[New-Poetry] we murder to deflect

[David Graham]

Some scattered musings, not directed "against" anyone else's.

I confess that I was the newly-minted holder of an MFA in poetry  
before it occurred to me that I knew almost nothing about traditional  
prosody.  Though I'd written in traditional forms as exercises along  
the way, I'd really never dug deep and learned the basics.  So I set  
about on a personal project of reading up, devouring many books on  
prosody and fairly diligently practicing things in my journal.  Among  
the things I learned:  I am not by nature a formalist, and have no  
great skill in rhyming, in particular.  But the training was  
invaluable, and I'm convinced that my free verse gained immensely in  
fluency and craft due to my apprenticeship.

I had always written by ear, and my ear was only sharpened by the  
practice.  Anyone who maintains that analysis kills inspiration is  
deluded, I think; if it *can* be killed thereby, it's not much as  
inspiration.  I love the little diagram that Nims included in  
*Western Wind*,  of a bird with all the parts labelled.  No actual  
bird was harmed by this drawing, he points out, and knowing what  
pinfeathers are just might make you a better observer of the next  
real bird you see. . . .  "We murder to dissect" is a nice line but  
faulty analogy.

Anyway, in typical fashion I got obsessed with prosody & traditional  
forms.  For five years almost everything in my journal I cast in some  
kind of form, often syllabics.  Things got loosened up by the time  
poems were finished or published, frequently.  But I wrote reams and  
reams of pentameter especially, trying to learn the moves.

My reading in Fussell & other texts eventually convinced me that  
prosody in general and scansion in particular are just as contested  
as other aspects of poetics, and that experts routinely disagree  
about even the most fundamental things.  So I tend not the enter the  
fray, myself.  It's against my religion to contest how others scan  
individual lines and phrases.  But this does not mean it is useless  
to study the tradition as well as traditional descriptions of what  
poets have been up to.

When I teach my course Poetry Aloud I always start with the ear.  We  
memorize & recite a short poem together before we do anything else.   
Interestingly, you can tell immediately tell who has a natural ear  
and who doesn't.  Some find it very difficult to hear even the basics  
of stress, I've found.  When I write the word "content" on the board  
and pronounce it as CONtent, then as conTENT, there are always a few  
who cannot easily tell the difference.  My own experience suggests  
that, even if you start out that way, you don't need to end up so.



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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
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