[New-Poetry] Re: a dead ear for scansion

[Skip Fox]

Once more with feeling:

 

If you didn't hear the rhythms, you couldn't speak the language. Not
sensibly. (Aside: If you want to see a linguist smile, tell him you can't
hear the language's rhythm.) I rarely make bald literal sentences and then
bluntly insist upon them, but. . . . Hell, native English speakers even know
that they will speak a rhythm-based language when in the womb. (Chinese
kids/fetuses in the womb learn that theirs will be pitched based. Roman
kids/fetuses learned theirs would be a durative one, Latin.) 

 

The fact that rhythm is just one of a myriad of factors (though one of the
most prominent of them) makes us realize how incredibly complex and delicate
the language is, it doesn't argue against rhythm.

 

In class when teaching scansion I simply say, You don't want to put the
emphasis on the wrong syllable, doing just that the words  emphasis and
syllable (an old joke of my father).  After a half-of-a-second even the
sleeper students get it. 

 

As do we all, whether we know it or not.

 

 

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