Write What You Know and Feel

It’s my observation that many aspiring poets when dealing with rhyme and meter for the first time get into a frame of mind in which reaching for a rhyme word becomes the dominant focus of attention, and while they are learning this new thing almost every other consideration takes second pace, such as writing about what you know about from personal experience and feel warmly about.

To make matters worse, our everyday language carries so much marketing jargon, and it is so insistent in our ears, that this has a way of inserting itself into our consciousness as we write, masquerading as what we “know” and “feel” and incessantly offering its words as “suitable” rhymes.

Here’s an exercise that will help us break out of this trap. First, write an initial line of a couplet that is about something you truly know and have experienced and feel warmly drawn to. You needn’t know why you are drawn (the poem will disclose that to you), but you need to feel warmly drawn. If you are not, throw that first line away and try another.

Second, consult a rhyming dictionary and find a group of rhyme words that all match the end-word of the first line you have chosen out of your experience and feeling. Your goal at this point is to make music, not a predetermined argument. If you have a choice, select as a rhyme word several that are spelled differently, although they sound the same as the last word of your initial line. Third, let the most suitable of these words pull fresh imagery into your second line, preferably imagery you haven’t already had in mind. Four, repeat this process until you have a fresh poem that little resembles what you initially set out to write.

This is the best way I know to pull yourself out of tired, repetitious writing. Try this and comment on it!

Leland

The “Morality” of the “Right Sensation”

Wallace Stevens, one of my favorite and most musical poets, in The Necessary Angel, speaks of “... the pleasure of the powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet's radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation” (p. 58).

This really speaks to me. It seems to me this is what poetry is all about. A philosophical treatise can give you a reasoned truth, but that’s not the same thing at all as a poetic truth, ringing with vibrant music, juxtaposing images that make a tapestry you never saw before and can’t describe to others except in the language of the poem. On a second reading it may be subtly different. Others will hear a slightly different music, see a different image, and feel their own lives reflected in it in a different manner.

It’s the powers that create that truth that interest me most. I think of them as inherent in one’s Mother Tongue. From in utero the unborn child is listening to its mother’s heart beat, her gurgling digestion, her voice resonating down from the voice box through the lungs and into the embryonic sac. He or she knows when the hormone’s juices of truth correspond to the utterances of word, and when they do not, and after his birth will more distantly confirm the truth and falsity of those words as a child at her knees.

In hewing to the “ur sensation” of language (not the clichés of Madison Avenue) the poet lives it anew and revitalizes it for all of us. This is the “morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere... the morality of the right sensation,” that he or she is privileged to live within. Some privilege, what?

Comments?

Leland

“Blank” Verse and the Reader’s Art

Pat K., in her recent comment wrote, “What does the term 'blank verse' mean? Blank verse??! Doesn't make a lot of sense!”

Good question. Blank verse is not verse devoid of words or meaning: Verse means turning. Blank verse is one that turns without a rhyme word to mark the end of a line by intentionally chiming with a nearby end word. Since no end words intentionally rhyme, the verse is blank, that is, without end chimes.

Rhyming always follows a scheme, such as a-a for a couplet (2 lines), a-b-a-b, or a-b-b-a for a quatrain (4 lines) etc. Three stanzas of quatrains plus a couplet can make a sonnet. One sonnet scheme (the English or Shakespearean) is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The sonnet is associated with love felt -- for people, dogs, and gods too.... So when you write a sonnet you are saying something through the form as well as through the words. That’s not possible in non-rhymed or “blank” verse. Nor is it possible in free verse.

Yet blank verse does provide an underlying rhythm against the push and pull of speech-stress. It’s just not as powerful as rhymed verse. It’s harder to memorize than are lines that rhyme. It has been a favorite over the centuries for long narratives and for expository writing in verse. It is usually iambic (stress on the second syllable) pentameter (five “feet” of two syllables to the foot). “Our CAT | enJOYED | the MOUSE | unTIL | it DIED |” is such a line.

That it’s written this way doesn’t necessarily mean it’s spoken this way. That would put both speaker and audience to sleep. That’s where speech-stress comes in. | OUR cat | enJOYED |... reflects the reader’s art in using speech-stress intelligently to interpret, while the meter’s soft drumbeat plays counterpoint in the background. The reader’s art is as important as the poet’s.

Readers, do you agree? Please join the conversation.

Leland

An Aid to Consciousness

Esther Cameron’s comment to the Jan. 30th blog, regarding “social changes, brought about in part by the technology that scattered communities, and ...made the silent, lonely introspection from which the poem springs, to which it speaks, appear passe” deserves further note.

In a comment on her comment I said “In my heart of hearts I guess I hope that the energies which formal poetry can release (as it has since before Shakespeare) might help express and shape a social consciousness for the better --- away from our mindless consumerism --- and not be merely, in form's decline and the abject loss of its energies, a symptom of it.”

It’s true that free-verse confessional poetry speaks to “lonely introspection.” However, the incantatory power of writing in meter and rhyme, and its ability to burst one out of the sides of one’s habitual box of feeling and thinking, makes it different. It makes it a source of “extrospection.”

This can bring to both poet and reader new awareness, mindfulness, consciousness of a sustainable Earth community we now lack. If we reward readers sufficiently for reading outward-looking poetry, it may move them, too, to look outward. Moved by the poetry, readers may help shape a new consensus about sustainable community.

Let’s not throw up our hands as though we were victims. Readers who visit Esther Cameron’s website at http://www.pointandcircumference.com will see that she hasn’t. Bravo! Comments?

Leland

What Turned the Trick for Me?

I left this question with a promise of an answer in a prior post. Ken Ingham’s excellent comment about the creative energy unleashed when using meter and rhyme prompted me to return to it.

The desperation I felt, at the poverty of feeling I experienced, was what turned the trick for me. (My dad died just before I turned six. Circumstances conspired to inhibit my sister’s and my grieving our loss. I spent 60 years in “denial.” That blocked areas of feeling. This was, of course, what blocked the poetry.)

The interplay of the musical elements --- of meter’s underlying rhythm, speech-stress in composing, and rhyme’s melodic end-chimes --- exercised for me an extraordinary incantatory power. I can only describe it as healing. It was healing regarding Dad’s death. This put me in touch with feeling levels I’d previously denied. It also burst out the sides of the box of my imagination.

It was a “right-brain” phenomenon which, like a car’s front-wheel drive, pulled me out of the box of my habitual feeling and thinking. How? When composing, I let one of a number of contextually suitable rhyme words, possessing nothing but pure potential (as in modern physics), do the work. Each would pull other images into the line, and bring it out in a new place!

Composing from line to line, following the formal rhyme scheme of the form chosen, the poem would take shape, its content always surprising me. Who else has tried this? Please comment!

Leland

Non-Readers of Poetry: What’s in it for Me?

Most non-readers of poetry complain that “reading poetry is effortful,” according to the Poetry Foundation’s 2006 Poetry in America Survey. And yet fewer than half of non-poetry readers consider it a waste of time, and more than half of them agree poems “help you appreciate the world around you...make you laugh... help you understand other people...provide comfort at difficult times.” (Executive Summary, page iii.)

What makes it 'effortful', I submit, is the lack of reward for those readers — the lack of pleasing artistry poets put into their work. There’s little to please the ear or the eye, or the craving for sophisticated rhythm like that which draws youngsters to hard rock concerts, or others to symphony orchestras, jazz, and soft rock. Readers will gladly expend effort if rewarded.

It’s true that good free verse employs alliteration, assonance, and consonance to furnish lyric notes, and rhetorical repetition that offers foreground rhythm. But there is no background rhythm without meter, without structural corner posts flagged with rhyme to mark the rhythm of individual lines as each turns (verse literally means turn). Much of the pleasure in formal poetry is speech-stress running counter to metrical stress. This contrapuntal pleasure is absent in free verse even for the out-loud- or lip-reader.

Indeed, what is the reward for the poet who writes with less music than is available? Neither readers nor poets of non rhyming, non metrical work experience the full underlying incantatory power found in formal work. Free verse offers considerably less reward as art on a subliminal and subconscious level. Without this power, this reward, what’s in it for the reader?

So who’s responsible? I think we, the poets, are. You? Please comment, pro or con.

Leland

Poets: Fear your Creativity’s Running Dry?

In my free-verse days, up until ‘02, more often than not I’d feel so dry I had nothing to say. I had to take a walk to generate inspiration. Plus, it bugged me that most of my poems, which tended to be “nature poems” looked alike and sounded alike — over and over only slight variations on the same theme which never seemed to advance or develop anything new beyond itself.

Looking back at the 40 or so poems I’d published, I felt embarrassed (none of them made it into my first book). With the help of Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing,” (Great book!) I taught myself to write in meter. But blank verse wasn’t enough by itself.

In the middle of a poem I stumbled onto a “random potentials” strategy (sounds like modern physics, doesn’t it?) which “cornered” and “tracked” like the first front-wheel drive automobile I ever drove: It didn’t fishtail! I wanted to experience more of that! I bought a copy of Sue Young’s New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary.

This rhyming strategy opened up a whole range of new feeling and new tactics for writing poems. Meter and Rhyme together became the twin anchor lines to a wholly new source of creativity I didn’t at all suspect might lie inside of me — and to new poems that expressed it.

What, besides desperation, turned the trick for me? More next time.

Meanwhile, are there any of you poets in cyberspace who fear your creativity is running dry? What do you do about it?

Any readers out there who feel the poets you are reading, or used to read, have run dry?

Please share your story or comments. Thank you.

Leland

How Did Poetry Get Where It Is?

It’s been over a hundred years since French poets, and then their English counterparts, threw over, as a temporary exercise, the use of meter and rhyme. They complained that its romantic subjects (especially the Rose) and the idiotic sing-song way poetry was recited back then, were totally irrelevant to life. I would agree if I had lived back then.

World War I brought most romantic poets to complete despair. Ezra Pound and especially T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams captured poets’ imaginations, and every poet living today knows in a general way the rest of the story.

In the latter part of the 20th century, MFA style free verse, often filled with critical allusions only academics could catch, and often written more to elicit critical analysis from other academics than to give the ordinary reader pleasure, became the dominant mode for poetry.

Today poetry readers are a small minority of all readers. There may be, in fact, more poets than readers. The urge to make poetry is a deeply felt one we all experience as children but seem, for the most part, to “grow out of” by adulthood, when for most people, it becomes a “lost art.”

Timothy Steele has written, I think, the definitive work on the recent history of meter and rhyme, Missing Measures, subtitled “Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter.” It’s well-worth reading. In the meanwhile, I’d like to ask you who choose to comment a question or two:

Whatever happened, in your opinion, to meter and rhyme such that it could not, or has not yet, reasserted itself despite a tradition older than Shakespeare?

Why are so few people reading poetry today, including non-academic free verse?

I’ll share with you some ideas I have, in another posting. But first, let’s hear from you!

Leland