5. Susie's Comment

Thanks to Susie for her poem in progress.  (Readers, send in yours today!)

Susie, Storrs, CT said...

How happy I would be if I could rhyme
a poem, but --- what should I do first?
I feel lost.

APRIL 17, 2015

"Feeling lost," believe it or not, is a good place to be at this point in a poem, Susie. That means you won't "force" it.

Your opening line is a good iambic pentameter line (five ta-TUMs). It is a good rhythm to maintain throughout your poem --- however many lines you want to write. It will help you get into your poet's zone.  If you haven't read blog 2, and 3, read them and you'll see why I say this. Plus, there is warm feeling to your line.

Your second line is four and a half ta-TUMs. You can add a TUM. Look in your rhyming dictionary for words that rhyme with "rhyme." If you haven't yet got a rhyming dictionary, make on a separate sheet of paper a list of all the words that rhyme with "rhyme" that you can think up. Ask your friends for rhyme words. (The dictionary I use is Sue Young's The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary. It's an Avon paperback listed in the post on resources.)

(I suggest you start with rhyming couplets, that is, a scheme which goes aa,bb,cc,dd etc.)

You only have space in the first line for one TUM, that is, a single syllable. How about "I'm?" In my rhyming dictionary, there are 14 other choices.  Choose any one that appeals to you.  Just be aware that it will control the following lines --- and that's just fine. That's as it should be, using the approach I am about to model for you.

How happy I would be if I could rhyme
a poem, but --- what should I do first?  I'm
a blind whisker-less cat, a bloodhound with
no nose

This is where "I'm" took the poem for me, offering metaphors that reflect your short statement, "I feel lost."  The statement is okay, but it lacks the imagery of the metaphors of being a cat and being a bloodhound.

Where did the cat and the dog come from?  "Lost" is pretty abstract without some kind of qualification.  I ask myself, lost like what?  Like a cat that's blind and has no whiskers. Like what else?  Like a bloodhound without a nose, which can't "scent" out a direction to go in.  "Like" and "as" signal similes.  To convert a simile into a metaphor, let a verb create a single entity out of the speaker who's lost and the thing she is like. Thus, I am a blind whisker-less cat.  I am a blood hound with no nose. Considerations of rhythm suggest we put these in apposition.  Hence the lines as they are so far developed.

Before I forget, note that there are no commas at the ends of lines. The only use of commas at the ends of lines is where the syntax of the sentence requires it for clear understanding.  If we put a comma at the end of every line, as the Victorians did, it would make it sing-song when read.  It would destroy the poems syntactic intelligibility.  I have used enjambment in most lines.

Now, look up "with" in your rhyming dictionary.  In mine there are five words of one syllable, and five of three syllables with the last syllable carrying the accent or stress (the TUM).  Let's choose the word "pith."

How happy I would be if I could rhyme
a poem, but --- what should I do first?  I'm
a blind whisker-less cat, a bloodhound with
no nose, divided, sniffing for that pith
of feeling which will keep me true to self

This is where "pith" took the poem.  What next?  I look in the dictionary and find a quite limited range of rhymes to match "self."  We need more rhymes than 'self' has.  Let's look elsewhere for an end-word to rhyme the following line with. "Heart"?  Much better range of choices (though using heart too often gets sticky).

How happy I would be if I could rhyme
a poem --- yet, what is my first step?  I'm             Changes here
a blind whisker-less cat, a bloodhound with           improve the
no nose, divided, sniffing for that pith                     rhythm.
of feeling which expresses best my heart.             Ditto.
Could "feeling lost" lead to a poet's art?

What do you think?  I think the answer to the question posed in the poem is YES.  And maybe, Susie, it will lead you there!

Your feelings will lead you to a completely different poem, even though you use the same rhyme words, because as individuals we have quite different experiences in life. Different rhymes lead to still different poems at the hands of the same poet.  The point is, don't ever force the poem into a predetermined theme, or use forced rhyme. First find the rhyme, then the line, and let the poem make whatever sense it will, in "going where it wants," as a reflection of your feeling and your growing skill.

Try it!  Now!  Susie, let me see your work with your rhymes and your feeling as the poem comes about. Remember, first find the rhyme, then the line.

Best wishes for your success ---

Leland

4. Resources for Present and Future Study

Young,  Sue,  The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary, Avon Books, NY, NY, 1991.  (You’ll find this a tremendously handy paperback volume containing over 65,000 entries of contemporary American English — including some clichéd and slang expressions best used only in humorous verse.  It utilizes a key to spoken sounds that becomes increasingly familiar and easy to use for the serious poet-to-be who wants true ear-rhymes.)

Gwynn, R.S. (Editor), New Expansive Poetry, Story Line Press, Ashland, OR, 1999.  (An interesting group of broadly-ranging essays regarding the contemporary scene in formal poetry.)

Kinzie, Mary, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1999.  (A comprehensive handbook of examples, principles, exercises, and terminology that will take you deep into the heart of formal poetry in all its variety of expression.)

Steele, Timothy, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification, Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1999.  (He’s right.  When you finish this volume, you will probably agree, as I certainly do, that’s where all the fun is — as Robert Frost promised.)

Steele, Timothy, Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter, University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville & London, 1990.  (This is a closely studied, detailed history of metrical poetry’s uses and abuses leading up to and including the revolt against it represented by William Carlos Williams and so many others.)

On a limited budget?  Buy Young’s Rhyming Dictionary now.  Borrow from your library, or by Inter-Library Loan, Steele’s All the Fun... and Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide..., in that order.  Work with each until you are satisfied it is worth it to you personally to buy them.  They will lead you to other resources.

3. Find Your Poet-Zone through Peripheral Vision

© 2012, 2015 by Leland Jamieson

(This page, like the one that precedes it, is fairly long – a personal account of my discovery of the poetry-writing zone. Send your poem in your comment as instructed on the first post before you spend time on this. Then print it out for future reference. Adapted from Chapter 1 of my book, How to Rhyme Your Way to ‘Metaphor Poems’.)

Do you like, or would you like, to express yourself and your feelings in a poem which does not later embarrass you?

Would you like to go more deeply and with more perception in a poem than you seem able to do at this time in your life?

And would you like to compose poetry more easily than you are able to now, if that were possible without compromising your poem’s honesty and quality?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, read on.

From my early teens I consciously wanted to write poems that rhymed. Try as I might, they were awful — forced rhymes made them ridiculous. I gave up finally and joined the free verse poets. I was afraid I’d never acquire the ability to think up unforced end-rhymes.

I chose William Carlos Williams as my mentor. I read and studied all his poetry, as well as a big biography, and, in it, much of the correspondence between him and both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Williams had a deep longing to discover a metrical system to replace the English Foot. Yet this eluded him all his life. He had been a strong voice leading us out of the 19th Century’s clichéd sentiment, language, and subject matter. His voice, among others, ended the overly-stressed, end-stopped ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM lines that characterized most public readings of English and American Poetry of that time. We can thank him for freeing us from those readings!

Even in the hands of his followers, however, his “revolution” has failed to this day to solve “the problem of rhythm” in free verse. (I address some of the inherent reasons why in the post that precedes this.)

My own free verse poems, even the 39 or so that found publishers, were more than a disappointment to me. In hindsight, they never deserved publication.

I set out, at last, to learn how to write metrical or “blank” verse on contemporary themes. That mastered to a small degree, I turned again to an effort to learn how to write unforced end-rhymes. I finally stumbled, yes, literally stumbled, upon an approach which made natural-sounding end-rhymes possible, even easy, for me to write.

The result was a liberation of my imagination, feeling, and consciousness to a degree I had never before experienced! I began to see things in my peripheral vision I had never seen before.

This process can make it possible for you, too, more easily to write natural end-rhymes. And it can liberate your imagination, feeling, and consciousness as well. How I Stumbled on Random-Potential “Reverse Composition” Rhyming

Rhymes are slight and silly little things to be afraid of — but for most of my life I was afraid of them. As I’ve said, I was afraid I couldn’t find a rhyming word to express what I wanted to say that would not distort the meaning intended. And I was equally afraid to manipulate lines into metrical rhythm because it made them sound sing-song when read. Both were writer’s (poet’s) blocks for me.

(Maybe they are for you, too!)

I stumbled upon a strategy for how to use a rhyming dictionary that I imagine is somewhat akin to random-potential “probability theory” in modern physics. After composing the first metrical line of a new poem (a couplet, for example), I opened my rhyming dictionary. I scanned a list of rhymes matching the end-word of my first line. This took my mind off the poem, and in those moments it did I began to see, looking at suggestive rhymes, peripheral connections to what was buried in my mind and heart to say. Working at random, but also by intuition, and responding to the suggestiveness of each of the rhyme words, I let one of them — possessing nothing but pure potential — draw out of my heart and mind the most appropriate next line’s imagery, action, feeling, or thought. You might call it “reverse composition.” I call it “Reverse Composition Rhyming.”

When the lights go out at night and you are looking but can’t see directly, it often helps to glance to one side, and find what you’re seeking in your peripheral vision. This is, in effect, what happened in my mind as I glanced through a list of rhyme words.

(It was a big change from my usual mode of composing. That was to expect, once I was already in and even near the end of the next line, to struggle to come up with a rhyme word to end it so it made sense and felt and sounded right. It never did.)

Let me state this as clearly as I can: The process is “reverse” because rather than starting a new line and struggling for a rhyme, you start with the rhyme and let it gently pull a new line into place without a struggle, because you do not hold too strict a preconception of what that line might say.

Let me repeat, in different words: First find the rhyme, and only then the new line. Do this without too strict a preconception of what the new line might say, or what words it might employ. I don’t want to press this dynamic to the point of surrealism or deconstructionist chaos. I only want to impress upon you this: Be open to the possibility that the poem may take you coherently to a new and different place than you imagined when you first set out to compose. Be alert to this, and go with it. Your creativity lies within the poem, not apart from it or outside it, not even apart from it somewhere in your heart or head.

In addition, I learned to manipulate meter with enjambment in a way that leads to a more natural reading, and frees it from seduction by ta-TUMs. It allows speech-stress more freedom to play its jazz-like counterpoint to the metrical and musical stresses of the line. This works especially well when the upper enjambed line’s last word is an active verb that turns the reader without a pause to the next line below it. The absence of punctuation at the turning supports that reading.

I credit Reverse Composition Rhyming and Enjambment with blasting open a dam which had held back my range of feeling and imagination. That is to say, it released an open and free-flowing river of creativity. Nothing I ever did (as I said, I’d been scribbling free verse since I was a teen) had ever opened up such a large, warm and exciting access to memory. Nothing I’d tried ever presented such serendipitous gifts of present-time awareness, sensitivity, perceptivity, and access to appropriate imagery. How could this be? Through peripheral vision.

In my experience, free verse is less freeing in the making than formal verse because it tends to keep you in your left hemisphere, looking there, and from there outside to the world or inside to the realm of feeling without the help of peripheral vision's random inspiration.

A more freeing poetry, for me, and probably for you, is metrically manipulated rhyming (musical) lines. Working out the challenges inherent in crafting poems in such a musical manner does move one’s thought processes to a large extent into the “feeling” right hemisphere. It is full of present-time awareness as well as memory, warmth of feeling, insights, delights, playfulness and surprises far superior to what the always-analytical left hemisphere can offer. (There’s still plenty of use for “the left” when it comes time to make critical revisions.)

Let me invite you to anticipate the direct benefits to you of a strategic application of Reverse Composition Rhyming:

1. A reverse composition rhyming poem starts with a metrical line describing anything which causes you, the poet, to feel warmth. The subject or topic (what the poem is “about”) emerges only later in the process. This approach eliminates the crisis which you often experience (and may express in moans and groans) when deciding what to write a poem “about.” In fact, a rhyme word that particularly delights you with its warmth may cause you to change direction regarding what the poem is all about. It keeps you fluid and enables you to follow where the emerging coherence in the poem “wants to go.”

2. Reverse Composition Rhyming is crucial to freeing you from the panic of not being able to find an appropriate unforced rhyme once past the first line of the poem.

3. The process helps you know how to handle matters when you are “stuck.” Just try a new approach with a different line. Or try a different rhyme (to a new end word in the prior line synonymous with, or superior to, the original) to pull a new line into place.

4. Working in Reverse Composition rhyme builds vocabulary and reduces the temptation to fall back on clichés while you are selecting optimum rhymes from a larger universe than those that come first to mind.

5. Reverse Composition Rhyming offers a more supportive structure than free verse. That’s because it focuses and stimulates and (believe it or not) frees you to be more creative in the process of thinking in similes and, subsequently, metaphors. This also helps you revise a poem with greater point and intelligence by offering a more artistically complex and focused challenge than free verse.

Would you, my good reader, like to take the same steps to move your poetry composition more deeply into the right hemisphere, and enjoy the same benefits?

You may fear you have nothing at all to say worth saying. (I have that fear most every time I start a poem.) Yet, you will feel aroused by the music and rhythm which metrical reverse rhyming makes You will enter the poet’s zone. You will discover you do have “something to say” — or the Muse does, through you. The Muse speaks most originally through self-taught “meter-&-music-making” poets who write with their lips, fingers and ears in the “zone.”

Surprise yourself! Discover that it is easier to write formal verse well than “free” verse well. Formal verse, framed in contemporary feeling that is yours, language that is yours, and images that are yours, is most truly freeing. Work that is truly yours will be contemporary and will deserve to be shared.

Welcome to the poet’s realm of peripheral vision’s metrical random-potential reverse rhyming composition, bursting with music and creativity that is almost magical in the way it puts you in your poet’s “Zone”!

Oh, yes! Get and use a good American rhyming dictionary. The one I find most useful is Sue Young’s The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary (1991). It is an inexpensive Avon paperback with 65,000 entries. While you await that at the bookstore or mail box, start with lists of rhyming words you and your friends can think up working together.

I’ll close with a poem I wrote for a Middle School Student, and another for a more general audience. I suggest you read them aloud for full effect:

Dance of the Quivering Digits

For Savannah and her Fifth Grade friends. April, 2005.

When thought and feeling don’t pan out,
does your heart throb with aching doubt?
You fear that you will never write
another line that feels quite right?
Then drum your fingers, and find “feet”
to dance the line your digits beat!

Next, find a rhyme word that can pull
a second line — one trim but full —
from heart and mind and quivering hand
whether or not it’s what you “planned.”
When once you’ve got two lines that dance,
across your lips quick smiles will prance.

Where do these two lines want to go?
How step aside and let them flow?
If you rely on feet and rhyme
they’ll find you more lines, every time.
Say “Yes!” to their uncanny smarts —
well known for warming poets’ hearts!

They’ll often lead you to express
a thought or feeling with finesse
you did not know you had in you
until the rhyme pulled it in view.
Thus, you may open inner eyes
to see what’s true — for you. Surprise!


Formal Poet as a Rooster

As a violin beneath one’s jaw
will resonate in the conch of ear,
spread gooseflesh through the player’s maw,
electrify his chakras’ sphere,
impel him toward a right-brained awe —
so may a formal chanticleer.

The horsehair bow of reading stress
contests each line — articulates
what’s drawn across pentam or less
(tetram or trim) — and celebrates
new vibes that “free verse” can’t express.
What un-taut string reverberates?

It’s speech-stress firing at the breech
ignites taut measured lines’ end chimes,
push-pulls at sense with feeling’s reach —
as poet (reader, hearer) times
out moss-thick tongues, cliché-gray speech,
and cries up dew-fresh paradigms.

Okay! Enough of my chatter. Let’s see you find your poet’s zone in your work. Please follow the Three Requirements in the first opening post above. Thank you.

Leland

2. Better Rhythm, Better Lines, Better Chimes

Seduce Readers into the “Zone”!

© 2009, 2015, by Leland Jamieson

(This is fairly long. It’s fairly deep stuff. Don’t let it distract you from sending your poem in the comment box. Do that first, and then come back to this. Print it for future reference. Adapted, with additions, from Chapter 7 of my book, How to Rhyme Your Way to ‘Metaphor Poems.’)

With nearly a century and a half of various expressions of free verse in American poetry behind us, it is pertinent for the poet-to-be to ask, “Why, in the 21st Century, compose by line, or in meter, or in rhyme? Is this a reactionary throw-back to the 19th Century?”

At the risk of over-simplification, I will summarize in my own words, to the extent it is pertinent to our subject, recent scientific thinking on the effects of line, meter, and rhyme in poetry with regard to their impact on the human brain.

This is in part a precis drawn from a rather long technical paper, “The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time,” by Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel. It is found in a collection of essays, New Expansive Poetry, edited by R.S. Gwynn (Story Line Press, 1999).

What does a study of 18 different languages, including Ancient Greek, Celtic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Slavic, Spanish, Uralic — plus those of Zambia and New Guinea and others less well-known in the west — show they all have in common? All utilize, in their most memorable poetry, lines that are a similar length in elapsed time when spoken.

On the one hand, the line length in all these languages does not exceed the elapsed time that the conscious mind consumes as it speaks, grasps, and understands the line’s content within what is called the “present moment of hearing.” On the other hand, the line is not so short that it allows other thoughts to intrude into the unconsumed “present moment of hearing.” The biological or “neural length” of this interval is roughly 3 seconds.

It is no accident that Iambic Pentameter, five stresses spoken over ten syllables, is so well established in English. Iambic Tetrameter, four stresses over eight syllables, is also well established, as is four-stress English Ballad meter. Why? Pentameter takes on average 3.3 seconds to speak, Tetrameter 2.4. These are congruent with lower frequency brain waves associated with the brain’s heightened creativity in the 3-second “present moment of hearing.”

When reading metrical end-rhymed poetry aloud we are drawn in by the underlying (subtle, not overemphasized) metrical auditory rhythm (ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM) as well as by periodic true end-rhymes. Scientists say the brain is driven by them. These auditory rhythmic drivers measure out each “present moment of hearing.” They bring about a cooperative feedback loop across the corpus callosum between the (reasoning-and-word) strength of the left hemisphere and the (feeling-and-image) strength of the right.

When the right and left hemispheres are united in this feedback loop, we experience our world more holistically (whether as poets composing a poem, or readers of it, or listeners to it). This is especially true for experience we consider ambiguous, contradictory, or multiple in its meanings. Purely analytic left-brain thinking alone cannot accomplish this holistic integration for us.

Metrical end-rhymed poetry helps us make sense of the world with all its contradictions at a depth prose cannot. Free verse, even with its rhetorical rhythms, fails as deeply as prose. The reason? Both prose and free verse lack regularly recurring auditory drivers (regular subliminal ta-TUMs and true end-rhymes) which create the low frequency brain waves. It’s these brain-waves that achieve the feedback loop and effect the optimum integration of the two hemispheres, or entrainment in the “poetry zone.”

To repeat, and add a third element: First is the underlying rhythm of meter, an auditory driver. Second is the recurring rhyme-sound images that mark turnings at the ends of three-second lines, also auditory drivers. Now add the Third: The lyric voice with its contrapuntal and interpretative speech-stress. These three join forces subliminally. Together they harness for the reader the power of the whole brain. They enable it to become entrained, and thus to experience poetry at its deepest levels because the brain is in the “zone.”

Thus, meter, line, and rhyme are far from just a throwback to a prior era (whether the 18th Century, or Shakespeare’s time, or the time of the Ancient Greeks and Romans). Composing by line, in meter, and in true ear rhyme (neither slant rhymes, nor blank verse) makes the most time-proven and universal poetry for one simple reason. According to the scientific evidence available to us, it creates a three-fold structure enabling speech to entrain the human brain, and therefore access it most holistically, in the “zone.” The same phenomenon puts the poet in the zone when composing the poem.

Every musical group today has a drummer. Why? To seduce the listeners to the dance. Shouldn’t your poetry have the music of rhyme, the beat of the drum, and seduction into the “zone” for your reader? And for you, the poet? For me, the answer is “Yes!” And "Yes!"

Leland

Oh, yes! Speaking of “the dance,” go to the next post and read to the end.

1. Send In Your Poem Today!

Roll up your sleeves and put into your "Post a Comment," below, a poem of 4-14 lines. It may be a poem you have struggled with, attempting to find the most appropriate metaphor(s).  Send me only one poem that meets these criteria:

1) You truly care about the poem-in-progress, rhymed or free verse. 2) It has one or more similes in it.  It may have metaphors. 3) But it still fails to satisfy you.  Do the metaphors really work?

Sign it with your first name, your city, and state.

Going forward, I will model, on one or more poems readers have submitted, strategies and tactics you can use that will deliver fresh new metaphors for the chosen poem(s). When you see these demonstrated, by me as well as by other participants returning their revised poems, and practice them yourself, you can do likewise to find your own best metaphors.

When you have revised your poem with your own metaphors, cut and paste both your original submission and your revised poem, the new above the old, for re-publication in a fresh Post a Comment on this blog. That way you (and your friends) can clearly see your progress.

Also, remember to invite all your friends to visit this page to see your work, and to take advantage of what they, too, can acquire for themselves as metaphor-building, and rhyme-making skills --- if they are interested. Remember your posting date, and look in the archives or prior comments, if necessary, to find your poem.

Thanks for your time and attention. Let’s get to work! You see, I am impatient for action, movement, achievement.  Yours.  There is no justifiable pride like the pride you can take in self-accomplishment.

Let's go to the Post a Comment Box!

OR,

In case you want a little more orientation before you put your fingers to the keyboard, consider the following:

Metaphor may be most simply defined by comparison with a simile. (We’ll have much more to say later about similes and how easily it is to develop them as a step in finding metaphors for your poem.)

For now, in a simile we say, for example, that love (an abstraction) is like the flames of a fire leaping in my heart. The word “like” is the indication that we are drawing a comparison between two unlike things. Or, in a verbal phrase, the word “as” functions the way "like" functions in the sentence: love is as though a fire were leaping within my heart. They both make a comparison.

The roots of the word “metaphor,” in the context of poetry, essentially mean "bearer of transferred, overlaid, newly combined (thus fresh) multiple-level meanings or images." In a metaphor we say, “my love is my heart's bonfire -- its flames leaping into the night sky.” Notice the "were leaping" in the paragraph above becomes active and much more powerful.  Notice, too, the overlaid, multiple, and far-reaching images.  (And notice there are no signposts, either “like” or “as.”)

A metaphor utilizes a verb (“is” or preferably a strong action verb) and makes a single entity of the two actions, images, or situations  that a simile only compares. Future blogs and comments will illustrate this distinction more fully, with your own poems.  As you observe this process modeled on a variety of different poems contributed by different people, you'll see how easy this is to do when you ask yourself the right questions.

This blog will also demonstrate the role of rhyme in generating imaginative metaphors through broadened peripheral vision. It is actually easier to write a good finished metaphor poem with rhymes, due to the expanded peripheral vision they bring, than in free verse.

Can you believe that?

It’s true.  It's hard to believe after a hundred years of "free verse." We’ll learn why, and how, in a future session, using 21st Century, post-9/11 topics, imagery, and sentiment rather than those characterizing late 19th Century poetry.

Okay!  Enough talk! Roll up your sleeves and let’s get started! Cut and paste into your comment box a poem that meets the 3 criteria at the top of this page. Copyright remains with you, so don't worry about that.

I look forward to seeing your poems and modeling solutions for you.

Leland Jamieson