy of his home, and even then strictly for the amusement (or bemusement) of Poet Gal. However, just as he upon occasion catches bits of salad in his teeth, or inadvertently leaves his fly unzipped, he undoubtedly upon occasion dangles the offhand participle in public.

As with any public gaffe, Poet Guy corrects the error as quickly and subtly as he can, while blushing no more than would be considered appropriate, and not too demonstratively, lest he be made mock of by the PF&D.

PG

 

[twelveoone]

If twelveoone means the cavalier poet, then Poet Guy's knowledge is maybe Thisbe, and not much else.

PG

Him, I keep running into his name. Regarding Pindaric Odes, as they where called.
Not quite a cavalier, transition figure. I could have sworn I ran into him on a book on metre, shows up in A History of Free Verse by Chris Beyers.
Just thought that was interesting.
Of other possible interest may be the history of metre, the concept, codification and importation thereof.

 

[butters]

Dear PandoraGlitters:

Poet Guy only ever intends to dangle his participles in the privacy of his home, and even then strictly for the amusement (or bemusement) of Poet Gal. However, just as he upon occasion catches bits of salad in his teeth, or inadvertently leaves his fly unzipped, he undoubtedly upon occasion dangles the offhand participle in public.

As with any public gaffe, Poet Guy corrects the error as quickly and subtly as he can, while blushing no more than would be considered appropriate, and not too demonstratively, lest he be made mock of by the PF&D.

PG

 

[Tzara]

Sorry for moving your question here, 29, but I did not want to go off topic in PBAnnie's thread. This is an old Q and A thread, so maybe this would be a good place to answer your question.

May I use this opportunity for a question? I've often found myself ending up with lines that break the meter as, for instance, instead of iambic pentameter I have nine or eleven syllables. Is that 'allowed' or is there even a term for? Lately, I don't feel I want to add 'Oh's or 'Well's to make the meter whole again.

Yes, it is not only "allowed," but common. The general term for the removal of a syllable is "truncation," if a trailing syllable is elided, and "initial truncation," if a leading syllable is elided. (The former is often also called "catalexis" and the latter is often referred to as an "acephalous line" [i.e. headless].)

Truncation/catalexis is often characteristic of trochaic rhymed verse, so that the rhymed syllables are stressed, as in Blake's "The Tyger":

Ty · ger / Ty · ger, / burn · ing / bright,
In the / for · ests / of the / night;​

Note that one could instead consider these as examples of acephalous iambic tetrameter, especially since the fourth line of the first stanza, "Could frame thy fearful symmetry" is straightforwardly iambic.

Note also that "catalexis" is sometimes used to mean the elision of a syllable from either the front or end of a line, though it seems, at least in my reading, to usually refer to the end of a line.

The addition of syllables is a little more complex. For example, a line may have a feminine ending, especially a feminine rhyme--meaning that the ending word ends on an unstressed syllable, so that an iambic pentameter line would be accented duh dah / duh dah / duh dah / dun dah / duh dah duh (think of a last word like "enraptured"). An excess number of syllables can also occur due to a metrical substitution, where something like an anapest is substituted for one of the iambic feet.

If I get some time, I'll try to post some examples.

 

[29wordsforsnow]

Thank you, Tzara , that helped a lot to preserve what's already written.

 

[Tzara]

The addition of syllables is a little more complex. For example, a line may have a feminine ending, especially a feminine rhyme--meaning that the ending word ends on an unstressed syllable, so that an iambic pentameter line would be accented duh dah / duh dah / duh dah / dun dah / duh dah duh (think of a last word like "enraptured"). An excess number of syllables can also occur due to a metrical substitution, where something like an anapest is substituted for one of the iambic feet.

OK. Here's an example of an iambic pentameter line that is (1) famous, (2) more than ten syllables, and (3) which substitutes an alternate foot (a trochee) for one of the iambs:

To be / or not / to be, / that is / the ques · tion​

The increased length is due to the feminine ending (the trailing unaccented syllable) and the substitution (or inversion) occurs in the fourth foot, following the caesura (internal pause or break).

It turns out these are pretty typical variations on standard iambic pentameter. Timothy Steele, in his superb book on meter and versification All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing, says of the substitution a "relatively frequent . . . substitution is a trochee-for-iamb switch in the third or fourth foot in the pentameter. . . . Usually, a grammatical pause precedes the mid-line inversion" (62).

Of the extra syllable at the end of the line, Steele says "Such a syllable (sometimes called "hypermetrical") produces a 'feminine ending.' This term derives from French prosody. In French the mute e is a common feminine suffix" and goes on to give the examples un ciel noir (a black sky) and une robe noire (a black dress). The respective nouns are masculine (ciel) and feminine (robe), so the change from noir to noire reflects the difference of masculine and feminine gender in French.

He then points out that "in traditional French verse, the mute e at the end of a word is sounded" (63). So we (i.e. English language prosodists) call a hypermetrical line of this type a feminine ending.

Not that anyone other than me finds this kind of thing interesting.

 

[Piscator]

Ok, I get syllables, rhyme and meter but I'm perplexed by stress count at least in poetry, Please explain.

 

[Tzara]

Ok, I get syllables, rhyme and meter but I'm perplexed by stress count at least in poetry, Please explain.

I'm somewhat confused by your question, Piscator. Stress count is a basic element of meter, for example. Are you asking about poetry structured simply by stress count (i.e., accentual verse)? Or are you asking about how to recognize stress in a line of poetry (i.e. scansion)?

The first question is easy for me to answer, probably with more detail than you care about. The second is much more difficult and the one many people have trouble with. Even when people think they can recognize it, they still frequently get it wrong (*raises hand*).

Or are you perhaps asking something else?

 

[Piscator]

I'm somewhat confused by your question, Piscator. Stress count is a basic element of meter, for example. Are you asking about poetry structured simply by stress count (i.e., accentual verse)? Or are you asking about how to recognize stress in a line of poetry (i.e. scansion)?

The first question is easy for me to answer, probably with more detail than you care about. The second is much more difficult and the one many people have trouble with. Even when people think they can recognize it, they still frequently get it wrong (*raises hand*).

Or are you perhaps asking something else?

Thanks Tzara, I apologize if my confusion confused you. U was referring to the second issue accentual verse. I'm sure I get it wrong and suspect it is affected by accent and the idiosyncrasies of English. But to quote my grandfather "Patience and perseverance made a Bishop of his Reverence."

 

[Tzara]

Thanks Tzara, I apologize if my confusion confused you. U was referring to the second issue accentual verse. I'm sure I get it wrong and suspect it is affected by accent and the idiosyncrasies of English. But to quote my grandfather "Patience and perseverance made a Bishop of his Reverence."

OK, here's more than you probably want to know about accentual verse:

Basically, accentual verse is verse where only the strong stresses or accents are counted, as opposed to accentual-syllabic verse (the common style of metrical verse in modern English), where both the number of strong stresses and the number of syllables count, through the building of lines with metrical feet, as in this example from Romeo and Juliet:

But, soft! / what light / through yon / der win / dow breaks?​

This is classic iambic pentameter, where the line consists of five iambic feet (an iamb is a single metrical unit consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). Thus, the line contains five feet, five stressed syllables, and ten syllables in total. Contrast that with a line like this:

But, soft! what's that light that through yon · der win · dow's now break · ing?​

Here there are still five stressed syllables (assuming I constructed this properly), but fourteen syllables in the line, and it doesn't parse neatly into consistent metrical feet (one way to attempt to parse it yields an iamb, two anapests, and two amphibrachs, or something like that).

Now, a line like that in isolation is neither metrical nor non-metrical. If preceded and/or followed by other lines that both feature five strong stesses while being as irregular in format, one would say that it is accentual pentameter.

Accentual verse is often the metrical technique used in nursery rhymes and folk ballads. Dana Gioia gives this example:

Star light, star bright,
First star I see to · night,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish to · night​

Each line has four strong beats, but in trying to scan this (i.e. parse it into metrical feet) each line ends up being a different meter: line three, for example, is iambic tetrameter, but line four is catalectic trochaic tetrameter; line one is spondaic dimeter (?) and line two is perhaps a spondee followed by two iambs. Despite that, it is highly metrical and has an easy to follow (and hear) beat.

Accentual verse is actually a very old metrical technique in English. Beowulf, for example, was composed in accentual verse:

Hwæt! We Gardena ... in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, ... þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ... ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing ... sceaþena þreatum,​

You probably don't read Old English (nor do I), but if you kind of sound this out ("þ" sounds like the "th" in with, "ð" like the "th" in other), you'll get something like a four stress line with a medial caesura (a pause or break in the line, here indicated by the extra space).

You might notice that there also is a repetition of some of the consonant sounds in most lines--traditional accentual verse (well, Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, as Gioia properly calls it) not only features a medial pause, it also typically features alliteration of some dominant consonant in each line, often repeated three times, split across the caesura.

You occasionally find this style in modern verse, such as in this example from W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety (another example from Dana Gioia):

Now the news. Night raids on
Five cities. Fires started.
Pressure applied by pincer movement
In threatening thrust. Third Division
Enlarges beachhead. Lucky charm
Saves sniper. Sabotage hinted
In steel-mill stoppage. Strong point held
By fanatical Nazis. Canal crossed​

Accentual verse, without the medial pause and alliteration, can also appear in stanzaic verse, with the number of accents per line varying within a stanza but consistent across stanzas. This poem by Richard Wilbur is a great example of that, the stanzas composed in a 3/5/3 stress pattern:

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.


Source: New and Collected Poems (1988)​

What I find especially interesting about this poem is that if you didn't know beforehand that it was metrical, you might not notice that it is. One of the commentaries I was looking at on the poem states that it is in free verse, which it clearly isn't, if examined closely. It points out, I think, how truly talented poets can write natural sounding verse while following a metrical structure.

 

[29wordsforsnow]

Thanks, Tzara, these insights instantly found a place in my remember-that-thread-list.

 

[Tzara]

Thanks, Tzara, these insights instantly found a place in my remember-that-thread-list.

Thanks, 29, for the compliment.

 

[Piscator]

Another thank you - your mini tome helped a lot.

 

[Tzara]

Another thank you - your mini tome helped a lot.

Thanks, Piscator.