Geekin' out on poetry (and Romanticism)—my study thread

Final followup:

And here's the trick with using meter in poetry or prose. At least this is what I've found in my very limited studies so far. At first you're struggling to try to remember or learn the names of all these meters like iambs and trochees and dactyls etc. Forget the names, what's important are the rhythms. Think of it like this:

"Da dun da dun da dood-le, da dum-pit-ty dum-pit-ty doo."​

Just stressed and unstressed syllables, and make sure they sound good. Sometimes you'll find a little catch, a spot where it sounds broken and you're not sure why. Just change it, find another word that makes it flow better. You might need to change several words or an entire phrase. I constantly have the back-channel of my mind working out alternative wordings and phrases and searching for any nice possibilities like internal rhymes or assonance each provides.

If you'd look deep enough into the rules of poetry you'd discover there's a name for it and all the terms involved, but that's not important. The way it sounds is. I don't start by thinking "I'll use mostly iambs and throw in a trochee and a dactyl here and there." Screw that! I can't think of it that way, that's for if you want to analyse it after the fact.* Instead do the dumpitty-dumpitty doo thing and listen to the rhythms of it. But I mean, use real words in place of dumpitty doodle.

* Actually I almost can at this point, but only with iambs and trochees, and then some of those three-syllable feet that can help you tranistion between them. I don't know the names of those, but they're dun da dun, da dun da, dun da da, da da dun, and even dun dun dun, and da da da.

Here's an example. I decided to just write up a few sentences with some rhythm (vague unfocused meter), and let in a few little poetic tricks:

If only I thought I could find a replacement, I'd drive to the store in a heartbeat. But you know and I know there are no replacements, they stopped making those years ago. So what do I do? I don't know. Maybe I'll just go.
​

All done intuitively, just checking for rhythms. I found a nice flow through the first sentence, it sounds like the first line of a poem, like something from the lyrical challenge thread. It's basically prose poetry. Now let me analyse it and see what I've got:

If on ly / I thought I / could find a / re place ment, / I'd drive to / the store in / a heart beat. / But you know / and I know / there are no / re place ments, / they stopped mak / ing those years / a go. / So what / do I do? / I don't know. / May be I'll / just go.​

Wow, I had no idea I was using the Dr Seuss/Limerick meter! I can't remember what it's called, but it's the da dun da, ambidextrous with the stress in the middle. Isn't that what the last poem I analyzed used predominantly? Oh yeah, it was The Raven. I really like the rhythm of that poem, and I probably unconsciously used it here. I was sort of guessing on where to put the separators for the last couple of sentences, it could go a different way. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

Poetic devices:

But you know and I know there are no
​

internal rhyme x3, each in Limerick meter, but on the third syllable each time (unstressed syllable). It's also that rhetorical device where you end phrases with the same word. Consonance maybe? It's sort-of that anyway, though it's usually done with sentences. In this case it's three phrases ending the same way in a single sentence. A mash-up. Those are fun.

I'm not sure if I like using the word replacement to rhyme with itself, it would be better if I could use some smaller words that rhyme closely. I mean something like "Don't know where my date went." But it is what it is, and repetition can be decent, as long as it doesn't sound clumsy. Ideally I'd try to find a better rhyme there.

At the end:

...Years ago. So what do I do? I don't know. Maybe I'll just go.​

The bolded sounds rhyme. It's assonance since it's a vowel sound inside the words (in some cases). And the little "So what do I do" is like a doodly-doo, quite literally. I figured these out when I heard David Lee Roth talking once about how much he had helped Eddie Van Halen figure out the guitar solos and so many other things (doubtless all bullshit). He said something like "And then Eddie started noodling around, you know, doing all that Noodlin' noodlin' stuff.

If you put the right letters together in the right ways, words themselves become musical. I also heard Sammy Hagar say "Doodley oodly oodly," also about a guitar lead. It might have been another one by Eddie. The difference is, one is nonsense sounds that sound like a guitar lead (onomatopoeia I suppose), and the other is actual words that have the same quality. Poodle doody has it too, but it doesn't sound as nice and conjures some nasty images and sensations. You can use other similar sounds, something like "Did Myrtle hurdle the turtle?" Or "Sammy's mammy took away his whammy bar." Lot's of soft vowels and m's and w's.

I think in order to get good at this you have to be thinking about it a lot. Just in idle moments run sequences of words through your head and try to make it sound musical or poetic. And when you can, write them down.

And I want to get this in here while I'm thinking about it:

What is Lyrical prose?

This is a question I googled many years ago when I was getting interested in poetic writing and prose. I found a somewhat surprising but amazing answer. Fortunately it still exists, and I was able to find it: What are some examples of lyrical prose? Quora response by Ellen Vrana

I don't know how to link directly to her answer, but it's the third one down (the top one is now by ChatGPT). I'm saving it as a PDF to my hard drive in case Quora ever goes down or this thread just disappears, as can happen suddenly on the internet.

Here are a few teasers to whet the appetite:

Lyrical has come to be understood as 'beautiful exposition or narration.'

That is not entirely what lyrical means; it does not mean words that personify inanimate objects or beautifully describe snow for the sake of it. It does not mean flowery, descriptive, or poetic verse just as is.

It is misused so often that if you have any sense, you'll do well to avoid any book that self-promotes as 'lyrical.' (Much to the chagrin of some keen fantasy authors who use the word "lyrical' for the very purpose of selling more of their formulaic crap.)​

Lyrical means that the prose (or an entire novel) has an aspect of music in its rhythm, sound, and/or structure.

* * *​

Lyrical prose that has a rhythm is perhaps the hardest to identify, because it requires one to read aloud, to notice the pause, stress, and pitch (especially pitch) of the words.

* * *
​

Lyrical structure or plot is when the entire novel reverberates around a central theme or image and returns to it like a refrain. Each subsequent movement/chapter, adds more information and more complexity but the melody is always present.
​

For the rest you'll just have to click on through and read her words. I think this is some vitally important stuff to think about if you want your prose to feel poetic or lyrical.

Ellen Vrana's blog—The Examined Life

She's the one who gave that great answer on Quora in my previous post. I got very curious about who she is and why she knows so much about this stuff I want to learn. In her Quora profile there's mention of her blog, called The Examined Life.

I like the subtitle: A collection of wisdom, a focus on the internal.

I'm reading through her most recent post, featuring snippets of poems about snails. Intriguing.

My previous attempt at lyrical or poetic prose was a fail really. I just wrote a poem, almost a limerick, that broke apart at the end. It was too poetic, or rather it followed too strict of a meter for too long. It was metrical verses put down in the form of sentences rather than lines of poetry. Prose poetry of a certain type, but it's not what I'm looking for.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from Passing Strange that I think have a nice almost lyrical sound to them. Someone told me she read it out loud (apparently that's just the way she reads everything) and that she noticed it had a nice rhyhmical sound to it in places.

To set it up—the character has just looked down into a trench where chained giants are being horribly tormented and fighting gigantically among themselves, hurling boulders and swinging heavy chains at each other. It's another of the torments of hell:

The sight is so unsettling—so horrendously frightful, and the ground shaking and juddering to all the calamitous tumult of their titanic violence, that I cannot for long peer into their midst and must again lift my sight away.

And now, surrounded on both sides by this immense suffering and apocalyptic violence, I'm filled with an intolerable despair. My very soul seems to cry out in anguish that it cannot for long bear. Unable to look upon anything else now, I lock eyes with King Diddy, who perhaps doesn't realize how fortunate he is not to be able to see into the trench nor far into the field of suffering souls—and I know my face must be wracked with anguish even as is his.

Oh why must we endure this? Just being here is torment beyond belief. It must end soon. I don't think I could withstand it much longer. I feel at any moment, utterly beyond my control, I will break down and begin to weep inconsolably, or perhaps to scream and not be able to stop.
​

I could see going more poetic or lyrical. I was only going for a pleasant mellifluous sound, and I think I achieved that pretty well. I think a truly lyrical or poetic prose would be somewhere between these two examples. I should also say that the old-fashioned language contributes a lot. It's what allows it to be poetic. If I had written it in a more modern, utilitarian style, there wouldn't be much allowance for poetic language.

I think what I need to do is get ahold of some of the books Ellen Vrana mentioned on Quora. I already have Joyce's Ulysses, and a couple more that fit the bill. I need to dig them out and do some reading and entrain myself to this kind of rhythm.

I think though, that to go more poetical or lyrical, your subject matter should itself incline that way. Certain subjects and approaches lend themselves to prose, and some to poetry or lyricism. I need to find some that lie between the two extremes.

A little psuedo-limerick I worked up:

We offer you from our impeccable selection
A confection of delectable perfection
A munchable so rare
And so beyond compare
We store it in unbreakable protection
​

Feels like somewhat pretentious Dr. Seuss.
I came up with the first two verses like a week ago, maybe two, and just finished it up tonight. Keep breaking down poetry and analyzing the prosody, keep reading it, keep writing it. I think getting your head filled with meter and rhyme and the rest of it is key. This became clear during the lyric battle thread, when several of us were cranking out mutiple rhymes a day. You start to think in verse.

Poetry in the Bible

I learned that the Bible was one of the major inspirations behind the poetry of William Blake, along with I believe Dante and Virgil. If you look at the King James version it does often sound very poetic, but I'm hard pressed to see how it qualifies as poetry. It doesn't seem to use any recognizable rhyme or meter (of course it's been translated, several times). Yes, it all has a strongly poetic feel to it, largely because of the old-fashioned language and many poetic/literary devices. But I want to understand why it's poetry, or what parts of it are.

So far here's what I've found: Poetry and Wisdom Books of the Bible: The Beginner’s Guide

Six of the books are considered poetry, mostly grouped together. These are:

• Job
• Psalms
• Proverbs
• Ecclesiastes
• Song of Songs
• Lamentations

A few selected tidbits from the article:

Heads-up: you will not find “roses are red”–type verse in these parts of the Bible. These six books are written in ancient Hebrew, and the poetry looks a lot more like the poetry of other ancient near-eastern cultures.

When English readers learn about poetry, we’re often introduced to the concepts of rhythm and rhyme. It’s the art of matching sounds of words together. The ancient Hebrews did something similar, but instead of crafting lines of similar sounds, their lines are linked by similar concepts. Bible scholars call this parallelism, and it’s the most important element of Hebrew poetry that you need to know about.

The authors of the Bible use several types of parallelism, but two high-level types dominate the pages of Scripture.

1. Synonymous parallelism (same thought repeated)
It’s common for biblical poets to craft two or more lines that share the same thought. Sometimes the second line restates the first, such as David‘s cry for help at the beginning of the Psalms:

LORD, how many are my foes!
How many rise up against me!
(Ps 3:1)
​

And sometimes the second line builds upon or intensifies the first. A good example of this is how the main speaker in the book of Ecclesiastes describes the repetitive cycle of the universe, particularly how not only is the ocean never full, but that the rivers never empty:

All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
(Ec 1:7)
​

There's also:

2. Antithetic parallelism (contrast and comparison)
Sometimes poets choose to put opposing thoughts side by side to make their point. These thoughts don’t necessarily voice opposing ideas—usually they’re describing two sides of the same principle.

The prologue to the book of Proverbs gives us a classic example of one thought being expressed by contrasting two opposing outcomes:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
(Pr 1:7)
​

I leave the rest to be explored on the website.

Here's an online version of the King James Bible, divided up into sections: KJV—Index of Books

Some more good info, going into more detail, on Biblical poetry: The Poetical Books @. Bible.Org

It's a very long page, and only the beginning of it deals directly with poetry in the Bible. Once you hit the section called Job, it's over. I like that it covers more poetic devices common in Biblical poetry and gives some info on them.

It occurred to me to look up some Dr. Seuss. My sister and I had some of the books when we were children, and we loved them, both the rhymes and the drawings.

• The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss PDF

Ah, the memories! It really brings a thrill. He really had a way with words and lines. And now there's a new dimension to it—as a kid I didn't get the subtext. I got it this time though. Spoiler'd so you can try to figure it out yourself. I'll just give this much as a teaser and a hint—there is no cat.

Spoiler: You know you want to read it! But read the book first.

There is really no Cat in the Hat, he's a figment of their imaginations. Thing 1 and Thing 2 are really the kids, running around and messing up the house all day. There's really a fish I'm sure (it's there from the beginning, before the imagination kicks in), but they imagine it talking, it's the voice of their conscience. That makes the cat in the hat a trickster and a scapegoat. They can blame it both for intruding and destroying the house, and on the subliminal level for entering their minds and making them do it. What does it mean that the cat came back in and cleaned up real fast? Probably that they used the same manic energy to clean up that they had used to destroy the place. I think he's a cat because cats are known for being mischevious and sometimes overly energetic and crazy. Interesting that the voice of their conscience is a fish, which are often eaten by cats, and it's trapped in a little bowl and has no control—no arms or legs, it's just a little head/body, and all it can do is to urge them to do the right thing.

There's a Cat in the Hat and a Fish in a Bowl. The cat torments the fish and the fish is constantly telling them to make it leave. Probably to some extent the idea of a cat hit because of the fish—they're traditional enemies in cartoons and fairy tales as well as in real life. One a predator, the other a helpless little headbody in a glass bowl. Really just a pair of big eyes and a mouth (the better to see them with, and to speak for their consciences). In fact I'll go one farther—when the kids started to misbehave, they kept seeing the bulging eyes of that innocent fish, always watching, and it became a symbol of their guilty conscience. Wow, there's really a lot more thought in this than I realized.

And now I see his costume—a tophat, umbrella, and bow tie. He's a trickster in the guise of something like a proper English gentleman from Dickens—a disguise for his Taz-like trickster nature. Or really for the kids' Taz-like nature. They had to invent him because there was no dog in the house to blame. "No mom, really, we swear! He was tall and wore a big hat with red stripes and a bow tie! And he was a cat! And then, and then he balanced on a ball and held the fish up in the air, and then..."

Youtube just showed me a nice series of videos on Biblical poetry:



They go into more depth than any of the articles I've found so far about some aspects of it.

What is Lyric Poetry?

I was reading in the book The Lyrical Novel when suddenly the question above occurred to me. So I put the book aside, opened face-down on the table, to pursue answers. I often find it's extremely helpful when seeking to understand something to map out the territory around it. It gives you a feel for what's close to it but isn't it, which is important to help define what something is.

Evild4ve's poetry battle thread (which launched my interest in poetry really) was aimed at creating lyric poetry. I didn't really know what that meant, but I figured it must be pretty similar to song lyrics, so that's the way I went. Plus it seemed like he was looking for essentially a rap battle.

But now I've decided to fill in this gap in my knowledge. I'll drop in the links I'm finding below:

• Lyric Poetry @Poets.org
• Supernovae and Dark Stars: Some Notes on Universality in the Lyric Poem

And an attempt to define it through quotes from those articles:

"Lyric poetry refers to a short poem, often with songlike qualities, that expresses the speaker’s personal emotions and feelings. Historically intended to be sung and accompany musical instrumentation, lyric now describes a broad category of non-narrative poetry, including elegies, odes, and sonnets.​

History of Lyric Poetry:

Lyric poetry began as a fixture of ancient Greece, classified against other categories of poetry at the time of classical antiquity: dramas (written in verse) and epic poems. The lyric was far shorter, distinguished also by its focus on the poet’s state of mind and personal themes rather than narrative arc."

The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth
1770 – 1850

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."
​

"This is the question essential to the lyric poem: how to make the particular universal, or, better said, how to discover the universal in the particular. Every poem is an attempt to answer this question, and when we are confronted with questions of such magnitude and scope, it is often best to defer to something that has—as Rilke says we must—lived those questions to their depths. By that I mean it is often best to defer to the poem."​

The video is so much better than any prosaic attempt to define or explain what lyric poetry is. Those are poetic people, people who live and breathe poetry (and poetically). I suddenly had the revelation, watching, that poetry to a certain extent is performance. I must watch the video again, at least once.

(From above): "Lyric poetry began as a fixture of ancient Greece, classified against other categories of poetry at the time of classical antiquity: dramas (written in verse) and epic poems."

written in verse
This grabbed my attention. What exactly does it mean? In a sense I know it to mean poetry, but obviously that's not what it means here. There are shades of meaning to it in the world of poetry, I must delve in:

• a line of metrical writing
• metrical language
• metrical writing distinguished from poetry especially by its lower level of intensity
• a body of metrical writing (as of a period or country)
• one of the short divisions into which a chapter of the Bible is traditionally divided

... and we have a winnah folks!

Ok, so, this is essentially the division between what I think of as real poetry and just rhyme (like nursery rhymes for instance). It's why the book I had as a kid was called A Child's Garden of Verses, rather than of Poetry. Poetry (real poetry) is denser than prose or ordinary verse—more intense as they said above. It puts a lot more meaning and feeling into a lot less words, and uses imagery powerfully, as well as many other poetic/literary devices. And it speaks on a different level. A more profound level.

Wow, this is intimidating stuff to be writing if I want to start making poetry! I need to keep in mind, you don't start off doing deep, profound, intense poetry. That comes at the end of a long process of learning and development.

Underneath that video are several extremely insightful comments (that I now see are written by one person). They really help to understand this idea of discovering the universal in the particular:

"I hear Joseph Brodsky saying in his essay "In the Shadow of Dante" in Less than One, "Love is the attitude of the infinite towards the finite. Our response is either prayer or poetry." Brodsky insists that the lyric is a response to the love of the infinite for us finite creatures. So we have to make a bridge between the finite and the infinite. A poem acknowledges that the infinite has entered our lives and we want to reply to it."

"Of course Shakespeare is addressing his beloved when he says "O, know, sweet love, I always write of you." But if Brodsky is right, Shakespeare is also addressing "Love " itself which is infinite, beyond our mortal limits. Shakespeare suggests that all of his writing is always about this infinite experience we call LOVE. Whenever it breaks into our mortal world, we want to reply, but the only way to reply to infinity is through prayer or poetry. Prayer or poetry is the language spoken by the infinite. Much sacred scripture, of course, is written in poetry because of this predicament. Ordinary speech cannot capture or render it.

"I suppose we must expand Brodsky's poetry as he does to all "art." Music, dance, theater, painting, architecture. And when we speak of a good artist...say a Rembrandt or a DaVinci, or Olivier, or Beethoven, or Nureyev, what we mean by "great or good art" is that we can hear or see the infinite through it. When we see a Rembrandt, somehow we see a soul, and that vision is very different than simply seeing a satisfactory portrait or likeness. We are not actually seeing a person, but the soul as well as the face as Maria insisted on speaking to Rilke's soul even after he died. And she could do that by creating a poem which could reach into another dimension beyond this world. William Blake calls this transformation of perception "cleansing the perception." For William Blake true perception is: To see a World in a Grain of Sand /And a Heaven in a Wild Flower /Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand /And Eternity in an hour.

"We live in this strange world today where the Mafia has brainwashed people into seeing people as "dirt" or "trash." They have reversed what Blake is describing, by leading people to reduce everything around them into less than the truth of its being. Poetry helps us to heal that terrible sickness, which was also prevalent in Blake's day in the slave trade which he eloquently spoke against in his poetry as well. Any real practice of religion or communication with the infinite blasts away the reductive vision of the criminal. If art or religion does not expand our perception, than I think we have to question whether or not it is sincere or merely a social gathering or an institution promoting its own mechanical life."

—All above comments by the user known as varasuetamminga9519 @ Youtube​

Transcribed from the video, starting. @ 17:08—

"The lyric—the meditative, the contemplative. Something remembered, narrated in the past tense, but inhabited emotionally—spiritually—in the present. Something irrevocably lost, but so precious that the poet needs to contrive a way to imagine having that loss all over again, which is as close as we come to possession. And this leads of course to what Jane was saying too about temporality. I think the foundational business of the lyric poem is to give us, just fleetingly, maybe a few times in our life, whether we're writing or reading, the impression of having been here. Of having inhabited the present tense, which does not exist. By the time I name it, it's gone. If I try to look forward to it, it's not yet here. But so the best we can have is a sense that it wasn't wholly lost on me, there was a moment—there was a moment I felt I had been there."

Well, this is what I keep hearing of as the divine—the present moment. In his books like The Power of Now, it's what Eckhart Tolle says connects us to the divine. This is an ancient idea, going back to at least his predecessor Meister Eckhart (and well before him as well). In the esoteric literature it's said the two pieces of the cross represent the two experiences of time; the horizontal member is profane time, the normal forward progression of it always into the future, while the vertical represents divine time—the eternal present moment that reaches up and connects us immediately with divinity and Heaven, and immediately lifts us out of the profane world. You enter this moment by practicing meditation, by dropping out of the conscious mind with its endless focus on the past and the future (regrets/failures/accomplishments, and hopes/fears/goals), and into the unconscious which knows only the present moment. If you can develop the ability to remain present in the present moment always, like a guru or a monk who can remain in meditation all the time no matter what they're doing, then you've entered the divine. Well, actually you enter it every time you meditate, assuming your meditation is simply to shut off the endless stream of words (left-brain, conscious, language-based thinking) and dwell instead in non-judging awareness. And if you can learn, like the monks and gurus do, to remain in that state all the time, then you've become holy. I like this conception of what the holy is, opposed to the very literal/materialist concepts so many people insist on attaching to it. And I like that this concept of the divine dovetails so perfectly with what the video (and all the material I've been finding now about lyric poetry) says poetry is about. Indeed, poetry and prayer are our way of connecting with the infinte—the divine within us.