Structure in poetry

[Tzara]

Alright, I truly have to know. Raise your hand if you're in here and you believe that real poetry has to rhyme and scan. Honestly. Are there really that many people who think so? Perhaps I'd better take this discussion a bit more seriously.

in all genuine curiosity,
bijou

All poetry scans. Scansion is merely the notation of stress and non-stress, among other things. The question is more about the regularity of a poem's scansion.

I think.

Obviously, not all poetry rhymes, at least regularly. I would suggest that, just on a kind of statistical basis, almost all poetry of any length contains something like rhyme (true rhyme, slant rhyme, whatever), just 'cause there are only so many morphemes.

If you read the Eliot article I linked earlier, he apparently felt he was tussling with people who felt free verse was somehow wrong. My impression here is that there are some who feel writing form is wrong, or at least ill-considered, and that that is probably the more prevalent attitude.

To which I offer my own serene write what you want, why you want, and fuck all those losers who can't deal with that.

Oops. Testy. Sorry.

Hey, BJ! I forgot to say I found that Sapphic poem of yours very interesting. I was just reading about the form, what, yesterday? Two days ago? Started thinking about trying to write something to it and, hey presto, there you are.

I started thinking about trying to write something that way and stalled out, though I didn't spend a lot of time on it.

You want to talk about that meter in this thread, feel free. I find it kind of interesting, because it is emphatically not iambic. That's kind of odd in English verse.

Anyway. Whatever.

Carry on (or carrion), people.

 

[Eluard]

Alright, I truly have to know. Raise your hand if you're in here and you believe that real poetry has to rhyme and scan. Honestly. Are there really that many people who think so? Perhaps I'd better take this discussion a bit more seriously.

in all genuine curiosity,
bijou

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that there were a lot of people here who thought that, though I'm sure there are some. I wasn't pointing the finger within this group. I have heard this view quite a bit in the outside world (by people who learned it at school).

My bad. Back in post 7 I was venting at having been sniped at indirectly in some threads in a way that I couldn't respond to (it was indirect). It had gotten to me over time. Maybe I need to take a break from this place.

Back on topic.

Reflecting further on this while coming out of sleep (always a good time to think) it seems to me that stress is just an irrelevant feature of line structure, and that the real property that structures lines is vowel repetition.

 

[Eluard]

agreed with much of what you said up there but this bit, sweet as it is, I must respond to, and only because it's really my point.

I try to do that at least once a day. The bones are not the form; the bones are the exercises that allow us to stay flexible. I try to do that once a day. Of those, you, and other humans, will see about one in every 600 attempts. It is the trying, the education, for which I argue here, not writing in form as such. Learning form. Practicing form. And then breaking out of it with the skills that the practice has granted.


bijou

I didn't miss your point — I've seen you make it before as well.

I'm not suggesting that you can't gain from practicing writing according to formal patterns. So a big yes to everything you say about learning flexibility and honing skills by writing in different ways.

But any constraint that you impose on yourself would do that. Writing poems so that every line starts with the letter K will also increase your flexibility and hone your abilities. So will writing standing on your head.

But my point still stands — and no one has addressed it yet — that if we were in possession of the correct structuring principles for poetry then writing according to the rules and structures ought to produce good poetry a large amount of time. But it doesn't — and I don't think anyone here seriously thinks it does.

So slow down: ask yourselves what `doing it well' really means, when you speak of writing according to formal rules.

Because my answer is that it means producing a good poem in spite of the form.

 

[Eluard]

All poetry scans. Scansion is merely the notation of stress and non-stress, among other things. The question is more about the regularity of a poem's scansion.

I think.

Obviously, not all poetry rhymes, at least regularly. I would suggest that, just on a kind of statistical basis, almost all poetry of any length contains something like rhyme (true rhyme, slant rhyme, whatever), just 'cause there are only so many morphemes.

If you read the Eliot article I linked earlier, he apparently felt he was tussling with people who felt free verse was somehow wrong. My impression here is that there are some who feel writing form is wrong, or at least ill-considered, and that that is probably the more prevalent attitude.

To which I offer my own serene write what you want, why you want, and fuck all those losers who can't deal with that.

Oops. Testy. Sorry.

Carry on (or carrion), people.

The mere fact that poetry contains stresses no more means that it is the pattern of stresses that makes it good than the fact that a crossword puzzle is symmetrical makes it good.

I don't feel writing in form is wrong — I regard it as difficult and interesting and challenging. But when a poem is good it is not good because it conforms to the rules of prosody.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

All poetry scans. Scansion is merely the notation of stress and non-stress, among other things. The question is more about the regularity of a poem's scansion.

I think.

Obviously, not all poetry rhymes, at least regularly. I would suggest that, just on a kind of statistical basis, almost all poetry of any length contains something like rhyme (true rhyme, slant rhyme, whatever), just 'cause there are only so many morphemes.

If you read the Eliot article I linked earlier, he apparently felt he was tussling with people who felt free verse was somehow wrong. My impression here is that there are some who feel writing form is wrong, or at least ill-considered, and that that is probably the more prevalent attitude.

To which I offer my own serene write what you want, why you want, and fuck all those losers who can't deal with that.

Oops. Testy. Sorry.

Hey, BJ! I forgot to say I found that Sapphic poem of yours very interesting. I was just reading about the form, what, yesterday? Two days ago? Started thinking about trying to write something to it and, hey presto, there you are.

I started thinking about trying to write something that way and stalled out, though I didn't spend a lot of time on it.

You want to talk about that meter in this thread, feel free. I find it kind of interesting, because it is emphatically not iambic. That's kind of odd in English verse.

Anyway. Whatever.

Carry on (or carrion), people.

Serene and testy simultaneously, that's our Tzara.

Yes, I think what our esteemed colleague may have meant was that there's apparently a camp that believes rhyme and organized traditional meter is the only way to go. I want to meet these people cause they sound wiggy and fascinating.

I often think that in here we are all basically in agreement, but we find ourselves wandering toward the center from different directions.

It was ill-advised in the extreme for you to give me permission to talk about sapphics here, because now I'm going to do so. Let me remind you that you have only yourself to blame.

I've been playing with sapphics for a while now. The meter turns me on, as anyone could probably guess from that scarlet and dripping initial post. The way I see it, there's a traditional way to interpret the actual accents, but since we're running into a difference between languages it's easier to just listen to what the lines do.

The examples that are always quoted, and in my opinion one of the better interpretations of the form as it lends itself to English are the verses by Swinburne. This, the first three stanzas of his piece entitled, appropriately, "Sapphics," gives a feel of it:

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.

Then to me so lying awake a vision
Came without sleep over the seas and touched me,
Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too,
Full of the vision,

Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctant...

See, here's what I notice. If you try to parse this form down into its stressed and unstressed syllables and so on, if you try to get all linear and organized about it, you end up lost. The form forces you to violate it, forces you to sit back and just hear it, just feel a rhythm, rather than count it out. As soon as you do that, you find a way to make the lines rock the way they do here.

Moving your hips helps.

I'm quite serious when i say that this form talks to me about the way women approach one another. The bump, the force of the first few syllables of each line, ("Came without sleep"; "Saw the white"; "Shine as fire"), the almost awkward unh-unh-unh of the beginning of it is a way of limping toward some kind of resolution. It's cautious, that approach.

And suddenly, by the end of the line, we're racing, we're rhythmic, breathless: implacable Aphrodite, unbound and the feet unsandalled, sunset on western waters... Can't you just hear grrrls talking excitedly to, and over, one another, falling over their own words, rising to a peak...

And the fourth short line, if it were an iambic rhythm, would close it, but it doesn't. It's a last little shudder, a gasp, a hesitation. We open our eyes, look at each other, take it all in, and then approach, again, for the next stanza.

In some ways, the sapphic may be the answer for both the form and anti-form camps. Understanding it in the first place requires the sort of intelligence and discipline that we snotty academic bastards get off on and brag about. But to make it work, you have to break the rules. You have to stop thinking about form and syllable stress and meter and trochees and just rock the lines. Rock with the hips, or the arms, or the voice, like girls do. Like mothers and best friends and hot lesbian chicks do. Finding it requires both sides of the brain, the linear and the intuitive, or more to the point, both the limbic and the dorsolateral.

And really, I'm not at all sure that I got the exact trochees and suchlike correct in my attempt (or at least, and this is an important point, the ONE attempt out of hundreds that I feel is worth paying attention to). But I think I found the feel of it, and when you're working in a form that was originally designed in another language, that, I think, is really the primary goal. To get the feel, to figure out its use, its emotional content, and translate that, not just the mathematics of it.

I need to stop talking about sapphics and go fan mah brow now.

I just managed to skip dinner and spend an hour writing about poetic form. This place totally rocks. Rooooooocks.

bijou

 

[manipulatrix]

.....

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Preface: Long-winded posting ahead. Filled with "this is how it is for me" kinda stuff. No extrapolation should be made from that to "this is how it should be" because that would be silly.

So... this is how it is for me...

I hear the words when I'm writing them. It's almost like I'm capturing the words and the rhythm and the feel of some sort of song in my head. But since I'm not musical, it's just the words. I read my words after I write them. That informs the structure.

And there is always structure. Even when I say there's no structure and it's free-form. Free form is it's own structure, and within the free form evidence of structure emerges.

Now, that sounds all zenlike and groovy and stuff. The reality is that sometimes the words fall all pretty into structure, other times I have to mud wrestle with the words. And sometimes they die in the process. I have an entire graveyard of failed poems that died this way. God rest their evil souls.

Self-promoting look at some of my poems here and their structure (or lack thereof which is it's own structure):

I dig cinquains (5 line stanzas with 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables per line) and I've done a few here: Spilled Erotic Measure and Heavy Trust and Vertigo . All of these poems ended up as cinquains because when I read the first write of them aloud they fell into that pattern... a slow incremental build in pacing and rhythm and then *drop* back to the 2 syllable lines. Um... I think cinquains are supposed to be just one 5 line set, technically. Mine never are. I have one that is 9 pages long.

I dig iambic pentameter (unrhymed unless it's humor or parody... not sure why but rhyming iambic pentameter and sonnets tends to read to my ear the same as a limerick) in moderation. Although I suppose technically what I do is just pentameter since it doesn't follow the iambic DUH duh very often. Only from time to time by happy accident. Burning the Family Pictures Or I cheat and do 8 syllables per line (or 7 or 11 etc) Fucking Statues

That's about as structured as I get unless I'm curious about a particular form and play with it (there's an entire section of my poetry graveyard from the sestina plague... VERY fatal to my poetry but I like wrestling with it).

That leaves the unstructured poetry I write. And there's structure there. It all relates to how it reads in my mouth. How to make the reader's mind sound out the words or meaning how I would read it. Never know how effective that turns out to be since I can't get inside the reader's head... but it works from this end.

For example: Lost has line breaks where I take breaths, like invisible punctuation. Walls is intentionally little short lines that can feel like bars and breathlessness and confusion since there are several lines that it's hard to tell which lines read together and which are new thoughts (intentional). Song and Mythology are patterned/structured as music would be, in my head. Half Awake Intensity started out written as prose poetry, one long run-on sentence and as I read it over and over allowed I just hit enter every time it seemed to "need" it (vague enough for ya?). The enters looked wrong so I played with spaces and visual structure and found some interesting things happened. I stopped playing with it, not when it was right, but when it made me smile. Then there are the times I'm just cute. I hate it when I'm cute like this: untitled I was feeling discordant and flipping the margins made this look "right." I cringe now when I see it because I'm not in that mood anymore. This is oddly what I was going for ... imposing my discordance on others. *sighs* I'm a brat.

It's just a spoken rhythm in print thingy. In the free-form structure there are still internal rhymes and cadences and alliteration. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I'm the ultimate in the nonsensical voodoo reasons for what structure exists.... 5 syllables is arbitrarily the ONLY thing that sounds right in a line... one word just won't sound "right" and I will tweak and tweak and tweak and suddenly realize I want internal rhyming or alliteration so that it flows. I didn't know that was what I wanted, it just sounded wrong. That sort of thing.

And I don't know how to explain it. It either looks/feels/reads right to me, or it doesn't. I don't know when I'm done with something or I got it "right". I just know when what I've written makes me smile. Or just shrug "eh... that's close enough," and I stop working on it. Sometimes I can see how the words / poetry could be technically better, but I'm so fond of a turn of phrase or the imperfections, I just let the words stay as they flowed out of me. This isn't an answer to your question, it's just me rambling. I'll stop. LOL

I could go on. I like words. Even words about words.

Over. And out.

What an excellent answer. See, this place is at its best when we're offering tools to one another, like this. Describing what works, offering it just in case it will work for someone else too.

Hell yeah.

bijou

 

[Tzara]

The mere fact that poetry contains stresses no more means that it is the pattern of stresses that makes it good than the fact that a crossword puzzle is symmetrical makes it good.

I don't feel writing in form is wrong — I regard it as difficult and interesting and challenging. But when a poem is good it is not good because it conforms to the rules of prosody.

Crossword puzzles are not symmetrical. How could they be, unless all the words formed palindromes?

Yes, El, I am joshing with you.

I'm not convinced there are rules of prosody. I would agree that simply adhering to a particular form does not guarantee a good poem.

What I'm after is trying to understand or make explicit the implicit "rules" we follow in writing poems. Even if we're able to write them out, it won't insure that someone following them strictly could write a decent poem. Not how it works.

But at least I might have a clearer idea of why mine suck.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

But at least I might have a clearer idea of why mine suck.

Give
me
a
motherfucking
break.

I mean that in the nicest of ways.

bijou

 

[Tzara]

Give
me
a
motherfucking
break.

I mean that in the nicest of ways.

bijou

OK.

Mother..........fucking.

Was that break enough?

 

[unpredictablebijou]

OK.

Mother..........fucking.

Was that break enough?

Whatever quality level your poetry may reach, your abilities as a smartass are beyond question.

pssst. hey. I got all hot and bothered and smeared a sapphic all over the writing live thread. Now you do one.

bijoubj

 

[Tzara]

Whatever quality level your poetry may reach, your abilities as a smartass are beyond question.

pssst. hey. I got all hot and bothered and smeared a sapphic all over the writing live thread. Now you do one.

bijoubj

Hey. I've read your stories. I just bet you'd make my ass smart.

I dunno about that Sapphic verse thing, though. It seems kinda girly.

And hard.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Hey. I've read your stories. I just bet you'd make my ass smart.

I dunno about that Sapphic verse thing, though. It seems kinda girly.

And hard.

*laughing!* smart indeed. I'm not really like that, though. That's just fiction

,honey...

Seems to me that anyone who likes girls can probably get into a sapphic. Don't have to be one. Just have to have a powerful fondness for certain bits of them. And one or two vivid memories. Or unmanifested ideas.

c'mon. *poke poke*
No pressure.

bijou

 

[Tathagata]

Tath has a good point about "just write." I doubt any of us would seriously contest the idea that you get better as a writer by writing. But I think understanding more about what you are doing and why you are doing it helps too. I was trained as a scientist. Trust your feelings, Luke is never an answer I'm happy with. I want to know.

Yeah. It's a problem.

No matter what you write, you are carrying with you, in some form, everything and everyone you've read and admired.
And I assume, or in MY case anyway, at some point you may have copied a style or two from some of those you admired,

If you trace it all back far enough in comes back to some form of rules.

I would say GOOD free verse is written by people who have some knowledge of the rules and have enough writing ability to, in their minds at least, discard them.

The problem is the more you read and take in, the more you know, and so the more things you have to " intentionally" discard.
It would take you forever to write anything because you'd always see " something" that was a pattern or style or referred back to some abhorrent form.

Egads
Gadzooks

All things are derivative
and choices you make have all been made before, and Yes, Tzara, to answer your original question, I think, most poets have an idea of how a poem should look and feel Before they write one, which in the strictest sense could not be " free verse" because it is not " spontaneous".
And by having an idea or thought as to how it should " look" you are imposing a form.

there is my serious 2 cents
loved the original question Tzarasan
sorry I got a bit touchy
rough week

asta lumbego
asta mamalama
vios con carne
amen

 

[Eluard]

Serene and testy simultaneously, that's our Tzara.

Yes, I think what our esteemed colleague may have meant was that there's apparently a camp that believes rhyme and organized traditional meter is the only way to go. I want to meet these people cause they sound wiggy and fascinating.

bijou

The whole issue of formal poetry vs Modernist free verse is still a very deep wound in the psyche of all Australians. We have been deeply scarred by the greatest literary scandal of the 20th century. But all poets, everywhere in the world, should know of it, so I will recount it for you here.

In 1943 two Australian poets who were serving in the army in France, James McAuley and Harold Stewart decided to write a poem that exposed the sham, the fraudulence — as they saw it — of Modern free verse. They composed a series of poems and invented a poet, one Ern Malley, who was to be the author of these poems, and sent the poems and a spurious biography to a magazine in Adelaide, South Australia (where I grew up) — the magazine being called Angry Penguins. This magazine, edited by a 22 year old Max Harris, immediately declared Malley an undiscovered genius, a suburban Keats, who had died tragically young. Immediately McAuley and Stewart announced the scam in the press and the whole issue became an international incident. Harris and his supporters stuck to their guns, declaring that the poems that had been written were indeed works of genius, whatever the intentions of their authors. Then, just to cap it off, Harris was charged with indecency by the Sth Australian police for printing the Ern Malley poems — he was interviewed by one Detective Sergeant Vogelesang who confessed in court that he didn’t understand many of the things that the was citing as indecent. And Harris went to prison.

The cause of Ern Malley, and his brilliant poetry, was championed by the New York poets Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery. You can read more about it here:

http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-dl.html

http://www.ernmalley.com/

http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/angrypenguins/


I knew Max Harris in Adelaide, because by that time, in middle age, he ran the city’s best book store and I, as a teenager, would go in there for hours. Max Harris turned me on to many modern poets. In fact the book of Rilke’s that he put in my hands is sitting on the couch next to me.

 

[Angeline]

I agree with this, mostly. Certainly the point about the internalisation of some patterns which are then applied unconsciously. But the question of the thread is to try to articulate those unconscious processes.

But think that the condescension you mention tends to run in the other direction — there is still that view that real poetry has to rhyme and scan. I find it exhasperating.

Well at the risk of sounding elitist, I think the people you describe are pretty unschooled in poetry and expect a "poem" to have all the lilt and charm of a Hallmark sentiment. People who have read at least some good poetry appreciate that poetry is poetry, and what makes a poem "good" has very little to do with form or perceived lack thereof.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

The whole issue of formal poetry vs Modernist free verse is still a very deep wound in the psyche of all Australians. We have been deeply scarred by the greatest literary scandal of the 20th century. But all poets, everywhere in the world, should know of it, so I will recount it for you here.

In 1943 two Australian poets who were serving in the army in France, James McAuley and Harold Stewart decided to write a poem that exposed the sham, the fraudulence — as they saw it — of Modern free verse. They composed a series of poems and invented a poet, one Ern Malley, who was to be the author of these poems, and sent the poems and a spurious biography to a magazine in Adelaide, South Australia (where I grew up) — the magazine being called Angry Penguins. This magazine, edited by a 22 year old Max Harris, immediately declared Malley an undiscovered genius, a suburban Keats, who had died tragically young. Immediately McAuley and Stewart announced the scam in the press and the whole issue became an international incident. Harris and his supporters stuck to their guns, declaring that the poems that had been written were indeed works of genius, whatever the intentions of their authors. Then, just to cap it off, Harris was charged with indecency by the Sth Australian police for printing the Ern Malley poems — he was interviewed by one Detective Sergeant Vogelesang who confessed in court that he didn’t understand many of the things that the was citing as indecent. And Harris went to prison.

The cause of Ern Malley, and his brilliant poetry, was championed by the New York poets Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery. You can read more about it here:

http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-dl.html

http://www.ernmalley.com/

http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/angrypenguins/


I knew Max Harris in Adelaide, because by that time, in middle age, he ran the city’s best book store and I, as a teenager, would go in there for hours. Max Harris turned me on to many modern poets. In fact the book of Rilke’s that he put in my hands is sitting on the couch next to me.

I have spent this quiet morning reading about this case in the various links.

I am completely speechless. I mean it. My mind is reeling.

You know who i love most of all in this story? Detective Vogelsang.

Every student of poetry should study the works of Ern Malley. Eluard, thank you.

One thing: I can't find anything about Harris actually going to prison. The news article claims that the judgment was 5 pounds or six weeks in prison, and that he chose to pay the fine. Was there another part of the story that I haven't found?

Speechless. no shit. That doesn't happen very often.
bij

 

[Tzara]

All things are derivative
and choices you make have all been made before, and Yes, Tzara, to answer your original question, I think, most poets have an idea of how a poem should look and feel Before they write one, which in the strictest sense could not be " free verse" because it is not " spontaneous".
And by having an idea or thought as to how it should " look" you are imposing a form.

there is my serious 2 cents
loved the original question Tzarasan
sorry I got a bit touchy
rough week

I didn't think you were touchy, just disputational. And that's a good thing. Itza discussion, after all.

 

[Tzara]

The whole issue of formal poetry vs Modernist free verse is still a very deep wound in the psyche of all Australians...

I agree with BJ, El. This was funny and interesting. It certainly shows why I don't want the police (or the justice system or the legislature) deciding what is good and bad for you to read (or watch or listen to). Unfortunately, that kinda thing is still going on in as just a clueless fashion.

 

[Tathagata]

I didn't think you were touchy, just disputational. And that's a good thing. Itza discussion, after all.

You're a better man than I am Gunga Din

 

[The_Fool]

Well at the risk of sounding elitist, I think the people you describe are pretty unschooled in poetry and expect a "poem" to have all the lilt and charm of a Hallmark sentiment. People who have read at least some good poetry appreciate that poetry is poetry, and what makes a poem "good" has very little to do with form or perceived lack thereof.

I do Hallmark well.

There is no such thing as poetry.

You are incredibly elitist...ducks

I may not be formless, but I am certainly vacuous...

 

[The_Fool]

Is there a difference between a musician that can't play the instrument and a Coltrane who deliberately creates dissonance?

 

[Sara Crewe]

OK.

Mother..........fucking.

Was that break enough?

I think you need a hyphen between mother and fucking.


Just sayin'.

 

[Tathagata]

Is there a difference between a musician that can't play the instrument and a Coltrane who deliberately creates dissonance?

Yes Coltrane purposely avoids the normal harmony, playing that which appears to be non harmonic..Robert Fripp, for example plays things that are so discordant that they seem to have nothing to do with the song
and yet...

a novice has no idea how to play harmony and avoids it by chance
there is no " intention" in his discordance

 

[Eluard]

I have spent this quiet morning reading about this case in the various links.

I am completely speechless. I mean it. My mind is reeling.

You know who i love most of all in this story? Detective Vogelsang.

Every student of poetry should study the works of Ern Malley. Eluard, thank you.

One thing: I can't find anything about Harris actually going to prison. The news article claims that the judgment was 5 pounds or six weeks in prison, and that he chose to pay the fine. Was there another part of the story that I haven't found?

Speechless. no shit. That doesn't happen very often.
bij

Yes, it is all pretty amazing — and had international repercussions! My memory obviously led me astray with the Harris going to jail thing. I read or was told this some time (i.e. years) ago and it stuck. But that was probably circulated before Michael Heyward wrote the definitive account and got the facts straight.

People in Adelaide said that even though history had proven Max Harris right that the whole thing had killed him. He was a dour, lifeless figure, sitting at the desk of mary martin's bookstore. He had a torpor that would only evaporate when he talked about books — poetry in particular.

I knew nothing of this story, btw, when I first visited him as a teenager. It was only when I was at University that I got bits of it.

Also Sidney Nolan — his co-editor — is one of Australia's leading painters. There is no one more eminent.