Making Music with Poetry

This week we're moving from a general focus on the carnal, the sensory details and ways we make them come alive in writing, to a stronger emphasis on how we use form, rhythm, rhyme, sound, and repetition to evoke in language. In other words, how we make music with poetry.

Please read from The Poet's Companion:
The Music of the Line (104-114)
Stop Making Sense (129-137)
Meter, Rhyme, and Form (138-150)
Repetition, Rhythm, and Blues (151-160)

The Music of the Line takes us through some of the building blocks of poems: line lengths, line breaks, and stanzas. Begin noticing the effects of each. What do long lines do? How do shorter lines both effect and affect meaning? When you break a line, why do you choose to do it where you do? Is it deliberately to emphasize the word on which you end or to break the sentence where it forces the reader to pause where she normally wouldn't? Or are you simply looking at length? Clusters of lines together, or stanzas, are like little rooms within the house of your poem ("stanza" is the Italian word for "room" as in a room in house). Are you constructing them for deliberate purposes as you would rooms that fit in a house?

Stop Making Sense gives us permission to play and dream with language, so that we may create "something ineffable, something beautiful and even beyond words" (129). Poets have historically made language itself the subject of their poems, the center of attention, and sometimes in so doing, the poems themselves aren't linear or logical. They invite the reader more into the experience of language as creator of meaning, and ask that you start to familiarize yourselves with this notion that poetry as an experience in language is always co-created (133). You're starting to see how this works, no doubt, in the feedback you're seeing in workshop.

Meter, Rhyme, and Form asks us to read poems aloud. Have you been doing that with your own work and that of your workshop members? For most of us it's the only way to get acquainted with the sounds of language, including the formal elements of meter, which is organized rhythm, and rhyme, which is a kind of echo, or repetition (140). They argue that these elements, in other words the way you say something, can be as crucial as what you are saying (143). And it's fun to have more tools. So, familiarize yourself with what we mean by "foot" and "feet" in poetry as well as their names (141-142), so you know what we're talking about when we say "scansion" as well as the various sonnet forms. But don't sweat it. There won't be a quiz. Though you may want to make use of these tools in your crafting and reading of poems.

Repetition, Rhythm, and Blues takes repetition and rhythm to a place most of us have some familiarity with if we've listened to any American popular music from the 20th Century: The Blues. We're introduced to the ideas of "repetend," or "the irregular repetition of a word or phrase at various places throughout a poem; "anaphora," which "is the repetition of a word or group of words at the beginnings of lines" (152),and "caesura," which is a pause in the middle of a line, perhaps from a comma or a period (156).

For this week's assignments, write the following in your journal:

*observations (the practice begun last week--see previous blog post for a refresher).
*#1 on p. 135--record a dream right after you have it.
*#12 on p. 137--jot down scraps of overheard conversation (this can be live in person, or from the radio or tv if you're alone).
*#1 on p. 159--write a poem that uses anaphora.
*#4 on p. 160--write a short poem that begins and ends with the same line.

For the poem you'll turn in to workshop next Tuesday:
choose to expand, flesh out, or otherwise keep working on one of the previous journal exercises. Flex your knowledge of and play with line breaks, stanzas, rhyme, meter, repetition, and overall rhythm. Yes, you have more freedom this week with your assignment. How does that make you feel? Excited? Afraid? If you feel you'd like more structure, you're welcome to try out a sonnet. Or use the other poems in the text as models and inspiration. You decide what you need. And if you need help, let me know.

And please have a look and listen to this four-minute video with Poet Laureate Joy Harjo in which she reads her poem "Perhaps The World Ends Here" and reflects on her childhood, the way the kitchen table unites us and the renewed connections she hopes will emerge out of this difficult time.