Let's talk about poetry, shall we?

I just started a new thread on this matter because I think it's interesting and worth exploring on it's own. See the well-rounded writer thread in the general writing category.

 

Ooh, fun discussion, but I'm off to bed. I shall be back tomorrow to pick it up again, though!

 

I wonder if there's a generational problem at play:-

The generation after WW1 puts men on the moon and invents the atom bomb.
Their children the Boomers greet these accomplishments with ennui.
They invent things like digital wristwatches and the mass media, culminating in this internet.
It's so they can experience everything from their armchairs and trade Pez dispensers with each other.
The education system squanders future generations' wealth on insulating them from the worldwide economic hardship that follows WW2.
School syllabuses become nugatory: in Maths and the Sciences bad habits and disproved theories are taught up till 18, which then used to have to be un-learned by anyone wanting to progress further and into industry.
Which in the Arts leaves us with millions of people knowing these worthy but antiquated Victorian ABAB rhyming schemes.
Nobody studied any groundbreaking or complicated poetry unless they went on to University, or went out and found it for themselves - which thankfully a good many of them did.

Their children though cannot sit around being facetious, because they're even worse-educated. By the 1970s they sense something's wrong and attempt Punk. Which is of course largely ignored and fails.
John Cooper Clarke was the UK's most famous punk poet - https://johncooperclarke.com/poems/i-married-a-monster-from-outer-space - it rhymes, but the rhymes are usually slightly 'off'

And the current generation?
Critique-by-checkbox, fandoms prioritizing who the poet is over what they've wrote.
Truly a bleak situation. But at least they've seen off Star Wars.

So there's a case for saying we can't blame all these Poetry Foundation prizewinners for splatting out portentious waffle and taking the money.
It's not their fault the only people qualified to stop them eloped into the Advertising industry in the 1980s and used the ancient divine art to flog soap powder.

It falls on left-behind misfits and outliers to critique and uncover any jewels in the midden-heap

So let's look at the first of these accused ones:-
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/160582/the-payphone

==

THE PAYPHONE, Joy Priest 2020

There can be no doubt but this is poetry.

Obviously it doesn't rhyme. The ideas are broken down into 4-line stanzas.
The metre I'll probably now make a howler due to only having studied the other end of history - but I think it scans as a pretty traditional iambic pentameter, which perhaps is veiled a little by the colloquial style.
Some of the verses sneak a syllable into the next line, and there is quite a lot of use made of the flexibility to leave one unstressed extra syllable on some line ends.
An unusual feature I feel can point out confidently is disenjambement, achieved using caesura. This shows the poet pausing to think before "What’s phantom" "A way home" etc

Strophe and antistrophe haven't come up on this thread yet - but moving from line to line, the ideas don't just trundle on like prose: each line-break marks a reversal or at least shift of mental direction. Emulating real human thoughts.
Even if to start with it's only a yay-boo-yay-boo:
disappeared (boo) // sick & black (yay) // where I stood to speak (yay) // greasy with other people's spit (boo)

Ah, and by coincidence this is going to be about Gen X's experience of old age, decrepitude, and looming poetic irrelevance!

It's like being stranded in a strange village and needing to get home using the pub's payphone. Straight away that's an experience to resonate with people of a certain age.
Newspapers, phone operators, jukeboxes - the imagery is all the tech lost in this particular passage of generations
[the smartphone] Gone its face, diamonded // Into uselessness. < this is beautiful, self-deprecating and postmodern - the type of voice that's fading out. The device losing the faces it takes away from its users.
Gone its face: that's a poetic omission of 'to be' plus a poetic noun-adjective reversal (cf. Tennyson: 'dark the night and chill!').

The stanzas are structured each around a lost thing. (v1) The poet (v2) the way of life (v3) the Boomers (v4) youth (v5) social memory (v6) the new technology is lost as well (v7) patience (v8) life
Well I think it's something like that.
This type of analysis is destructive - it does a little damage: remember poetry should raise meaning out of structure, not reduce meanings to structure.

On the postmodern reading, which I'll submit is running in the background behind this sequence, perhaps the poet has assumed the mantle of all his generation's poetry.
It was in the world briefly, left little impact, and now it's departing again.
As well as our communities having become anonymous, tedious, and slightly hostile - often publess - we have become poetically hostile to inspiration (the wild weeds and honeysuckle).
Notice though: the poet has somehow performed a miracle and brought a payphone into existence.
But the call hasn't connected.
So perhaps there's still a chance this wandering god or satyr can be persuaded to stay with us.

 

It’s a shame, the poet could really have done something with the concept of the defunct pay phone (maybe I’ll write something on the subject).

Contrast that with anything Susan Jarvis Bryant wrote—click the link in my earlier post (WARNING: right-wing content ahead!). She’s light-years ahead of most of today’s crappy crop of “poets” (for those who don’t know, a light-year is a unit of distance, not time). Best part is, unlike Frost, Wordsworth, and Brassens, she’s still alive and writing.

 

NottheTerritory picked out the Payphone one. Do you want to do the contrast with Susan Jarvis Bryant?
I don't want to start open-endedly critiquing the whole internet just to make the case for a standpoint that isn't mine and should be familiar without me. But poems sure don't contrast themselves.

What about this one? It might have some overlap to do with 'out with the old in with the new'
https://classicalpoets.org/2023/05/05/a-poem-and-warning-for-coronation-of-king-charles-iii-by-susan-jarvis-bryant/

 

Oh, yes, that one! I love it. She’s clearly not happy about Charles III being king, because of his politics. I love the wit and how she writes as if she’s thinking in the form.

The point was that poets who stick to the old ways and follow them well write better poetry than those who follow the Johnny-come-lately methods.

 

On second thoughts, in the interests of not leaving a job half-done, and fair play, and impartiality - and because I'm bored, I'll do it.

Literature is very big, and so usually comparing two random poems is like dredging up an ocean polyp and putting it next to a goblin shark. "This one is bigger. This one has bones." So what.

But fortunately these two poems have a slight overlap, since they're both about a change-of-era.
In 'Payphone,' the poet situates herself on the generational threshold between Gen X (writing 1970s-1990s, mainly) and Gen Z (writing since 2000). Generally the passage of the old generation is being regretted.
In CIII (which I'll use as shorthand for the poem as distinct from the person), it's the transition from Queen Elizabeth II to King Charles III. And this is being regretted too.

There are only two places though that I think CIII regrets the Queen's passing rather than the King's ascension. She looks wistfully at the TV (l.7) and he has plans no queen would entertain (l.10).
"A proper Charlie" is a phrase that enters English in around 1960 (https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/English_for_a_New_Generation/Y40CAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq="a+proper+charlie"&dq="a+proper+charlie"&printsec=frontcover)
along with the now better-known "A right Charlie". It means a fool, but (imo) it has enough of a positive register that the poet could pretend it's a compliment. The less-common form is probably chosen to sustain this - a proper Charlie has a much kinder register than a right Charlie.

I wish all poets would signal their word-play with italics. It saves a lot of hunting around for things to criticize.
Also considerate to tack a glossary to the end. I think this poem might have appeared in the Daily Mail, and if so that might be why. (I'm about 50% sure I remember reading it there, and her bio says she's been published there.)

Like Payphone CIII is also in iambic pentameters.
The rhyme-scheme is:- ABABAAAACDCDEE. There are a few internal rhymes.
I'm not sure why the last two lines are indented, as well as having the direct rhyme.
The tone swings grander right at the end, but Google didn't throw up any intertexts.

So it's an iambic pentameter with rhyming couplets.
That might be a very good idea if we're praising what's old and worried by what's new.
But what we have to go to next is forced rhymes.

pageantry will beam
procession’s set to stream

Does pageantry beam? Do processions stream? Or is the language being pulled into places it doesn't want to go?
Beam is being used as an intransitive verb - equivalent to shine. There's a more common derived usage where we beam to shine our teeth at someone. But the question is whether the intermediate usage survives.
So we go to the OED (and swear because it's been scanned badly): https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.99992/page/n765/mode/2up
The usage we want is on the furthest right hand page near the top: I.3 and there are 3 examples (which I'll type out to save your eyes):-

No excellencie... like to that which beames out from God in the Covenant of grace. (Marshall, 1641)
Her whole countenance beamed with smiles (Irving, 1800)
Yon sun beams hotliest on The earth when distant most (Bailey, 1839)

All three of those are archaic, obscure and qualify the verb to avoid confusion.
It would be nice to check a more recent edition of the OED to see if the usage has been dropped with no examples in the last 100 years. But alas our language is behind a paywall.

The procession streaming (or being "set" to stream, so that a metric foot can be filled up) has a different problem. Processions proceed. Rivers stream. The word streaming either adds nothing to the idea or contradicts it. It's redundant other than fitting the rhyme scheme and padding the metre.

That's just the first rhyme. Skimming down, we get internal contradiction - the people being at once a sea and a stream. A move from the visual (gleaming and beaming) to the sonic (hooves clattering) so that crown can be rhymed with sound.
And finally the closing rhyme relying on a forced idea: When [kings go woke], [their sceptres etc] go up in smoke. Except they don't. Because there hasn't been any previous woke king, or even monarch to base the claim on.
Ah but, I'm in a UK perspective: has there been a monarch deposed elsewhere in the world as a result of wokery?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_who_lost_their_thrones_in_the_20th_century
No. Because nobody's crown and sceptre have gone up in smoke for any reason since the 1970s.

==

It's clear the poet wants to warn Charles III off of his green policies. Even quite environmentally-conscious types could want that.
Or if we agree this isn't a piece of opportunistic doggerel she hacked out in 30 minutes, it's the poet capturing and documenting (perhaps even predicting) a widely-held contemporary concern about Charles.
So a valid point to drive at. What else could she have rhymed with woke?

https://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?typeofrhyme=perfect&Word=woke

Bloke, broke, choke, cloak, coke, croak, folk, joke, oak, poke, soak, spoke, stoke, stroke, yoke, yolk... and then evoke, baroque and various 2-syllable variants of the same words
That's about 18 possible words she can emphasize to close the poem. And they're not hard words. Not like sandwich.

When green and grizzled kings cruise with the woke
They'll wish they'd abdicated like that Edward bloke
In front of the taxpayers on a rope they'll choke
Out of faux fur they'll be required to make their cloak
They'll not be so popular with folk
Revolutionaries with a spike will give them a poke
Jeffrey Epstein will their butto-

==

So, even this poem, by an experienced poet, published in a national newspaper, to commemorate a major national celebration, exhibits the classic problem with rhyming verse.
Its being an occasional poem that genuinely captures the feelings shared by a wide audience... is an argument, but not a critical or textual one.
When this is dug up in 4000 years time by archaeologists looking for the missing sex scene in Twilight, it will still have forced rhymes.

I don't like comparing poets' craft - but I'll submit that Payphone's having no rhymes probably helps it achieve a more technically-impressive use of metre what with the caesuras.
And where Payphone doesn't signal the regret directly - its vanished old men are more ambiguous than CIII's dead queen - I think it achieves greater emotional depth.
Part of this is probably that all of Payphone is an interior monologue, where CIII has to give up half of its lines to construct the (familiar) exterior spectacle of the Coronation.
And even when that constraint is relaxed, the latter half of the poem only gives two lines to the poet's character (l.7 and l.9).
So there is a contrast between Payphone's character-writing, and CIII's polemic informed by spectacle.

==

Username Required loves CIII, from a colleague's and a poet's perspective, and perhaps also a political perspective - no critique should ever diminish Love.
He mentions wit in the poem though, which is textual, so I will look for that before giving way.
CIII's poet isn't at all anti-monarchist or strongly anti-Charles, so we're not looking for parodic wit. It's going to be softer. And perhaps reflective: some idea that positively stimulates the audience.
Perhaps it's the surprise in l.7 where the rich description (I can't call it vivid when it's dropping sea and stream metaphors) of the event stops abruptly - and we find she's actually just going to watch it on TV like most people, because she's skeptical about the new king's politics.
Is that wit? I checked https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wit and yes I think it's relating a seemingly disparate TV to a King so as to illuminate Daily Mail readers. CIII is a witty poem.

==

The new ways came out of the old ways being pursued vigorously and with curiosity. When art stands still we end up surrounded by giant stone heads of people whose names we can't read.

 

Wow, that’s quite a detailed critique! Not sure how to respond to that, it’s at a much higher level than I know how to do. You clearly look for very different things in a poem, because “The Payphone” uses a method of conveying its message that doesn’t really speak to me the way those I list as my influences do.

I don’t see those as forced rhymes. Having read the poet’s other work, I believe she said exactly what she meant to say.

By the way, your proposed alternatives for the closing line don’t have the right meter. “The Payphone” has no discernible meter at all, so I’m not sure what you mean there.

You seem to think rhyming, metrical poetry is bad just because the method is old, and that the modern forms are good just because they’re new.

 

Interesting. This sounds a lot like the way scene beats are supposed to flip values repeatedly according to Robert McKee. And now I'm curious what relation the word apostrophe has to strophe and antistrophe.

Thank you for showing us what poetry analysis can look like, and for giving me more terms to look up. In fact I need to find a good site devoted to teaching the techniques and terms and spend some time there absorbing like an amoeba.

 

This is very true, at least of a certain kind of inner dialogue (as opposed to monologue). It often goes like Gollum arguing with himself—you divide yourself into two functional personae and one asks the questions or asserts one side of an argument, while the other gives answers or takes the opposing side.

Why did he do that?

Well, maybe you really pissed him off.

Yes, but how? I don't get it.

Come on man, you know what you did. Do I need to spell it out for you?

​

So I suppose this follows a pattern of strophe/antistrophe? Or is it called that only in Poe-tree?

 

Now I'm getting confused. I'm finding unclear definitions of the terms. Strophe seems to be a turning, and originally meant something the Greek chorus chanted as they moved in one direction across the stage. It seems to refer to a movement of thought or idea in one direction. So far so good.

But for antistrophe I'm mostly finding "Repeating the same word or phrase at the ends of several lines for emphasis." I believe it originally meant the chorus reverses direction and possibly also chants an opposed phrase or saying to the one they were originally chanting in the Strophe.

Hmmm... it also just occured to me—how does this all relate to catastrophe? Cata is the opposite of ana, as in the anabasis and the catabasis. It means a movement toward and a movement away. Or maybe up and down. There's anabolic and catabolic in relation to steroids, exercise, and diet, and they refer to a building up and a tearing down of muscle tissue. Opposing movements.

I need to check a few more poetry sites.

 

I don’t bother with Ancient Greek forms myself.

 

Sorry yes that's what I meant. The point was that if it's found from line to line or sentence to sentence, the passage probably isn't prose. Lots of prose has it at a macro-level though, such as when showing both sides of an argument.
I believe Robert McKee is the same concept and he just calls it by the English word.

I picked through this in case it was useful - looking for any forms with 10 syllables. https://poetscollective.org/poetryforms/example-index/

All I conclude is that if the poem's mostly 10 syllables a line, and it's not syllabic verse - then it's gotta be worth trying to scan it as iambic pentameter.
PayPhone has numerous half-lines and run-on lines, but that's always been part of the form. Here they don't sound odd or leave ideas feeling incomplete.
And I'm absolutely not wedded to that poem, it might be clunky bad iambics.
But I think it's actually pretty similar to Dr Faustus - see if you agree below. If that gets us any closer, that's apparently blank verse in iambic pentameter.

O, Faustus, lay that damned book aside,
Gone that day’s newspaper, boot-printed,
And gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy soul,
The dog walking itself leash-in-mouth

And heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head!
Down the small avenue, the bookstore
Read, read the Scriptures:—that is blasphemy.
Where I felt the train rumble past

That's almost too good. Scary intertext? Demons in the poetry society?

My fallback is the caesuras on lines 8, 12, 20, 24, 28
What I mean is that on top of the stanza-break, the words jar against each other rather than blending or flowing.
It's like miniature tongue-twisters - the poet uses the slight time delay while the mouth gets ready for the next syllable.
Record Now. can't be blended - it forces a slight pause between the d and the N. That's the caesura.
And caesuras would be metre even if this was prose and not poetry.

===

I feel that does me a slight disservice. Because it's only insofaras difficult is bad and novel is good.
All natural language has metre. And other than the extremes of free-verse or word-pictures (I love that old one with the "swarm" of capital Bs) poetry is usually better off using it.
This is about strict metre. I think putting strict metre together with rhyme is often a problem because (i) it's tempting (since we're all trained on it from birth), (ii) it raises the stakes (because one bad rhyme derails the argument or shatters the voice), (iii) it's difficult to make sure rhymes aren't creating intertexts... and a very minor (iv) I'm concerned about the state homogenizing our vowel-sounds.

Those issues don't apply to poets with a serious dedication to archaic forms - but on a forum visited by all levels of writers including people who are still picking up the confidence to comment, and who might be very new and very untrained - they bear rehearsing.
Especially if there's any risk of poetry being dismissed without a fair reading.

 

No disservice intended, but I don’t agree that strict meter with rhyme is a problem. Look at our folk songs and hymns—the strict meter and rhyme help rather than hinder. If anything, calling such things “archaic” does them a disservice.

In addition, I’ve found that people are more interested in my poetry because I use forms in which rhyme and meter are both strict. They tell me it makes the impact stronger. People have told me that some of my poems have made a big and positive difference in their lives. I don’t believe this would have happened, at least not as much, if they had been in free verse.

 

The folk songs and hymns come from the same milieu as the classic poets (including because what we've got now is the folk-songs as preserved by middle-class folklorists).
I say they're good by already stretching their genre conventions, and also because the English language was in a golden age. And we've been able to cherry-pick them.
Realistically, they're 150-250 years old, and either incomprehensible or unrelatable for most of the world's 2 billion English-speakers.
(Thanks to them) we're Number One by a good margin. Another golden age is on the way. So let's have some new poets and forms - maybe we can break China.

It's what you do with the form. You put care in, you edit, you research - and you've reached people with something that touched them. So it wasn't William McGonagall.
For free verse to work, I believe it must select (or design) constraints for itself which are as sophisticated as those of its precursors - or moreso. The fact it can be moreso is sort of the point.
With your conscience - the rare fact that making a difference to your readers matters to you - if you did free verse, it would be diligent, and it would work. And if you don't that's fine too.

 

All this Epistrophe/Strophe/Antipasta stuff is part of a Classical grammar course I bought but haven't finished yet. I should dig the books out and do a little page-flipping. It's included in the course called the Progymnasta, which was basic grammar in the ancient Roman/Latin-speaking world. I was diligently memorizing all the (seemingly endless) words and phrases, but after a while I realized I don't need to know the Latin names for all of them, as long as I know what they are. For instance, I frequently repeat a word or phrase at the end of several sentences for effect, or at the beginning or in the middle. Each has it's own name, and I don't need to know what they are.

But I do want to know the techniques. So most likely I'll learn those (I doubtless already use many of them) but not worry about remembering the names.

 

I just looked up Epistrophe and got this:

epistrophe
ə-pĭs′trə-fē
noun

1. The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the end of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs, as.
2. In rhetoric, a figure in which several successive clauses or sentences end with the same word or affirmation: as, “Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they the seed of Abraham ? so am I.”
3. In music, in a cyclic composition, the original concluding melody, phrase, or section, when repeated at the end of the several divisions; a refrain.

... And yet, that's also what Antistrophe means in poetry? Why is language so effed up??!!

 

I must have found a bad page before, because now I find this:

antistrophe
ăn-tĭs′trə-fē
noun

1. The second stanza, and those like it, in a poem consisting of alternating stanzas in contrasting metrical form.
2. The second division of the triad of a Pindaric ode, having the same stanza form as the strophe.
3. The choral movement in classical Greek drama in the opposite direction from that of the strophe.

This agrees largely with the meaning evild4ve gave. Why is the internet so efffed up???!! Or maybe it's my searching skillz.

 

I think the loose metre is why I ultimately couldn't get behind The Payphone. I remember searching for it but getting nothing at all satisfactory from of the syllables, or ultimately the content due to how vague and disjointed the imagery is IMO, but that's a different discussion.

You're clearly correct, though, @evild4ve, in that it is absolutely poetry. I think I just don't like that one, so it isn't a good example for my point.

I'm also quite impressed with you evaluation. Damn interesting. Would you mind doing a few more of those from the Poetry Foundation? Only if you're down; I don't want to try and squeeze too much milk from the golden goose or anything.

 

I would but it's Xoic's thread and he's properly bringing it back to the OP - and the technical concepts needed to write poetry or critique it.

One of the problems critique has is that whatever technical concepts it has, the techniques they apply to are other people's.
Even foundational concepts like metre aren't universal. And more abstract concepts like strophe+antistrophe are absent in some writers, done unconsciously by others, applied to different levels of the composition - and have infinitely many permutations.
It ends up that the technical terminology has to float. I think another problem is that the internet is full of pages of superficial definitions that have left most of the rich (and inconclusive!) debates of these concepts behind on the shelves as printed books.
The OP lists some particular ones:-

assonance - think it's best left to happen naturally (and that deep down it's the same thing as rhyme). Write what sounds nice covers it. Assonance is very prone to dialect-gaps.
consonance - if this is different from alliteration imo everything is being overthought
half-rhymes - I don't reckon anyone sets out to write these, like "hmm, this situation calls for a half-rhyme to give my reader a nice aural connection to my theme". Do what sounds nice.
masculine and feminine rhymes - "you can rhyme more than one syllable" being spun out into a short book by the creative writing industry's critical gender arm
eye rhymes - I couldn't find an example that wasn't due to either historic vowel-shift, or the guide's own dialect assumptions, or the poet trying to hide an objectively crap rhyme. But where it's a genuine thing, I'd say it's part of the poet's right to choose how the words are said, as well as choosing the words.
end rhymes and internal rhymes - because why have one concept when we can have two. Internal rhyme is interesting though if we can see a poet does it at every chance, or refuses to do it

It's like whack-a-mole. Rows of content creators at desks: split a hair, define a new writing concept, upload a guide to it, feed the algorithm

 

Hear hear!! I've run across lots of superficial definitions and sound-byte explanations. Nothing of any real depth or substance yet. That Poem Analysis site I posted at the top of page 1 is brimming with shallowness and superficiality, and their analyses seem to be very nearly illiterate. I'm starting to suspect everything there might be written by ESL people. I'm thinking books are the next logical step. I have one somewhere, called The Art of Poetry Writing I think, purchased at the same time as Gardner's The Art of Fiction. Need to go dig that one out of the basement.

 

Oh and @evild4ve —I do hope you bless us with some more of your analysis, but whenever it feels appropriate. Don't burn yourself out right here and now. That's some good stuff, man!

 

Just a quick observation I want to throw out there (into the shark tank)—recently I've been looking at one of the major differences between song lyrics and poetry. You have a lot more latitude in meter for lyrics, because the singer can compress several syllables down into one (the way Bob Dylan and his student Springsteen used to do so well), or you can stretch a single syllable out as far as you want to. Dig this for some syllable-stretching magic:



I set it to start just before the syllable-stretching madness. Garden is usually a mere two syllables, but if my count is correct they turned it into seven! I think in the studio version you normally hear it's nine or ten.

I suspect this kind of singing super-power is why so many people who write poetry today (by which I'm referring to noobs, greenhorns, and beginners) play so fast and loose with meter. Well, this plus they probably don't know what meter is yet.

But syllable-stretching-and-short'ning has always been a feature, even going back to what's thought of as very strict poetry of ye olden days. A speaker can do the same tricks a singer can, and they even came up with visual notation for it, like the humble apostrophe (check previous sentence for two examples), and truncations of familiar words (such as morn for morning). And then there was the poetic stretching, such as blessed being pronounced as a two-syllable word, but on a first reading you wouldn't know that until you reach the end of the line and you're a dollar short. Unless they made it clear by a trick like this—bless-ed or bless'ed.

I was perusing some Shakespeare last night—something meant to be in iambic pentameter, and he played really fast and loose on some lines. It was either the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow soliloquy from Hamlet, or maybe it was another one (I read several). Some lines had like 13 or 14 syllables, some had 8 or 9. I guess you can get away with it when you're Shakespeare.

 

I looked up what Iambic means (as I said I would last night), and it refers to a foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, which is very common in the English language. I suppose this is why it sounds so natural to us.

Example: "If you do doubt your courage" (from the epic poem Monty Python and the Holy Grail). That's iambic, but not in pentameter, which would have five metrical feet (so ten syllables). Penta means five, as in the pentagon and the pentagram. And then meter means meter, as in meter. So an Iamb means a single foot has the structure of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and Pentameter means there are five feet. Since each foot has two syllables, that makes ten syllables total.

Easy peasy.

 

Showing and Telling in poetry?!

I started in on the Art of Poetry Writing book last night (penned by a certain William Packard. Be careful, for there are many books called The Art of Poetry Writing! Accept no substitutes), and I ran across something intense and mind-blowing. Yes, apparently showing and telling applies even here.

He starts the section on Poetic Devices by saying they can roughly be divided into three categories—Sight, Sound, and Voice, which can also be stated as Image, Rhythm, and Persona. He then goes on to say that Image is the heart and soul of poetry, because it comes from the unconscious (which dreams mostly in pictures), and goes straight to the unconscious of the reader/listener. That strikes much deeper than mere surface stuff. If you can create good imagery, this is what people will remember and be deeply touched by.

Well, hell!! Isn't this what they say about Showing as compared to Telling? In fact, the same holds true in filmmaking as well. Those directors who use excellent cinematography, and especially if they create long poetic scenes with little or no dialogue (dreamlike), strike straight to the heart of the unconscious as well. All hail lords Kubrick, Ridley-Scott, and Coppola! With appropriate tips of hats to Lynch and Cronenberg, the Dream Kings. Spielberg is good with showing too, and of all people, I remember Joss Whedan saying fans mostly talk about the Buffyspeak, but he worked hard to make sure he was showing in his shows, not just having everything done in dialogue.

Yes, here is the missing depth and profundity I sought in vain while skimming across the mostly shallow pond system known as ye internete.