Ryme & Meter Online • September 13 2009

• Slowly recovering from my August vacation.
  

• Many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.

• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).

• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry

Poetrybay: An on-line magazine for the 21rst Century

FALL 2009

X.J. KENNEDY AND WALT WHITMAN

Walt Whitman is considered the American progenitor of the wide, expansive ‘free verse’ style of poetry that puts aside rhyme and rhythm in favor of a more muscular, natural form of verse. So one would think that when a national poet is chosen to serve as the poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace in West Hills, they’d choose a free verse style writer.

Not in 2009.

In choosing X J Kennedy as writer in residence at the WWBA, the association chose one of the key figures in the world of formal verse since he first began publishing in the late 1950s, and a man for whom advocacy of poems that use rhyme and meter has been a fundamental mantra.

Not that Kennedy sees any conflict in that. “In American poetry there are many mansions,” said Kennedy earlier this year, as he prepared to take on his duties as Master Poet and Poet In Residence at the WWBA. “I have admiration for someone who can write good free verse.”

Things have not always been so cordial…

George Kalogeris on C.P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems
The Sensuous Archaism of C.P. Cavafy: A review by George Kalogeris

…What Auden most likely meant by Cavafy’s unique tone was an irreducible trace element in the poet’s signature style, and not the tone of individual poems, each of which is dependent upon intricate effects of prosody.  In his deeply instructive, excellent introduction to his new translation of Cavafy’s oeuvre, Daniel Mendelsohn reminds us that Cavafy’s poems are “unmistakably musical”, and that one of the goals of his book is to restore some of the richness of Cavafy’s linguistic  texture through close attention to prosody, and specifically to matters of diction, rhyme, and meter…

IZZY THE LIZZY, BY RENEE RIVA
Gail D. Welborn
Published 08/30/2009 – 7:07 a.m. CST

…Washington author, Renee Riva, writes with a catchy rhythm and fanciful sounding rhyme and meter. The rhyming sounds will engage children and encourage their imitation of this humorous read-aloud book.  A book that features qualities not usually found in the animal kingdom, such as traits of  kindness and compassionate mercy.

Steve Bjorkman’s captivating illustrations portray Izzy Lizzy’s kind expressions and colorful dress. With umbrella in hand, she sports a large straw hat, as she slithers down the bayou. Jeb is bright yellow with black bee stripes and gossamer wings to complement Anastasia, the light purple spider. Filled with colorful flowers, foliage, trees and water, Bjorkman’s illustrations will capture and delight children’s imaginations….

Joel Nelson · Alpine, TX
Cowboy Poet

Interview by Josephine Reed for the NEA

…I had a good background in poetry. I had two wonderful literature teachers in high school who caused me to really fall in love with the sound of the words written and rhyme and meter, just the way that poets like Robert W. Service and Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling assembled their words just fascinated me. They had such command of the English language and they could express an idea so eloquently and do it in rhyme and meter without detracting from the thought. And that takes a great command of the language to be able to do that…

International Examiner

“Breaking the Map”
By Na Young Kwon

…Lieberman describes herself as a “mixed-race Amerasian… growing up in a bilingual, bicultural home which shaped [her] basic understanding of the world.” While the poet favors prose-like stanzas for more structured forms that may utilize rhyme and meter, Lieberman does employ the Vietnamese “ca-dao”— “a genre of popular Vietnamese poems that stems from oral tradition, a sort of cross between folk song and nursery rhyme”— which she learned from songs her mother and grandmother sang to her. The ca-dao comprises a fixed form of “luc-bat” or “6-8,” which is marked by an alternating syllabic count for every couplet with rhyme patterns and tonal emphasis. The subject matter typically reflects themes of agricultural life—nature, seasons, animals and folk proverbs. The first section of “Four Folksongs” is a translated version from this genre…

Los Angeles Times

Nicholson Baker: Inside the author — and his alter ego

His new book, ‘The Anthologist,’ is a novel within an novel featuring a character who sheds light on his creator.

Baker is not Paul Chowder, for Chowder is in the thick of a crisis. He’s a poet in America in the beginning of the 21st century, problem one. His girlfriend has just left him, mainly because he’s a pathological procrastinator. His one potential source of income, the introduction to a poetry anthology, eludes him day after endless day. But boy, does he love poetry. The novel is a course in meter, rhyme, inspiration; some well-known poets, some lesser known…¶

“I grew up writing poetry with meter and rhyme,” Baker recalls. “This is not good for one’s career. We’ve gone through this phase of childish experimentation when it comes to poetry. Now we’re having to relearn those finer things, things Tennyson and Swinburne knew at 14.” It’s not that he dismisses free verse entirely. So many poets he loves — Louise Bogan, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver — write in free verse. “I want them to be subversive and they can’t be if the orthodoxy is free verse,” Baker says, in a characteristic jitterbug with history. Clearly, his ideas for “The Anthologist” have been marinating for a long time…

BOOK REVIEW

Susan Wheeler
Assorted Poems
reviewed by Will Cordeiro
143 pp. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Hardback. $25.00. 9780374258610 hardcover

All That Glitters

…It’s as if all we are left with are snatches of distorted song on a broken jukebox. This typical freewheeling stanza has the giddy verve of language spun in a cyclotron, throwing off new, short-lived, unstable semantic particulates.

The same process, however, begins to spin the day-to-day laws of macro-level sense-making out-of-control, caroming everything back into an undifferentiated cosmic alphabet soup.  The whole is held tenuously together by the thread of sonic association, the bumptious almost-meter and the loopy half-rhymes structuring its happy-go-lucky semblance of story along with the obsessive repetition at the end of the line.  It has gusto aplenty.  —But what the hell does it mean? (…)

• Google must have just indexed this page. The article dates from 2005, but the topic interests me, so I’ve included it here.  In some previous posts, like those on Donne, I’ve speculated as to the way the Elizabethans might have pronounced our words.

The real sound of Shakespeare? (Globe theatre performs Shakespeare’s plays in Shakespeare’s dialect)
BBC News  | Joe Boyle

Posted on 07/19/2005 10:36:29 AM PDT by nickcarraway

Ever been baffled by the bard? Vexed by his verse? Or perplexed by his puns? London’s Globe theatre thinks it has the answer: perform Shakespeare’s plays in Shakespeare’s dialect.

In August the theatre will stage an “original production” of Troilus and Cressida – with the actors performing the lines as close to the 16th century pronunciations as possible.

By opening night, they will have rehearsed using phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will render the play just as its author intended. They say their accents are somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire – yet bizarrely, completely intelligible if you happen to come from North Carolina.

For example, the word “voice” is pronounced the same as “vice”, “reason” as “raisin”, “room” as “Rome”, “one” as “own” – breathing new life into Shakespeare’s rhyming and punning.

The New York Times

Def Poetry
By BAZ DREISINGER

Published: September 8, 2009

…To that end, the first half of the book is a triumph of jargon-free scrutiny. Bradley takes on rhythm — from the Greek rheo, meaning “flow,” which is apt: flow is what rappers possess — and dissects rap’s “dual rhythmic relationship,” its marriage of rhymes and beats (with the beat defined as “poetic meter rendered audible”). Next comes rhyme: “the music M.C.’s make with their mouths.” “A skillfully rendered rhyme strikes a balance between expectation and novelty” — e.g., “My grammar pays like Carlos Santana plays,” per Lauryn Hill — and for rappers, rhyme “provides the necessary formal constraints on their potentially unfettered poetic freedom.” The chapter entitled “Wordplay” is the strongest, and that’s appropriate, since play is what hip-hop does best. We’re treated to lyric upon juicy lyric — not just from the usual suspects, to Bradley’s credit — filled with similes, conceits, personification, even onomatopoeia (“Woop! Woop! That’s the sound of da police,” KRS-One rapped)…

Alan Nordstrom’s Blog

What you’ll find below is an upside-down anthology of sorts: a journal of my frequent nightly musings from January 2008 till now, in reverse order.

Much of what I write here is verse in traditional rhymed iambic pentameters, old fashioned in form but contemporary in topics and idiom. It asks to be read aloud so that the effects of rhyme and meter may be felt.

Poetry Guardians Reject Modern Verse

…While I was at Vermont Studio (VSC), I met Kevin Young.  He said my poetry was sing-song-ey and that I should write prose poetry instead.  I told him that I grew up with ballads and beautiful poetry that rhymed so that is my preferred method of expression.  Mr. Young said my rhymes were obvious; however, I highly doubt that as I have always used creative and abstract methods.  I would suggest that VSC match incoming artists to appropriate writers as I really didn’t benefit from the workshop with him…

• The article mentioned by the Poetry Verse blog is also linked below.
  

Poetry Guardians Reject Modern Verse

‘A lot of people high up in poetry circles look down on rhyme and metre and think it is old-fashioned,’ said Bernard Lamb, president of the QES and an academic at Imperial College London. ‘But what is the definition of poetry? I would say, if it doesn’t have rhyme or metre, then it is not poetry, it is just prose. You can have prose that is full of imagery, but it is still prose.’

The campaign is being spearheaded by Michael George Gibson, who said it was ‘disgraceful’ that the Poetry Society had failed to respond properly to his demands for a definition. ‘For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure and, second, alliteration and rhyme,’ said Gibson. ‘Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems.’ True poems, he said, gave the reader or listener a ‘special pleasure’.

Paradise Tossed

…I’m one of those rare persons who greatly prefers formal poetry to modern free verse. I know I’m a minority, and I’m not here to argue the merits of each over the other. I simply want to offer up some resources for those who, like me, are of the formal school or for those who prefer free verse but would like to get better acquainted with formal poetry—especially fellow poets who would like to write some. One of the arguments I’ve heard against formal poetry is that it’s obsolete, antiquated, a relic of the past. On the contrary, the movement is alive and well, and there are a number of modern technological resources available to anybody with a computer. With the following five, I believe anybody can come to understand, enjoy, and write formal poetry…

Formal Feeling
Posted on August 31, 2009 by Annie Janusch

When translating closed form poetry, the formal elements (meter and rhyme) are often the first thing the translator abandons. It’s common to read sonnets in translation, for example, that dispense with the rhyme and meter of the original. I’m no neo-formalist, but when a translator comes along who’s able to convey not only the sense of the original, but an approximation (or recreation) of the rhythm and rhyme, I pay attention. George Szirtes, a prolific writer and translator born in Budapest, who has lived in Britain for most of his life, is that kind of poet…

“Breaking the Map”

By Na Young Kwon

Rhyme & Meter Online: April 19 2009

• Missed last week. This one is a little delayed.

• Many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.

• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).

• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry

PoemShape

Reading Richard Wilbur’s “Mind”

If a bat becomes lost in your house, don’t cringe in a corner. Here’s something you might not know. If a bat can’t escape from a room after a certain period of time, it will indeed assume that it knows all the obstacles. It has memorized your room. It will stop echo locating and fly and fly and fly – no matter what windows you open. A memory is like an opinion. In a sense, the bat becomes trapped by its own opinion. The bat won’t falter. The bat/mind assumes that it has no need to explore. The most inflexible opinions are the loneliest ones and, as Wilbur tells us at the outset, the mind is like the bat that beats in its cavern all alone…

Got a poem – by heart?

In our second hour today we’re talking with writer Jim Holt about learning poems by heart — and reciting them from memory.  Who needs an iPod, he says, when you’ve got great verse running through your head! We’re hoping our listeners, on the air and online, will bring their own favorites to the party. If you have a great poem you want to recite, from memory (no cheating!), then let’s hear it — call in this morning between 11am and noon Eastern, at 1-800-423-8255, and we’ll try to get you on…

‘Book of Rhymes’ by Adam Bradley: Professor of literature takes us inside the rhythms of rap

Some folks may scoff at the comparison of hip-hop to metaphysical poetry, but Bradley wouldn’t be among them. A literature professor at Claremont McKenna College with a doctorate in English from Harvard, he is keenly attuned to what he calls “the poetics of hip-hop,” the ways that rap both converges with and distinguishes itself from what we traditionally think of as poetry.

Here you’ll find Yeats and Frost alongside Nas and the Wu-Tang Clan, together forming a discussion on meter and accent, scansion and slant rhymes. More important, the old-timers and the new jacks seem to get along just fine: Book of Rhymes, MLA vocabulary or no, takes great joy in the written and the rapped word, and it will leave you listening to your favorite MCs with bigger and better ears than before…

Read Write Believe

Poetry Quote of the Day: Rilke Defends Rhyme

“Do not say anything against rhyme! It is a mighty goddess indeed…

New York Times

Sunday Book Review

“A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” With this sentence the novelist E. M. Forster introduced the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy to the English-speaking world in 1919. Since then, Cavafy’s distinctive tone —wistfully elegiac but resolutely dry-eyed — has captivated English-language poets from W. H. Auden to James Merrill to Louise Glück. Auden maintained that Cavafy’s tone seems always to “survive translation,” and Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before. Together with “The Unfinished Poems” (the first English translation of poems Cavafy was still drafting when he died in 1933), this “Collected Poems” not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language…

All Rileyed Up

Poetry Talk with Ginny Kaczmarek

I like so many different poets for different reasons, and I’m always discovering new ones (or old ones I never read deeply before). I go through phases, too. Lately I’m really into formalist poetry, sonnets, villanelles, rhymes and meter, so I’ve been reading Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, for their takes on old forms. I love Thom Gunn, who wrote formal, British- proper poetry about biker gangs and his gay lovers and the plague of AIDS in the ’80s. Annie Finch inspires me with her feminist formalist experiments…

Poemshape

Why do Poets write Iambic Pentameter?

Iambic Pentameter originated as an attempt to develop a meter for the English language legitimizing English as an alternative and equal to Latin (as a language also capable of great poetry and literature). Encyclopedia of Spenser – ExtractSince meter was a feature of all great Latin poetry, it was deemed essential that an equivalent be developed for the English Language. But poets couldn’t simply adopt Latin’s dactylic hexameter or dactylic pentameter lines. Latin uses quantitative meter, a meter based on the alternation of long and short syllables…

Poetry By Stacey

Battle of Wills [Extract]

Fighting the urge was becoming too strong,
It had only been days but seemed so long,
Temptation all around, pulling him in,
Would its magnetic power finally win?

Desparately trying to keep occupied,
Pushing the thought to the back of his mind,
But despite everything he tried to do,
A voice screamed ” go on you know you want to…

[Don’t know if this is recent – or just recently indexed – but an interesting post.]

The Politics of Meter: on Traditional Forms
by Catherine Wagner

For decades, traditional patterns have been distrusted by, for instance, the “organic form”/”projective verse” avant-garde, as well as by writers working with nontraditional word-patterns—the Language poets, Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, and others. The distrust of verse is widespread. Even my dad tells me he knows that poetry shouldn’t rhyme or be in regular meter anymore. And poets of all stripes still get suddenly bored or nervous when they detect traditional forms. Not very many years ago, some members of the Buffalo Poetics listserv were provoked to anger when Annie Finch joined the list to ask for input on the anthology of forms she was putting together. And after a reading I gave recently in England, a poet (a committed political activist and self-declared member of the avant-garde) congratulated me on my “anti-prosody.” She was certain that what she’d heard meant I was working in ironic opposition to traditional meter. Not so…

Rhyme & Meter Online: April 5 2009

• Many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.

• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).

• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry

New York Times

Got Poetry?

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone…

Author’s Den

A Poem Is A Creation

A poem is a creation of English language , a result of learning poem foundation,
It is a creation of imagination, of memory’s recall and retention of education,
Of alphabet’s vowels, a,e,i,o,u, and any consonants combination,
Of b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, and z  that make syllable formation,
Of their dissimilar, multiple mixed natures that become all word creation,
Words are but syllables, but vowels and consonants made arrangement,
All are made definition in any dictionary and an exact denotation,
Sometimes also explained in varied ways within any connotation.

Rhyme, meter and my musings

Selfish Want

I wrote this today actually and I am so proud of myself. Not the subject of the poem, but myself. The poem itself is going to make me look badly I’m afraid, but then I wouldn’t be a very honest person if I were unwilling to show my flaws. This is a rather profound piece on my part really. It says a lot about myself and my own conception of morality, of right and wrong. I enjoy my random moments of self-discovery and introspection. I like epiphanies and it is nice to have one now and again even if they are about myself and not some other problem with society or something more important. I hope all of you enjoy my poem even if it doesn’t make complete sense to you.

PoemShape

Sir Phillip Sidney: His Meter and his Sonnets

So… Sidney is slyly suggesting that, if only his Sonnets achieve their aim, she might take some pleasure (her own orgasm) from his orgasm. If you think this far-fetched, then I would recommend a book like Filthy Shakespeare. The Elizabethans saw life very differently than we do. Death and sex was ever present. Life, in all its glory and decay, was intimate. They weren’t nearly so prudish about the realities of life as we have become – which isn’t to say that prudishness didn’t exist. The Elizabethans were all too ready to find sly humor in the crudities of life – much to the dismay and denial of our more puritan contemporaries.

The University of Arizona Poetry Center

solar poetry contest [Only open to University of Arizona Students and Staff]

This spring the Poetry Center is partnering with the Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy (AzRISE) to present a university-wide Solar Poetry Contest. The contest is presented in celebration of the University of Arizona’s upcoming participation in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, an international student competition to build a house fully powered by the sun.

The final judge for the contest will be UA Creative Writing Professor Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Science and Other Poems and numerous essay collections about the role of literature in our natural world. Deadline for submission (one poem per entry) is May 15, 2009. Winners will be announced in August 2009 and will have the opportunity to read their work at the public viewing of the solar house on August 28….

• I’m not sure if this was posted during the last week. Google states it was posted Mar 29, 2009. The information is interesting enough to merit a link.

youngpoets.ca

Teaching Form Poetry

by Yvonne Blomer

Although modern poetry tends to favour what we call “free verse,” lately there seems to be a revival of “form poetry,” or poems that make use of traditional structures, such as the sonnet, pantoum, glossa and ghazal. For many, writing in form is a way to create a framework in which to work. For others it feels like a constraint. W.H. Auden went as far as to say that “The poet who works in free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, and darning himself.”

As Auden suggests in this quote, free verse is formless. Though that can be argued, it can also be said that free verse does not contain many of the constraints or rules that apply to poetry in form. Formal poetry contains lines that are broken into a pattern of stress, often iambic pentameter. It follows a rhyme scheme. Though in contemporary poetry, even formal poems break many of the rules of the traditional form, the poems still contain within them the essence of the original, a framework within which to write. Based on the Auden quote above, this framework does some of the work for the poet. The difference between free verse and traditional forms, as well as modern takes on traditional forms, are important distinctions for students to note.

The Gods Are Bored

Why Does He Hear Singing Now?

Welcome to “The Gods Are Bored!” Today we add a new hero to our Pantheon of Special Mortals. He is Walt Whitman.

I think Walt Whitman must have been very brave to pen the poetry he did in an era so dedicated to rhyme and meter. His courage certainly bore fruit. Who among us does not love the guy? ….

PoemShape

Shelley’s Sonnet Ozymandias

It is the heart – the synechdocic figure of the human soul, compassion, and capacity to empathize – that is at the heart of the sonnet and that is alive within the sculptor. The heart is what fed the hand – the hand that mocked and gave life to lifelessness through compassion and morality – through art. It is because of the human heart that anything at all survived and continues to survive. And perhaps Shelley means to instruct us that art is the highest and most durable manifestation of the human heart.

Open Letters A Monthly Arts and Literature Review

Steve Donoghue: The Aeneid of Vergil
translated by Sarah Ruden
Yale University Press, 2008

Virgil took the assignment and went to ground, laboring for ten years (sometimes, if legend is to be believed, at the rate of only a line or two a day). There were work-in-progress readings given to friends and colleagues (who assured those not present that a great work was being born), and we may presume that when Augustus met with Virgil in Athens in 40 B.C. the emperor inquired after more than the weather. But even after ten years, there was no finished epic. Virgil grew sick during a trip to the East, gave the standard poet-deathbed instructions to destroy his work, then promptly expired, leaving behind literature’s single most impressive fragment, which, of course, Augustus ordered preserved….

Danna Williams: Surreal Estate Agent

Animal Flower Cave Sonnet

The following poem was almost submitted to H&H for review, but I considered it a waste of an effort so snatched it from the queue to place here as the early start of National Poetry Month.  “Animal Flower Cave” is one of a few recent attempts to compose a contemporary sonnet.  I won’t bore readers with the source of inspiration, but I will admit it has been too long since I’ve done a strict meter and rhyme verse.  My hope is that anyone reading it won’t judge it or the poet too harshly.  This may be my last sonnet, unless the ghost of Shakespeare inhabits my body, which is very unlikely.

Without further ado about nothing:
Animal Flower Cave Sonnet

Your parting lips that touch the brazen sun,
also graze my tongue – suddenly struck dumb.
The thought of our sex under a sea bed,
and Barrett Browning swimming in my head…

• In case you need a rhyme for velocity…

Baroque in Hackney

Elegantly Dressed Dressing Down

“Having climbed to the summit and started to cross it, he
rolls down the side with increasing velocity.”

What! We’re already up to G20 Summit and they still haven’t sorted it out?? Well – Obama’s here now. Really. He’s here in London. Everything’ll be fine. Michelle came off the plane and onto the front pages in a wonderful yellow statement dress & hopefully London will bask in the glow, rather than being smashed up by a crowd of idiots as predicted.

The Formalist Portal

REAR-MEAT RHODA

Girls come in assorted sizes,
Predictable, and sans surprises.
But there’s one who breaks the quota:
The guys all call her Rear-Meat Rhoda.

Rhoda has a rounded bottom
(Not too many females got ’em).
Men who pass say “Get a loada
That caboose!” when they see Rhoda…

Lemon Hound

Strange Bedfellows and inquiry

But then I find these poets coming from very different places who are both speaking directly, in very different ways, getting it on with language, and I am moved to write of them, and share. Is that not a call to action if nothing else? And actions are many, some of them more meditative than others, as with Johnson: “our text today is the heliotrope/swiveling its holy troupe.” We are down in the violet bed oh, natural poets, we are down in “hoar” and our tongues a “fovent choir” (10). How unhip the language: “vulgate,” “spinal block” and “womb,” not the province of language poetry, far too sincere and bodily, far too rhythmic, but more unwieldly than the formalists. What would Heaney think? What would Silliman say? Can one have an opinion?…

Ana Verse

Sylvia Plath’s “I Am Vertical”

As an experiment I have opened to a random page in Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems (New York: Harper’s and Row, 1981). The volume encompasses four collections of poetry: The Colossus, Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees (all copyright dates 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981). She died in 1963 at the age of 30. Four of the poems in the collection originally appeared in The American Poetry Review and four in The New York Times Book Review. I opened randomly to page 162, poem numbered 143: “I Am Vertical” (28 March 1961)…

Rhyme & Meter Online: March 29 2009

• Many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.
• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).
• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry

Newsweek

The End of Verse?

A recent NEA report finds fiction reading on the rise, while readership of poetry has dropped significantly. Is an art form dying?

In January, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled “Reading on the Rise,” announcing that the number of American adults reading fiction had increased for the first time since the NEA began tracking reading habits in 1982. According to the report, 50.2 percent of adults had read a work of fiction in the previous year, compared with just 46.7 percent in 2002. The results were greeted with a mixture of excitement and caution by education experts. Some saw them as the long-awaited reversal of the trend toward a dumber, TV-obsessed United States; others, more wary, called them a statistical blip. Almost as an afterthought, the report also noted that the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry’s readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years.

• Commentary at Newsweek

• Commentary at Poetry Foundation

PoemShape

Sir Phillip Sidney: His Meter and his Sonnets

I have noticed that readers of my previous post on Shakespearean, Spenserian, Petrarchan Sonnet Forms have occasionally searched for further information on Sidney’s Sonnets. sir-phillip-sidneyThe first thing to know about Sidney is that his Sonnets predated those of Shakespeare, Daniel, Drayton, Donne, or Spenser. Spenser published his sonnets, Amoretti,  in 1595, 9 years after Sidney’s death and four years after Sidney’s own Sonnets were posthumously published. Samuel Daniel’s Delia was published in 1592. Micheal Drayton’s Idea was published in 1594. Shakespeare’s Sonnet Sequence was published in 1609. My point in mentioning this is that Sidney’s Sonnets are written in a variety of rhyme schemes and his meter varies between Iambic Pentameter and Iambic Hexameter (also called Alexandrines). Shakespeare, Spenser, Daniel and Drayton all settle on a single Sonnet scheme. When Sidney was writing, the Sonnet was still an unestablished form…

Poetic meter, rhythm and rhyme

Michael Hickey

Meter is a systematically arranged and measured rhythm pattern in a literary composition, such as poetry. The root meaning of the word comes from the Greek term for measure…. Meter is the linguistic sound pattern of verse. You can imagine it as being a kind of measured beat of a poem. The precise units of poetic meter will vary from language to language and involve the manner in which syllables are arranged in repeated patterns, called feet, within a line…

Ezine Articles

Holly Bliss

Homer and Hesiod – Greek Poets and Their Poetry Forms

In ancient times, people “would sing the stories of the Trojan War and its Greek heroes; these songs would be the Greek equivalent of a mini-series, for the stories were so long that they would take days to complete. The Greeks believed that the greatest of these story-tellers was a blind man named Homer, and that he sung ten epic poems about the Trojan War, of which only two survived (although the Greeks seem to have known them). As a group these poems told the entire history of the Trojan War; each poem, however, only covered a small part of that history” (Hooker).

OPTIONS Associates: For a Better World

Time to Rhyme

It’s been a while since I’ve let myself write poetry. My heart hasn’t been in it. Tonight in my Monday night Big Yellow writing group, I decided it’s about time. And not just poetry, but rhymes. I love rhyming, so that’s what I wrote about in poem # 2…

Women on Top

The Poet Robert Frost

What I find interesting about Frost is that I’ve learned how little poetic license he does take. Frost’s style, or individual method and tone, I read repeatedly, trying to decipher and understand better. I often wonder if Frost was more a master of prose disguised in poetry, as his literary writings seem to me to vary in rhythm and often seem more like ordinary speech. He seems to me to be very much a master of free verse. Furthermore, I feel Frost often wrote allegories, or stories with an underlying meaning symbolized by his characters and their action…

Stoning the Devil

Formalism and the Pleasure Principle

I make no claims to be an expert where poetic form is concerned, but I want to posit a new possibility that has not, to my knowledge, heretofore been posited. What if someone were to put together post-avant (as it exists now) and formalism? The experiments of poets like Aaron Belz, Kristy Odelius, Robert Archambeau, and other Chicago affiliated poets, have put a proverbial foot in the door, but the door still needs to be kicked open…

Book reviews: Michael Donaghy

Reviews by JOHN BURNSIDE

Michael Donaghy was, in his quiet way, one of the former: sensing that the Modernist/Postmodern game had gone on for far too long – that the conductors of chaos had, quite simply, lost the plot – he set out on a quest for order in poetry, though it was an order that in no way resembled that of some of those self-proclaimed “new formalists” who, like their opponents in the ludic-but-meaningless camp, were never very good at distinguishing baby from bathwater… In this quest, of course, he was not alone, but he was, for any number of reasons, exemplary, both in his own work, and in his critical understanding of poetics. In his work, form is never less than organic, the artifice is always paradoxically natural. Not surprising, then, that he has been a significant influence on the work of many of our leading poets, both in their thinking about form, and in their work…

Rhyme & Meter Online: March 22, 2009

• A belated post this week. Not as much but I’ll add more if I find more (or by your recommendations).
• Many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.
• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).
• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry

BennyThomas’s Weblog

Pen portraits-14

GEOFFREY CHAUCER (British)  (1340  –  1400)
Poet.

He was the fist poet to write in modern English. “He found his native tongue a dialect and left it a language”.
Son of a well to do wine merchant, he lived in the troubled times. He served in the army for some time. He was taken prisoner by the French and released only after the peace of Bretigny was signed in May 1360. He served as one of the valets of the King’s chamber and went abroad on embassies and missions. In 1366 he married one who was closely connected with the court. In 1372 he visited Genoa, Pisa and Florence. In 1382 he was appointed as comptroller of the Petty Customs and shortly after he left London for Greenwich, where he spent most of his remaining years, until just before his death, when he took a house near the Chapel of St. Mary in Westminister. In 1386 he was elected as a Knight of the shire for Kent in the Parliament. By 1389 Richard II appointed him clerk of the King’s works at Westminister...

8th Annual Pleasanton
Poetry, Prose & Arts Festival Overview

Dana Gioia is a poet, critic and best-selling anthologist. He recently served as Chair for the National Endowment for the Arts. He is one of America’s leading contemporary men of letters. Winner of the American Book Award, Gioia is internationally recognized for his role in reviving rhyme, meter and narrative in contemporary poetry. He combines populist ideals and high standards to bring poetry to a broader audience…

Poetics and Ruminations

The Poetry of Black Power and Black Mountain

Langston Hughes (1902-67) was among the first American Blacks to make a living as a writer.  Although he was associated with the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s and ’30s, he lived into the 1960s, “The Decade of Protest.”  As Richard K. Barksdale showed in Langston Hughes and His Critics (1977), Hughes’ output was enormous, and it covered the field; he wrote drama, fiction, autobiography, libretti for musicals, opera, and a cantata — but it is as a poet that he stood as a model for post-Modernist Blacks such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks (see elsewhere on this blog), Amiri Baraka, and Don L. Lee. Although Hughes was accused of being the next thing to a member of the literary establishment and of not writing enough consciousness-raising material, he was in fact the first to write civil rights protest poetry that was identifiable as such, and he did it when it was quite dangerous to do so, long before it was fashionable.

PoemShape

John Donne & the Meter of Death be not Proud…

At the Poetry Foundation I’ve been involved in an interesting discussion on John Donne’s Sonnet: Death be not proud… As part of the discussion I started searching the web to see what others had written. (I especially wanted to find readings and performances.) But, to my astonishment, I saw that everyone was misreading the poem!

As it turns out, this Sonnet (like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116) is one of the most misread sonnets in the English Language.

Rhyme & Meter Online: March 15, 2009

• Many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.
• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).
• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry

Life, an epic Poem

Analysis: William Blake

William Blake’s poems are methodical in construction of the meter and rhyme, every word seemingly painstakingly chosen. He uses standard formal poetry constructions like trochaic and iambic tetrameter, rhyming couplets, and quatrains in almost every one of his poems, which helped me to fully grasp these concepts in ways I never did in high school English class.

Mike Snyder’s Formal Blog

Stephen Edgar’s Stanzas

…today I just want to point out his use of regularly varying line-lengths in rhymed, metrical poetry. I’ve seen such verse called “heterometrical,” or “het-met,” for short, but Lew Turco don’t like that, not one bit, so I won’t use the terms. Not today, anyway…. A fairly simple example is the stanza Edgar uses in “Transit of Venus,” from the sequence “Consume My Heart Away.”

Poetry Foundation

Wernicke’s Area

By Martin Earl

Since poetry is now written largely without rules (or written with self-invented rules), since the common craft of metrics, rhyming, quantifying are no longer taught, largely dispensed with by the community, the result is a less universal and a more personal poem, a poem that can no longer be “read”, except by the writer and the writer’s closest cohorts – those who know the language. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. There is simply no need in today’s world to write or to read epics composed in ottava rima which tell the life-stories of unlikely heroes…

The Poetry Archive

Stephen Edgar

What is most immediately distinctive about Edgar’s work, certainly among poets of his generation, is his commitment to formal verse “and for showing considerable panache in handling [it]” (Kevin Hart, Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry). This has drawn comparisons, in Australia, with poets such as A D Hope and Gwen Harwood, but also to the likes of Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur. Poetry Chicago says of him that “he achieves, overall, a supple classicism that earns him a place next to the best twentieth-century American formalists.”

[Looks like this book (the paperback version?) was just posted at Amazon. The publication date is June 1, 2009.]

Amazon.Com

Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets (Paperback)

Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets by William Baer. Interviews with Willis Barnstone, Robert Conquest, Wendy Cope, Douglas Dunn, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Donald Justice, X. J. Kennedy, Maxine Kumin, Frederick Morgan, John Frederick Nims, W. D. Snodgrass, Derek Walcott, and Richard Wilbur. When free verse and its many movements seemed to dominate poetry, other writers worked steadfastly, insistently, and majestically in traditional forms of rhyme and meter. Such poets as Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Derek Walcott, and Richard Wilbur utilized sonnets, villanelles, blank verse, and many other forms to create dazzling, lasting work. Their writing posed a counterpoint to free verse, sustained a tradition in English language verse, and eventually inspired the movement called New Formalism. Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets collects interviews with some of the most influential poets of the last fifty years.

Poetry Foundation

By Annie Finch

Listening to Poetry: On The Free Verse Brain and the Metrical Brain

Poetry’s connection with music and the right brain may be its basic identifying use and distinction as an art form, the reason it has survived through the millennia. And perhaps this essential connection is the reason that, after a century dominated so hugely by free verse, the caricature of poetry in the popular mind still remains, against all apparent reason and the weight of a century’s lived experience, inherently associated with meter…

Metrical poetry, traditionally, offers up its riches to the receptive, listening mind. The meter itself guides, and the inner or outer ear has only to hear. Reading a metrical poem aloud is rather like performing a piece of music using the instrument of your voice (and just as in music, the degree of skill in composition will significantly affect the result). When John Donne opens a sonnet with “Death be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for, thou are not so,” the weight and length of the stressed first syllable of each of these lines, in contrast to the unstressed syllable of the iambic openings of the rest of the lines in the poem, are very specifically determined. Because a metrical poem modulates individual phrases against the scaffolding of a rhythm and line-length that is mutually expected by both poet and reader, the poet can indicate, even on the page, the exact timber, tempo, and other physical characteristics the reading-aloud process should take at each point in the poem…..

PoemShape

The Art & Writing of Iambic Pentameter

The art to writing Iambic Pentameter is partly in knowing when not to write it.

Chaucer was the first poet to write full length “poems” in Iambic Pentameter. But his language was middle English, not modern. The first drama (that we know about) written in Modern English and in Iambic Pentameter (Blank Verse) was Gorboduc not by one author, but two – Sackville and Norton. Since this was probably their first crack at Iambic Pentameter, and since they wanted to make a good impression, they didn’t vary the pattern one iota. In other words, they didn’t quite know when not to write it.

Rhyme and Meter Online: March 8, 2009

• As with last week, many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.
• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).
• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry

Poetics and Ruminations

Robert Lowell from Soup to Nuts

Robert  Lowell  began as an arch-formalist deeply indebted to the Modernists, in particular his teacher John Crowe Ransom, and  his mentor-friend Allen Tate, both members of the so-called “Fugitive” poets of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Ransom was himself a leading member of the formalist New Critics, and the precepts he held close to his heart were those of the English Renaissance and the “Metaphysical” poets of the 17th-century.

Birthday of Richard Wilbur

Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns

The Structure-Form Distinction

Perhaps you asked yourself about content, and so you discovered that you like a wide variety of topics in your poems: desire, death, hope, nature, relationships, nightingales.  Perhaps you asked yourself about form, and so you discovered that you like a lot of forms—a lot of sonnets, some villanelles, a smattering of sestinas.  But one question you probably didn’t ask yourself was: do these poems turn?  If this question, which likely only arose if you had a number of sonnets on your list, in fact seems strange, then it is imperative to investigate this strangeness for it indicates that the turn, a significant shift in the poem’s rhetorical progress, which is so vital in poetry, is rarely recognized as such.

Today’s Woman writing Community

Writing Advice: How To Write Great Children’s Poetry and Rhyming Stories

Children love rhyme. The rhythm of the text, the way the words bounce off the tongue can be especially appealing to young children who are mastering language and reading. There are two vehicles for verse in the children’s market: poetry and rhyming stories. Both have special guidelines.

Rhyming Stories. Often at writers’ conferences editors will say they don’t like stories with rhyming text. That’s not exactly true — rhyming stories are published all the time. What these editors are really objecting to is bad rhyming text. Too many writers try to copy Dr. Seuss, the master of the rhymed story. They imitate the form of his work but not the substance. The rhyme is a vehicle to tell the story, not the other way around. It must still follow all the rules of a good picture book: a strong opening, believable characters, an interesting plot, a satisfying ending. Every word must advance the story – you can’t throw in extra phrases simply to complete the rhyme. Consider the opening lines of The Cat in the Hat. In eight short lines Dr. Seuss establishes setting, mood and conflict. Few books written in prose do so much with so little…

Poemshape

W.B. Yeats & Long Legged Fly: Meaning & Meter

The supreme act of creation, the genius of mind, moves outside its own awareness – becomes like the long legged fly that moves upon the stream or the the source of being and mind. It must not be observed lest the mind too, become aware of itself, and so slip from the supple surface of its contemplation. The beautiful metaphor of the fly upon the stream is Yeats’ expression of true genius – the state in which great art is produced…

(G)reatness & Style: Jack Stillinger on John Keats

…my feeling is that content (great in thought or otherwise) has all too readily been equated and conflated with (G)reat Poetry. There’s a difference (or at least one is inclined to assume so) given the broader public disregard of contemporary poets in favor of poets like Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Shakespeare, Millay and Cummings – all poets who were and are famous not just for their ideas, but for their poetry (the language and style in which they expressed their ideas).

What is: Heroic Couplets

The term Heroic refers to Iambic Pentameter and Couplets refers to any two, paired, rhyming lines.

Open Heroic Couplets: Open Heroic couplets are rhyming couplets that are enjambed.

Closed Heroic Couplets: Closed Heroic couplets are rhyming couplets that are, first and foremost, syntactically discrete, meaning that each couplet is end-stopped with the end-of-couplet rhyme…

suite101.com

Understanding Emily Dickinson’s Wild Nights

The poem’s final stanza deepens the enigma that is Emily Dickinson. A little less than a year after the poem was allegedly written, Dickinson largely disappeared from society. She became a local Amherst eccentric, always dressed in white. Near the end of her life, she shunned company of any kind. This image of Dickinson, along with her austere portrait, taken at the age of 18 at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, have jointly impressed on readers the notion of the poet’s ascetic restraint. But “Wild Nights” depicts a more radiant inner existence, to which she has allowed readers only a glimpse.

How to write heroic couplets

Heroic couplets were once the epitome of poetry. If you had to read Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.you’ve read heroic couplets. Poets used this form not just for “regular” poetry, but for social commentaries, arguments, political dissertationsanything and everything you could think of was put into heroic couplet form. It’s name was even derived from the distinguished and loft subject matter often contained in it’s verses. This form of poetry was immensely popular until about the end of the 18th century…

TimesOnline

Poetry is the cornerstone of civilisation

You can’t teach being a poet, you can’t train to be one. I was once a judge in a poetry competition, and I can’t tell you how many people who aren’t poets write it. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of where poetry comes from and how it arrives, but I do know it is the highest calling of a cerebral, emotional, aesthetic existence. Poetry, along with dancing and drumming, is probably the most ancient of all our arts. There was rhythm and rhyme before written language. Its meter resonates from our own heartbeats to make stories. Before somebody wrote down Homer’s Iliad, it was memorised and repeated. Poems lit up the memory of our collective past, told us who we were and where we came from, and they still do…

Delight in Disorder

Imperfections and inconsistencies can enhance the appeal of a person, a place, a thing, an action, an idea, and so on. For example, an imperfection—a crack—helps make the Liberty Bell one of Philadelphia’s most popular tourist attractions. Likewise, a very noticeable imperfection helps make the Leaning Tower of Pisa one of Italy’s foremost tourist draws….

….A single mole on the cheek of a beautiful woman tends to increase rather than diminish her beauty. And graying temples can turn a middle-aged man into a distinguished gentleman…

Rhyme & Meter Online: Sunday March 1, 2009

• As with last week, many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.
• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).
• Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry
  

Mike Snyder’s Formal Blog

• Broken Lines and Narrative February 28th

…given that a good long narrative is hard enough on its own, given the additional difficulty of making effective use of rhyme and meter (or at least line breaks), and given the common reader’s reaction when he or she sees poetry (you know it’s not “Oh, Goody!”), why the hell does anyone want to write a verse novel?… Why do I want to?

• More Broken Lines February 27th

In free verse, the line break is either a purely visual artifact to organize a silent reading (viewing?), or else it’s a rhythmic marker to organize a performance. In either case, it forces the reader to experience language differently than in prose: the rhythm of the sentence is broken; the forward thrust of argument and narrative are diminished…

Accomodatingly

• trial run

And the forms which are all over the place right now are forms which emphasize craft, but which don’t require deep acquaintance with pre-modern poetry– they are forms whose difficult requirements don’t include scansion or rhyme. That’s why young poets are (mostly) writing sestinas, pantouns, lipograms, anagrams, alphabetical acrostics, rather than Spenserian stanzas, ottava rima, or rime royal…. Such forms not only allow us to avoid measuring ourselves against Victorians who really knew how to do stuff we haven’t learned…

Poetry Foundation

• Going Negative
  

Maybe poetry is so marginal, so fragile a commodity, we worry about kicking it when it’s already pretty clearly down. Whatever the reason for our anxiety, the negative review, when it appears in magazines like this one, is often more of an event than it ought to be. But negativity, I’m starting to think, needs to be the poetry reviewer’s natural posture, the default position she assumes before scanning a single line. Because really, approaching every new book with an open mind is as well-meaning but ultimately exhausting as approaching every stranger on the street with open arms…

PoemShape

• Erlkönigin
• Keats’ Ode to Autumn

…the Romantic Era had begun. This was the beginning of the age that emphasized the pastoral over and above the urban – an intuitive grasp of the world began to supercede the classical emphasis on reason. The world’s natural state was a central metaphor for the Romantics with its the inevitable cycle of creation and loss.

• (G)reatness & the Language of Poetry

While pursuing discussion on Orr’s article over at A Compulsive Reader, another question occurred to me. Why is it that practically no poets after the moderns seem to be widely read, remembered or recognized by the general, non-poetry reading public. Almost everyone I ask (who maybe reads three or four poems a year) knows of Robert Frost, can name a poem by him and maybe even recite a line or two. No one, (during my unscientific survey), could do the same for any poet of the later generation.

Sonnets

The sonnet is an old and challenging way to write a poem due to the rules of meter, lines, and rhyme scheme. Probably the most notable sonnet writer in the world is William Shakespeare. But sonnets are still being written today! My aim, dear reader, is for these sample sonnets to inspire you to search for more contemporary sonnets.

Frederick Turner’s Blog

• Poetry & Currency

New research has shown that the prosodic character of spoken language is essential to its meaning.  This is obvious in a tonal language like Chinese, where the very meaning of a word depends on its tone. But English is no less tonal, except that we use tone and pitch not to establish our lexicon but to establish our syntax and logic.  In English we cannot speak a sentence without instinctively giving it a melody—all songwriters understand this.  It is a natural genius that we all possess, and that poets refine and amplify by the arts of meter and rhyme…

Welcome to Dr. Roger K.A. Allen’s Blog

• Musing on Poetry in Medical Journals

With regards poetry, this is ephemeral a bit like origami, fresh bread or the morning newspaper. Poetry is meant to be read fresh. Fashions and written expression change. Today’s formless and often artless style would not even be recognised as “poetry” by Shakespeare or Milton. There are no rules now. The bar has been lowered as with our education. Only editors have the divining rods to detect good poetry. Rhyme and meter are gone. It is now McDonald’s poetry a bit like most modern art and modern education. What matters now are content, mood, fuzzy feelings and most of all, what’s in fashion.

February 26, 2009

Calling on North Shore poets to create

Anyone who feels like saying “Give peace a chance” in meter, rhyme or free verse may submit one poem of 50 lines or fewer to the 10th annual Peace Poetry Contest. The deadline is Friday, April 10.

The contest is sponsored by the Samantha Smith North Shore Chapter of Veterans For Peace. Submissions should focus on the nature and value of peace, and call for an end to war and to violence and hatred in our communities.

Children in grades kindergarten to 12, as well as adults, may participate. A public reading will be held Sunday, April 26, at 2 p.m. at Salem State College.

Only original, previously unpublished compositions will be accepted. Writers, children and adults, should send poems, with contact information, to peacepoetry@massvfp.org, or to: Peace Poetry, Veterans For Peace, P.O. Box 177, Ipswich, MA 01938.

Students should include names of their parents and schools, and a parent or teacher’s phone number and e-mail address for notification.

Gently Read Literature

• Toward a Poetics of Coexistence: A Review of Peter Cole’s Things On Which I’ve Stumbled by Philip Metres

One of the remarkable discoveries in Things, for those of us who know only his translations, is that Cole’s own poetry is driven by a pulsing formalism—not only in the taut meters and insistent rhymes, but also in the tendency toward received forms: the villanelle, ghazal, sonnets, sestinas. Though he occasionally lapses into abstractions—as Fried noted, “his embrace of abstraction…can make the eyes cross, at least out of context”—his willingness to “stumble” both into philosophically “abstract” and politically incendiary terrain make him an unusual and courageous contemporary poet…

Rhyme & Meter Online: Sunday February 22 2009

• Not much this week. A couple of posts by me. Mostly discussions on various forums (such as Poets.Org) which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.
• If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).

About.Com

Definition: Terza rima is poetry written in three-line stanzas (or “tercets”) linked by end-rhymes patterned aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe, etc. There is no specified number of stanzas in the form, but poems written in terza rima usually end with a single line or a couplet rhyming with the middle line of the last tercet.

Dante Alighieri was the first poet to use terza rima, in his Divine Comedy, and he was followed by other Italian poets of the Renaissance, like Boccaccio & Petrarch…

Robert Frost, Iambic Pentameter & Mending Wall

Having noticed several searches on Frost’s Mending Wall (probably one of the most famous poems he wrote) I thought I would take a look at the poem. I’ve looked at several of my books on Frost and none of them extensively analyze the poem. The archetypal meaning of the wall is straightfoward and expounded on by the speaker of the poem. Perhaps the most insightful comment was Richard Poirier’s in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing…

Roethke and Waltzing Iambic Tetrameter

Theodore Roethke lived from 1908 to 1963. He died the same year as Robert Frost, though much younger when he died – only 55. Though he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, the Waking, his reputation these days remains overshadowed. Two good books that both offer brief biographies on  Roethke, Michael Schmidt’s the Lives of the Poets and David Perkins A History of Modern Poetry, cite Roethke’s inability to establish his own voice as contributing to his relative obscurity….

Poetry

Below you will find a compliation of snippets I have found on the internet which will help you understand poetry better. I know it is a lot to take in. Let me know if anything confuses you. Please be sure to look this over a few times, and especially read the bit about poetry and modernism at the end…

How to Write a Poem

First you’ll need to read or listen to poetry. This is not a requirement for writing poetry, especially if your writing just for your enjoyment, however most all publish worthy poems are written by those who read or listen to poetry regularly…

A Traveler from an Antique Land

Of course that’s from Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, and I quote it in the post heading because the pop-sci book on human genetics I’ve just started, Bryan Sykes’ The Seven Daughters of Eve, quotes it without acknowledgement in the second paragraph of the prologue…

• According to Google, this was posted on the 18th, despite being an older interview. The interview is a good read.

Interview with Professor Haun Saussy, October 3rd, 2007

Often the bronze texts are not very “poetic” in our twentieth-century sense of the word. They are short on beautiful poetic metaphors. In breaking free of rhyme and meter, twentieth-century poets and critics said, “We’re not so interested in the sound of verse; poetry isn’t composed to the metronome; what counts is imagery, that is the point of using free verse.” In all this perfectly justifiable poetic revolution, we have lost track of what was important in an earlier revolution, namely the discovery of rhyme which was so important for early Chinese poetry…

• This website and its posts aren’t recent, but is new to me.

Limping Iambics

Coming Home

She sat facing backwards on the train to Crewe,
watching herself shrinking in the distance
while familiar landscapes flickered past the window,
though not in black and white.
They had been, once –
with hairline cracks that burst upon a screen,
where Mother, tightly-permed and nyloned,
clicked her heels through unconnected scenes…

• And I wrote a new poem this week, in Iambic Dimeter.

A February Bat

• If you’ve tried out rhyme or meter this week, let me know & let the world know! Comment!

Rhyme & Meter Online: Sunday February 15 2009

• This is the first of what I hope will be a weekly Sunday post. I’ll be searching the net for whatever has been posted during the previous week – posts related to meter and rhyme in poetry. Hopefully the post will expand as I get better at it. If any readers would like to recommend sites please do so in the comment field. Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).

Book & Reading Forums asks the Question: Is Shakespeare Poetry?

Voices is a CD with original recordings of Icelandic folk music. The recordings were collected around Iceland in the homes of farmers, grandmothers and fishermen that still lived in the old tradition or could remember some of the old songs that had been sung in Iceland for generations. The CD contains chanting of rimur, hymns, ballads and nursery rhymes.

Barrier of a Common Language
An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry

About the Book

The latest offering in the Poets on Poetry series from acclaimed poet, critic, and National Endowment for the Arts’ chairman Dana Gioia, Barrier of a Common Language collects essays on British poets and poetry spanning the past two decades.

Gioia ignited a national debate on the relevance of poetry in 1991 when he published an essay in the Atlantic titled “Can Poetry Matter?” The essay was expanded into a book of the same name and went on to become one of the best-selling books of contemporary poetry criticism in the 1990s…

The Road Not Taken

One of the loveliest poems in the English language is Frost’s The Road Not Taken. Part of the magic is in how Frost loosens meter to obtain a more colloquial tone. In one of the most enjoyable books I own (among books on Frost)  Lea Newman relates that according to a survey of 18,000 written, recorded and videotaped responses, this poem (along with Robert Frost) is America’s most popular poem…

Between the Rhyme

Too often doing time
World is deaf and dumb and blind
Loss is less than fine
Walk between the rhyme…

Things Fall Apart: A Guide to William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
Notes on Form

By Bob Holman & Margery Snyder

Able Muse Call for Submissions

Able Muse exclusively publishes formal poetry complemented by art and photography, fiction and non-fiction including essays, book reviews and interviews with a focus on metrical poetry. We are looking for well-crafted poems of any length or subject that employ skillful and imaginative use of meter and rhyme, executed in a contemporary idiom, that reads as naturally as your free verse poems. All forms of formal poetry are welcome. For an example of what we’re interested in, check the poetry of Philip Larkin, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott, Marilyn Hacker, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht….

Able Muse seeks to publish established as well as new voices. We read everything and publish only the best. Send your best!

Send only previously unpublished poems. No simultaneous submissions, please. Contributions that have already been published or are being considered for publication elsewhere are not eligible to be considered for publication in Able Muse, unless a cross-publishing arrangement has previously been negotiated.

Dr. Kim Bridgford wins prestigious NEA fellowship

Dr. Bridgford explained that a criticism of contemporary poetry is that it is too much like prose, hence the increasing appeal of the traditional form that employs rhyme and meter. Her favorite traditional form is the sonnet, a 14-line poem. “It sounds different with every little change. It appeals to my sense of detail,” she said.

Dr. Bridgford said she likes poems that are conversational, and wants readers to notice the form and rhythms. “I like to break the form and experiment with various parts of form,” she said….