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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84

An Older, Wiser Man with Rhythm


Anyway, people ask me sometimes, “What do you mean that your older poems do not have a good rhythm? And is it really that important in poetry?” Let me answer the second question or the second part of the question first.

Essentially--and I am oversimplifying some but not much—rhythm is established in poetry by regular and repeating metrical feet. The most common metrical foot in English poetry is the iamb. It is a “rising” meter that is an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. It is found in the words “today,” “unite,” and “collide.” It is a bouncing meter that can get pretty redundant and sing-songish in longer pieces of verse such as in Alexander Pope’s longer works, for he writes in heroic couplets, which are two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter or, in other words, five iambic feet in a row. Now, no poet, including Pope, writes continually in iambs, but the regularly repeated meter in a lot of English language poems is iambic in nature. I can talk about trochees, spondees, dactyls, and other metrical feet some other time. For now, let’s focus on the iamb. The iamb is a basic rhythm that is common in poetry. I tend to write in iambs.

Since we were children, rhythm has been as strong a mnemonic device as rhyme because, while rhyme is something that we hear, rhythm is something that we can feel. We can tap our feet or clap our hands to it. This lends muscle memory to mind memory and helps us remember songs, games, prayers, and, yes, poetry. We learn things quicker, we learn them better, and we remember them longer when we combine the physical attributes of rhythm to the mental attributes of memorization. It has also been proven that humans take more enjoyment in rhythmic expressions of their language whether English or the African Igbo. If we take more enjoyment in it, if we learn better and quicker with it than without it, and we remember it longer with rhythm, do you think rhythm is important in poetry? I guess that I am not answering the question, I am asking you to answer it.

Now, the second part—Here is a fragment of a poem that I wrote in 1990 or thereabouts. See if you can pick up any sort of regular rhythm.

We have passed through waterless places

We are becoming shapeless

We are shifting aimlessly

And shift often from side to side

And becoming shapeless

There was a time when we had a strong purpose

We had rapture, adulation and ecstasy

But through the temptation of humanization

We lost religion, philosophy , and poetry.


Here is a piece of a poem from Atheists and Empty Spaces that uses basically the same words.

We pass through idolatrous[i] places

Where deities cannot go.

We are becoming shapeless.

Our apathy makes us so.


We enter ourselves in races

No mortal has ever won.

Infinity is shapeless,

And we seem too bored to run[ii].


We amble through empty spaces,

Indifference our wavering guide.

We are becoming shapeless

As we shift from side to side.


We think that in most cases

The truth is what we have seen.

Our faith is growing shapeless

As the glow around a screen.


[i] Here, I mean the worship of physical, material objects. [ii] In Victor Hugo’s Et Nox Facta Est, Satan ran or, actually, flew in circles for ten thousand years trying to escape infinity before he stopped to rest, broken, tired, and panting. I am past the word count that I promised for each blog, but I ask: Can you tell the difference in these two fragments? Which is more memorable, easier to learn, and more enjoyable? Yes, you can tell. I took the picture of the purple coneflower in our yard earlier this year. It has nothing to do with the poems or rhythm. It is simply a neat picture.

Yorumlar


I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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