Hendecasyllabics: Discussion and Practice

[Tzara]

Here's another contemporary example, from 1997:

Lucid Waking
Annie Finch

Once I wanted the whole dawn not to let me
sleep. One morning, then, I began to see things.
Waking woke me, came slipping up through half-light,
crying softly, a cat leaving her corner,
stretching, tall in the new gray air of morning,
raising paws much too high. She came slow-stepping
down the hallway to crouch, to call, to whisper
through the door, making still and slow the dawning
once so bird-ridden--and the sun, the curtains.

Source: Eve​

 

[AlwaysHungry]

stop. right now.

stresses can get confusing since different accents often place the 'stronger' sounds in a line in different places - regional accents can really throw a spanner into the engine.

There may also be more than one legitimate way to scan a poem. Sometimes the accent may be ambiguous. That's why I think in terms of music. If the meter of the poem is correct, it should be possible to sing it to a musical accompaniment that features a repeating dotted note pattern, with the stressed syllables being the longer notes. Think Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Woman" for iambic pentameter.

 

[butters]

There may also be more than one legitimate way to scan a poem. Sometimes the accent may be ambiguous. That's why I think in terms of music. If the meter of the poem is correct, it should be possible to sing it to a musical accompaniment that features a repeating dotted note pattern, with the stressed syllables being the longer notes. Think Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Woman" for iambic pentameter.

yeah, that's why i have to look away from the terminology and simply feel the rhythm & musicality

to be fair, i often revert (without realising) to iambic tetrameter, but with this exercise i'm finding the hardest thing to do is the damned trochee at the start. it's tripping me up time and time again. anyway, still all viralised here so maybe it'll come better in a few days.

 

[AlwaysHungry]

Supposedly iambic pentameter resembles normal speech. Shakespeare and Schiller wrote their plays in it.

 

[butters]

Supposedly iambic pentameter resembles normal speech. Shakespeare and Schiller wrote their plays in it.

pent/tent - yup. a lot of english speech seems to fall quite naturally into this patterning, and shakespeare used it no doubt for the very reasons of performance.

 

[Magnetron]

tod,

It's fair to say my head ached a little bit too. It certainly is an exercise in persistence. To someone who writes in free verse in shorter lines as you and yours truly does to a lesser extent than you, it's very different, but I also think it stretches us as writers.

Which usually doesn't happen unless someone is pulling our legs.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

*hits self in head with hammer multiple times*
I dont get it, I dont get it, I dont get it
I dont get it.

I think (feels like an oxymoron at the moment)
That this is beyond what limited brain capacity I have
as soon as people start talking stresse and iambicwhatever the heck
I cant keep up. I had to get my 9 year old to help me with syllables

Once, years ago, we had a daunting challenge painstakingly compiled by Lauren Hynde. It lasted a whole year and involved, I can't remember, how many forms and subjects/titles. It was great fun and everyone seemed to enjoy it but an esteemed poet that I admired tremendously, Patrick Carrington, wrote me this....

."What I see and hear is a poet whose often beautiful voice is self-choked by leashes, a caged hummingbird. – “they are sore grieving”?!? – Who talks like that? Who can believe a phrase like that, jammed in only to fit so predetermined requirement. Where is the honesty?

To this reader, this poem is waste of time, a whole lot of nothing, from a poet whose voice is more beautiful then she knows when she’s free and flying, a poet who believes she writes fluff and then what does she do? She goes and applies further restraints and cuffs and chords to herself instead of bolting when the cage door flies open and hitting the sky, where birds belong.

Is that the solution to your perceived fluff problem? You don’t write fluff at your best, by the way, though it is impossible to know that reading this nonsense and “Obdurate Oasis?” forget about it, that writing’s about as phony as it gets.

I do understand these are for the Survivor deal going on, which seems like a whole lot of fun and which is certainly a good reason to try them all out if you enjoy it. I just worry that a voice as beautiful as yours (and one that still seemingly does not believe in itself) will somehow be hindered further still by writing counterfeit slop like this, which I really hate to believe.

So, now I have said what I wanted to say to you. You won’t hear any more about it from me."

I don't regret writing in form and still do on occasion but I was very encouraged by Pat's kind words. So don't feel bad or get a headache trying this devilish form, free-form is what we read comfortably these days.

 

[AlwaysHungry]

In all the art forms in which I have dabbled, whether it be music, the written word, or others, I have never regretted learning to discipline myself. I have never felt that when it was time to say what I had to say, that the scale exercises, the composing in different traditional forms, the study of other artists, was somehow stifling my creativity. On the contrary, I always have felt more secure in my ability to express myself as an individual, because I had struggled to understand what others had to say, and carefully checked to see whether their ideas might enrich mine. YMMV. I would also discourage anyone from writing counterfeit slop, of course. But I find Tzara's challenge very stimulating.

 

[greenmountaineer]

Excellent examples from AH and gm. Here's my first shot. I think this is correct, but not entirely sure:

Lonely and Frustrated Poet Nelson Freck
Works on Improving His (Metrical) Pickup Line

In the presence of women I get nervous,
speak inanities, stare off in the distance,
whistle tunelessly hit songs from the Eighties—
ineffectual, clumsy interactions.
Hence, my writing. A poem is my way of
making small talk that might provoke some interest
from some woman who just might think I'm funny.
Desperation births many lousy poems.
This one. Others. In common meter quatrains,
haiku, roundelays, sonnets, villanelles, and
Now hendecasyllabics, from the Latin:
Trochee, dactyl, then trochee, trochee, trochee.
Any classisists looking for a boyfriend?
We could conjugate certain verbs together,
Amo, Amas and other words just like them.
Call me anytime. I'll respond quite quickly.​

Note that "poem" here is pronounced po·em.

Playful, really well done, Tzara; if Poetry ever develops a Personals section, it's a sure bet they'll accept it.

Great poem.

My take away so far (I can be challenged on this because it's still coming together in my mind.) is how punctuation in the line itself can create a pleasant sounding variation in the pattern. That may not be an "ah-hah" to others, but I never gave much thought about how to use punctuation to create that effect.

 

[Angeline]

I'd appreciate an explanation of how an anceps syllable, one that can be read as long or short, works in a metered line. I find this really confusing. If I want to write a trochee I can say "I am," but if I want to write a spondee is "I think" correct? Or is that an iamb? If I were speaking the phrase I could put equal emphasis on both words. I could with "I am" too, if I were using it as a declarative.

 

[AlwaysHungry]

I'd appreciate an explanation of how an anceps syllable, one that can be read as long or short, works in a metered line. I find this really confusing.

I don't have much book learnin', but my sense is that it functions like a wild card in poker. If you can read the line aloud and it plausibly conforms to the intended meter, you're home free. There are many syllables that do not obviously fall into the "stressed" or "unstressed" categories.

Incidentally, I have found plenty of examples from my most revered poets, including Shakespeare and Keats, where they brazen violate the metric scheme. I think that sometimes a particular word choice is just so attractive that it trumps the metric pattern (to extend my poker analogy) -- or perhaps there is a possibility, which I like to think about it, that the poet intentionally deviates from the pattern to call attention to a particular phrase, or for some other artistic reason.

 

[HarryHill]

Okay' I've officially lost interest, going to go back to playing with my NOTA form

 

[Angeline]

I don't have much book learnin', but my sense is that it functions like a wild card in poker. If you can read the line aloud and it plausibly conforms to the intended meter, you're home free. There are many syllables that do not obviously fall into the "stressed" or "unstressed" categories.

Incidentally, I have found plenty of examples from my most revered poets, including Shakespeare and Keats, where they brazen violate the metric scheme. I think that sometimes a particular word choice is just so attractive that it trumps the metric pattern (to extend my poker analogy) -- or perhaps there is a possibility, which I like to think about it, that the poet intentionally deviates from the pattern to call attention to a particular phrase, or for some other artistic reason.

That makes sense though I know regional pronunciations can affect stress but I guess that's where quibbles come from.

Also I agree that what makes a great writer great beyond skill in technique is knowing when art is more important.

Ok another try I wrote just now listening to Miles.

Low and swirling the moan seems made of sorrow
singing deep from a lonesome memory, a
somewhere silent in bones or eyes and welling
nonetheless it is heard in yes the ears and
also caged in the heart and somehow singing.

 

[Tzara]

I'd appreciate an explanation of how an anceps syllable, one that can be read as long or short, works in a metered line. I find this really confusing. If I want to write a trochee I can say "I am," but if I want to write a spondee is "I think" correct? Or is that an iamb? If I were speaking the phrase I could put equal emphasis on both words. I could with "I am" too, if I were using it as a declarative.

According to Timothy Steele, in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification: "The concept of anceps syllables is not usefully applied to English versification.... English meters are based on syllabic stress, and this can change--especially where monosyllabic words are concerned--according to sense and verbal environment."

My understanding is that anceps syllables really only apply to classical Greek and Latin meters, which are quantitative (long and short syllables). Adaptations into English of quantitative meters converts long to stressed syllables and short to unstressed syllables, so it's at best an approximation.

In your examples (I am/I think), whether they would be iambic or trochaic would depend on their context in the sentence (assuming, of course, they fell on a foot boundary--the two words could be part of separate feet, depending on how the line was scanned). For me,

I think I'm right.​

the "I think" would be iambic, whereas in

That's what I think!​

it would be trochaic, but that depends on the emotional context of the sentence. For example, the first would be iambic if the emotional context was indecision, but trochaic if defiant.

So its kind of a mess, as most things are in English.

Spondees are when two syllables have roughly equal stress and that stress is relatively strong. "Not now!" for example. The end line in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" is a spondee. As is the last line is R.S. Gwynn's parody of the poem, "Fried Beauty."

 

[greenmountaineer]

All Soul's Day

Not the day of the dead as some would have it.
Only when we make claims does someone suffer
loss. The fall doesn't portend death, as trees are
merely leafless before they bud in springtime.
Let's not talk of time, mind's phantasm. Seeing's
not believing. The earth was flat once. Sun up,
sun down, it went around the planet sure as
saints in heaven, the rest in purgatory.
Life was so predictable, like Galileo's
inquisition, the verdict read, confession.
Shun the priests and the shroud you made to bury
in the grave, better saved instead to swaddle.

 

[Angeline]

According to Timothy Steele, in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification: "The concept of anceps syllables is not usefully applied to English versification.... English meters are based on syllabic stress, and this can change--especially where monosyllabic words are concerned--according to sense and verbal environment."

My understanding is that anceps syllables really only apply to classical Greek and Latin meters, which are quantitative (long and short syllables). Adaptations into English of quantitative meters converts long to stressed syllables and short to unstressed syllables, so it's at best an approximation.

In your examples (I am/I think), whether they would be iambic or trochaic would depend on their context in the sentence (assuming, of course, they fell on a foot boundary--the two words could be part of separate feet, depending on how the line was scanned). For me,

I think I'm right.​

the "I think" would be iambic, whereas in

That's what I think!​

it would be trochaic, but that depends on the emotional context of the sentence. For example, the first would be iambic if the emotional context was indecision, but trochaic if defiant.

So its kind of a mess, as most things are in English.

Spondees are when two syllables have roughly equal stress and that stress is relatively strong. "Not now!" for example. The end line in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" is a spondee. As is the last line is R.S. Gwynn's parody of the poem, "Fried Beauty."

Thank you for the examples.

Spondees kind of scare me at the moment because I can't tell if I just think both words sound stressed or they really do. I'm trying to do some practice daily because it irks me that I'm confused! But I'm not ready for spondees yet lol.


So how much did I screw up my second try? I may have fallen into counting a single syllable word as unstressed in a few places.


When I first started editing I had this very sharp little old lady as a mentor. And I would constantly be running to her with questions. And sometimes she would say "it depends on what you had for breakfast this morning." It's a rule unless it isn't!

 

[Angeline]

It's humbling to read some of these examples and a testament to where practice can take you.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

I found audio of Frost reading his poem "For Once, Then Something" but it's no help at all with the spondees and trochees as I'd hoped. It's lovely tho'. Onward and upward.......

 

[AlwaysHungry]

So how much did I screw up my second try? I may have fallen into counting a single syllable word as unstressed in a few places.

It scans right on the money for me.

I think a good rule of thumb would be to read the poem aloud, exaggerating the stresses where you think that they ought to be. If it doesn't sound ridiculous, it's a keeper.

 

[greenmountaineer]

I found audio of Frost reading his poem "For Once, Then Something" but it's no help at all with the spondees and trochees as I'd hoped. It's lovely tho'. Onward and upward.......

It must be that northern New England accent.

I'm still trying to figure out if "butter"(bud-dah) is a trochee or spondee:


http://youtu.be/gjqfVc7eiA8

 

[AlwaysHungry]

I'm still trying to figure out if "butter"(bud-dah) is a trochee or spondee:

It's another example of the sort Tzara offered. It's a wild card that could go either way, depending on context.

 

[Angeline]

It scans right on the money for me.

I think a good rule of thumb would be to read the poem aloud, exaggerating the stresses where you think that they ought to be. If it doesn't sound ridiculous, it's a keeper.

Thank you. I do read the lines aloud, repeatedly and even with free verse because I believe poetry is meant to be heard (unless you're writing a shape poem, I guess).

This is, for me, pretty intense. I've never felt this motivated to practice in specific meters. I've always had the sense that if you understand how to manipulate sound when you write you can affect things like pace and tone without necessarily having to rely on specific words. That's exciting to me.

Anyway I do appreciate help from those of you who are more experienced in this. It's a confounding but great challenge.

 

[Angeline]

Try #3

Life is writing and sometimes eating. Sleep is
daily. Dreams are a shadow. You are waiting
somewhere. I am not there or even sure if
There is anywhere you have ever traveled.

Here's a flower, a ruby rose and gormless
air preceding the rain (a softness). I am
drunk with you in the distant sky of dreams and
holding armfuls of roses, raindrops falling.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

I got tired of scrolling so here are all (I think) the hendecasyllabic poems so far,

Here's a trial run:

Metaphor?

Surreptitiously I await the moment
When the delicate fresh cilantro, or the
Fragrance spun from a balsam will remind me.
Or, perhaps when the breeze alights correctly,
Soft and lingering on my face or fingers,
Thus to perfectly furnish me an image
Of ineffable pain or joy residing
Somewhere, possibly near my heart. But really,
No, my heart is an engine made of muscle,
Pumping blood through my body's lonely byways
Out to extremities, home to no emotion.
Where on earth is the place whose name I'm feeling?

As to the Matter of Gray

Gray, the color of many things November,
is today a few scraps of bark, like coffin
lids, down in the backyard among dead insects,
once in green exoskeletons, once hurry-
scurry mayflies that flew their day of living.

Gray is also the painted stroke of bamboo
leaves calligraphers draw upon white paper
that's as pure as a monk's mind meditating
where there isn't a question is the answer
to the trillion synapses flying, seeking.

Excellent examples from AH and gm. Here's my first shot. I think this is correct, but not entirely sure:

Lonely and Frustrated Poet Nelson Freck
Works on Improving His (Metrical) Pickup Line

In the presence of women I get nervous,
speak inanities, stare off in the distance,
whistle tunelessly hit songs from the Eighties—
ineffectual, clumsy interactions.
Hence, my writing. A poem is my way of
making small talk that might provoke some interest
from some woman who just might think I'm funny.
Desperation births many lousy poems.
This one. Others. In common meter quatrains,
haiku, roundelays, sonnets, villanelles, and
Now hendecasyllabics, from the Latin:
Trochee, dactyl, then trochee, trochee, trochee.
Any classisists looking for a boyfriend?
We could conjugate certain verbs together,
Amo, Amas and other words just like them.
Call me anytime. I'll respond quite quickly.​

Note that "poem" here is pronounced po·em.

Not the day of the dead as some would have it.
Only when we make claims does someone suffer
loss. The fall doesn't portend death, as trees are
merely leafless before they bud in springtime.
Let's not talk of time, mind's phantasm. Seeing's
not believing. The earth was flat once. Sun up,
sun down, it went around the planet sure as
saints in heaven, the rest in purgatory.
Life was so predictable, like Galileo's
inquisition, the verdict read, confession.
Shun the priests and the shroud you made to bury
in the grave, better saved instead to swaddle.

Life is writing and sometimes eating. Sleep is
daily. Dreams are a shadow. You are waiting
somewhere. I am not there or even sure if
There is anywhere you have ever traveled.

Here's a flower, a ruby rose and gormless
air preceding the rain (a softness). I am
drunk with you in the distant sky of dreams and
holding armfuls of roses, raindrops falling.

These are all great efforts, well done!

I officially withdraw, my mental energy is at a low. I'll still fiddle with the hendecasyllable but just not in public.

 

[Angeline]

practice #4

Maine you piled the snow like no one wanted,
filling colorless empty days with drifting.
We would shovel and plow guy locks us back in
breathing plumes of the air and red of face in
iced December when sliding Hannaford bound,
Miles blowing in time as blades in motion
swipe us clear into night and twinkle season.