[New-Poetry] Questions on form

[Michael Snider]

The only beef I have with linguistic prosody is that its practitioners  
call it prosody, which confuses the hell out of the issue for people  
who want to make poems.  Sure it's capable of decribing more, and more  
subtle, effects than is traditional poetic prosody, but the whole  
point of metrical poetry is to make a dance between those effects  
catalogued in scientific prosody (but used unconsciously by all of us)  
and the deliberately schematic meters which poets can actually use.

Scientific, linguistic prosidies are wonderful for description of the  
characteristics of a language and for analytical, even predictive work  
on the relationships between languages or between the dialects within  
a language, but I cannot imagine using it as a principle of  
composition.  How maintain all that apparatus in consciousness? And,  
if unconscious, how is it different from cultivating an ear?

On Jan 2, 2008, at 6:21 PM, jfq at myuw.net wrote:

>
> I agree that this is the traditional view of meter in classical  
> prosody, and laid out more eloquently than i have done so, so  
> thanks. But i don't think I'm wrong to call it shoehorning because  
> it doesn't emerge from the rhythms of natural speech. That's pretty  
> central to the point i'm trying to make: that the rhythm of poetry  
> ought to emerge from the rhythm of natural speech. I recognize it as  
> a prescriptive position, certainly, but I think a good case can be  
> made for it on several good grounds. Not the least, but certainly  
> not the only one either, is that a view of meter based on modern  
> scientific prosody gives the poet a richer palette not just as  
> regards rhythm but with all prosodic devices which rely on their  
> timing in relation to eachother to have their effect. Allowing for  
> greater subtlety in composition is a good thing, because it doesn't  
> eliminate the more plodding sorts of meter if one wants to use them.  
> Although with the options available to contemporary lyric poets i  
> fail to see why one would want to remain shackled to received forms  
> and meters.
>
> On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Michael Snider wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 2, 2008, at 4:12 PM, jfq at myuw.net wrote:
>>
>>> well, not wanting to overstate the case, obviously they matter.  
>>> but i think only as a tertiary concern when compared to the  
>>> relative pattern of weights and stresses and also the fact of  
>>> various forms of silence and pauses that are generally unaccounted  
>>> for, but hugely influential in the rhythm of verse. account for  
>>> that, and if there are no irregularities there, then sure, you  
>>> might turn to syllable count to smooth wrinkles.
>>
>>
>> All that goes on--silences, dipthongs, rhetorical stress, and much  
>> more--but the rhthm of a metrical poem is neither those things it  
>> inherits from natural speech nor its meter, but is instead a  
>> product of the interaction of meter and speech. It's not shoe- 
>> horning, though Bob G is correct that meter results in what you  
>> miight call "nudges" either up or down on the natural speech stress  
>> of a phrase. Those nudges come from a more-or-less strict pattern  
>> of stressed and unstressed syllables within the feet of the poem-- 
>> and only contrasting stress within a foot, not between feet, counts  
>> for the meter.
>>
>> BTW, the terms of traditional English prosody are Greek in origin  
>> but they don't even pretend to refer to the same phenomena, though  
>> Sidney and a few others were a might confused early on.
>>
>> And hiya, folks. Been mostly off-net for a while, and the several  
>> thousand unread New Poetry emails were a little intimidating.  I  
>> finally decided to just jump over the lot.
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>
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