[New-Poetry] Questions on form

Wed Jan 2 22:56:55 EST 2008

Well, we agree on this at least: every poet, whether writing in meter  
or not, ought to work with "sentece level stress as it works with  
intonation to word level stress, and the use of various punctuation  
devices to create pauses and control the stresses of the sentence,"

But on the matter of apparatus--why stop at 4 levels of stress? Tim  
Steele uses them for pedagocical purposes, to show that an untressed  
syllable in a given foot my actually have greater speech stress than  
the stressed syallable in an adjacent foot [ his(1) rough(2) / grip(3)  
hurt(4) is two perfectly regular iambic feet with each successive  
syllable more strongly stressed than its predecessor], but  speech  
stress is analog and infinitely variable. Why not graph stress with a  
curve? The point is that 4 levels of stress is just as arbitrary as 2-- 
and I'd argue less useful rhythmically, just as, in music, the time  
signature gives rhythmic guidance to the player (and the dancer!)   
without reference to whether the passage is played piano, pianisimo,  
forte, crescendo, diminuendo -- sheer stress does not produce rhythm,  
but repeated patters of stress  and unstress do. How much can a reader  
or listener  retain of a pattern of 4 levels of stress, given that  
inevitably the poet's 4 levels will be actually heard (and readers  
hear, and readers' brains enact) as difference from beat to beat, that  
is, as stressed or unstressed?

Still, fair enough--especially "i like my approach better because I  
feel its led me in more interesting and original directions than  
working with a more tradesman like inspiration and revision sort of  
process ever did." I think personally inspiration is vastly overrated,  
or, said a little differently, that inspiration is what happens when  
one works at revision.

On Jan 2, 2008, at 8:03 PM, jfq at myuw.net wrote:

>
> I really don't think there's _that_ much apparatus to it, or at  
> least no more so than one gets in modern music theory in a music  
> school, or in color theory and the like when you study painting. I  
> can't speak for everyone, but for me, thinking in terms of four  
> levels of stress, of comparing sentence level stress as it works  
> with intonation to word level stress, and the use of various  
> punctuation devices to create pauses and control the stresses of the  
> sentence is something that's become more or less second nature to me  
> since I've started using it in my writing. which isn't to say that  
> it's something that I do unconsciously. nor is it something i'm  
> constantly aware of, but rather it's a tool by which i can shape my  
> lines to the effect I want to have without having to worry over much  
> about whether they'll turn out all right. Make them work enough and  
> they'll be ok and won't need much polish after the act of  
> composition. One can, i believe, approach writing in a way similar  
> to the technique of sumi-e in japanese painting and be very  
> successful. Or, one can be a mannerist and consider decisions and  
> composition very carefully as one builds. My poetic goal is to do  
> both at the same time, and while i feel like i still have a long way  
> to go to get there, even the act of trying to do it has given me a  
> method which contrasts sharply with what I tend to think that the  
> general practice as it's taught in writing programs (the inspiration  
> and revision process) that seems to try to split the difference  
> between the two extreme's of approach, and I think that's fine too  
> but i also think it tends to create a certain kind of writing.
>
> If you'll permit me the conceit, i like my approach better because I  
> feel its led me in more interesting and original directions than  
> working with a more tradesman like inspiration and revision sort of  
> process ever did. You're right though, in comparing the overall goal  
> to developing an ear. What I'd point out as the correlary to that is  
> that there is more than one kind of ear, and more than one way to  
> develop it. In the end, maybe "you just go on your nerve" or at  
> least i like to, but your nerve is different depending on how it's  
> been cultivated.
>
>
> On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Michael Snider wrote:
>
>> 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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