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Ask the Expert Series: A Conversation on Poetry
Ricochetti Concretevol came up with the idea to start a conversation where he would share his expertise: Concrete Questions Conversation. His real purpose was to attempt to claim the prize for worst poster when the contest rolls around next year, but he wound up starting a fascinating thread. It’s also a fascinating idea for a conversation. We have so much expertise gathered on Ricochet from a wide variety of fields of endeavor. So, I thought it would be fun for those who can to share their expertise.
Like many Ricochetti, I have several areas of expertise. But most of them are shared by several other people on Ricochet. For instance, we have many published authors here, so questions on the general topic of writing could be answered by many here as Aaron proved in his Fictional Advice for Fictional Authors conversation. Corporate governance might be another expertise that is easy to find on Ricochet. Many lawyers deal with the topic. Many of our members have surely also been on boards of commercial, non-profit, or governmental corporations. While they may not have abstracted the experiences in quite the way I have, if a question were put out on the subject, there might be a dozen or more answers available immediately. Some of my other areas of consulting expertise might be scarcer on the ground at Ricochet, but how many people are likely to have questions involving process management or data modeling? Of the things I know that there is a remote chance that people may have some curiosity about, the only thing left would be poetry. This includes poetic structures, meter, rhyme, rhythm, the prosody of many nations, and all those things we are supposed to believe disappeared in a free verse post-modernist world. If you have questions about how to write a better poem, how to approach a form, how to do anything regarding poetry, share the questions here and I shall try to answer them comprehensibly.
Now, Concretevol had questions from another member to start things out. I will start with a few questions from my FAQ sheet on one of my Websites.
Q. How does somebody create a new poetic form?
A. As poets, sometimes we conform to someone else’s standard, as when we write a sonnet. Other times we invent a new structure for a given situation and poem. If we codify the rules of the new form, find a name for it, reuse it, and share the form definition with other formalists who use it, it becomes a new form. If we only use the form once, don’t write down the rules, or if no other poets get excited by it, the form is just a nonce form, meaning used once.
In my own work, I’ve found at least four ways to create new poetry forms:
- Make something up for a specific poetic occasion. Form follows function, and sometimes I find I’ve created a form that is reusable when writing a specific poem.
- Vary on a theme:. As an example, when I first started using form, I couldn’t scan a poem to save my life — no rhythm — so had great difficulty with accentual-syllabic forms, such as the English sonnet. Given this, I created my own form of sonnet, the sardine, that is purely syllabic by definition. Of course, I didn’t have to do that given that the French also produce purely syllabic Petrarchan sonnets, but it seemed a great idea at the time. This brings up another point.
- Play to your handicaps and strengths. If there is something about a form that you can’t do or don’t like, consider changing the form rules for your own use. In developing the sardine, I actually used two existing forms. First was the Petrarchan sonnet; second was the redondilla, a purely syllabic Spanish quatrain with envelope rhyme scheme (abba). Based on this mixing, I came up with a fourteen line form that was syllabic, but was also tougher to rhyme than other sonnets. I’m much better at rhyming than a lot of people. (That isn’t to say that I don’t put out some real klinkers in my light verse.) So, the sonondilla’s predominant rhyme scheme is abbaabbaccddcc, which is even more difficult than the Petrarchan sonnet to do well.
- Analyze present forms for gaps. While writing a book on poetic forms that is still in progress, I came across an interesting fact about the ballade family. There is the ballade and the ballade supreme, a slightly longer variation. There are also the double ballade and double ballade supreme. Lastly, there is a double refrain ballade, but no double refrain ballade supreme. Well, being a poet with an engineer’s soul, or vice versa, I thought it best to fill the gap. Now I have a definition for the double refrain ballade supreme: a 35 line isosyllabic form divided into three ten line verses and a five-line envoy. Each line is usually eight or ten syllables long. It has two refrains. The rhyming and repeating structure are thus: ababbCcdcD ababbCcdcD ababbCcdcD cCdcD.
Knowing what elements define the different existing structures helps to understand how to create new ones.
Q. When you sit down in front of a blank page/screen and decide to write a villanelle, as an example, how do you approach it. I would assume, the theme comes first. Then what? Do you write down the rhyme scheme, find the first line and go from there?
A. Each form is different. For instance, with a Villanelle, it’s best to start with the couplet, the two refrains. They appear throughout separately and together and have to function as a final couplet.
The same is true of the Triolet, which also has a couplet. It’s scheme is ABaAabAB, so the first line (A) is a refrain that appears alone once, and with the repeton (B) twice. I start with that couplet.
A Sonnet I usually start with an idea and the turn of thought or pivot. I find it easier to develop the whole if I have the pivot in mind from the start.
A Sestina is a difficult form where you need to find six very flexible words as the repetitive end words. That is often the first step.
A Tyburn is similar, requiring one to find the first four words/phrases that will work together. The hardest part is finding a rhyme that will allow the structure.
I guess summing it up, I would say that you find the most difficult part to make work, and tackle that as your starting point. Once you have that down, the rest flows relatively easily.
Q. How does form influence creation?
A. Art is never done in freedom. All art, all creation, is done under constraints. There are several types of constraint in art: monetary, temporal, intentional, and artificial among them.
An architect will produce a different office building with a fifteen million dollar budget than with a one million dollar budget. If a sculptor gets a commission for a work, he may use different materials based on the cost of materials versus the amount of the commission. Maybe the sculpture will be marble instead of steel because of the cost of materials and price to work it. A painter who cannot afford a huge canvas may be able to afford a packet of smaller ones, so he’ll paint six miniatures rather than a wall-spanning canvas. Those are monetary constraints. Unless you are taking poetic commissions, you are unlikely to run into this type of constraint. Poetry usually takes time rather than money to produce. For a poet, a monetary constraint might come with enough cash to get his book an ISBN.
A temporal constraint deals with time. Does the building have to be finished before October when the snow flies in Minnesota? Does the sculpture have to be done by April 16th for the degree show? Does the painting have to be done by tomorrow for a gallery opening? These are examples of temporal constraints. Again, unless you are taking commissions or publishing, time constraints are seldom a factor. You might have to put out a poem for your wife’s birthday or write her one for your anniversary, but usually this isn’t a factor for poets.
The other two constraints are the ones we deal with every day.
Intentional constraints deal with purpose. If the architect is building an apartment house rather than an office building, it changes the specific applications of the building code. It changes the plumbing capacity needed. It changes the parking lot to space ratio. It changes many other factors. If the sculptor is building a work based on a commission from the city fathers, it will probably be more sedate than something created for a student degree show. If the painter is doing a portrait of a lady, it will be different than an urban mural of sea mammals on the wall of an opera house. Intention is reflected in the why. For a poet, writer or speechifier, one set of intentional constraints is the communication goals. Are we trying to inform, persuade, query, entertain, or some combination? A limerick is entertaining, but seldom meets the other three goals. A haiku is informative. It is good for painting an image in a few words, but would be terrible for persuasion. This brings us to the next set of constraints.
Artificial constraints are those imposed by the environment, tools, and materials. A brick building has different qualities than a glass and steel construction, as well as different strengths and weaknesses. A sculptor using steel works differently than one using stone. Different tools are used for the different media. One is cut and chipped away; the other heated, bent, and welded. A painter with a 4″ x 6″ canvas and oils is going to produce a different landscape than an artist with a 3′ x 4′ canvas and acrylic paints. For a poet, form is the set of artificial constraints. Ideally, form follows function. In other words, the intentional constraints are imposed first, which directs the artist to the form. An architect doesn’t look at a pile of bricks that he has laying around and think: “Gee, I can build something. I wonder what I should build?” Most of them have a commission or plan in their hands before they consider what materials will be used. With a poet, ideally one knows what one is trying to accomplish, and one can pick the form that best meets that potential.
The truth is that there is interplay. If the best form to achieve the goals and subject of the poem is a ballade, but the poet has never heard of a ballade, he may use a villanelle instead. Maybe the poet is required to write a Shakespearean sonnet for a class, so he determines his purpose for the poem based on that constraint.
Getting then to the meat of the issue, form influences creation through the interplay of intent with the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the form. A diamante is not a narrative form. It is created out of sixteen discrete words that do not interact grammatically. Instead, there are two base words, antonyms, which the other words describe or relate to. The only way that the diamante conveys a story is through the choice of a title and the direction downward from one polar opposite to the other. A ballad is meant to tell a story. A haiku is meant to convey an image, perhaps a metaphor comparing a natural event with a human one. Haiku is not meant to tell tales in the same way as the ballad. You can’t do with seventeen syllables what you can with hundreds of words.
Earlier I discussed finding the starting point of the poem. For each form it is different based on the hardest part of creating that form. For the haiku, it is in coming up with a fresh natural metaphor to describe something. After that, finding the words that convey that image in seventeen syllables is relatively easy. In writing a villanelle, creating the two refrains, which act both independently and as a couplet, is the most important factor in creating a successful villanelle. Of course, choosing the two rhymes is important, too. If you choose a rhyme ending that is hard to bring six or eight words on the topic to bear, things can get ugly. For instance, in my The Life and Times of Leaf the Red, the last word in the middle line of the first tercet is “travel.” I wound up with difficult going on the rhyme, following with: unravel, gravel, gavel, unravels, and gravel. It’s a good thing it is a bit of light verse, or I’d have to rewrite that with a new rhyme. Basically, you have to determine what the most important or difficult part of the form is and start there. This is another way that form interacts with the creative process.
So, those are a few questions to get things started. Let’s see if poetic form is as interesting a subject as concrete, or whether Concretevol just picked the wrong subject to be an expert in if he wanted to be the worst poster of the year. (And if you haven’t, I do urge you to check out Concretevol’s thread. It’s very interesting.)
Published in General
To assist Aaron in getting over some of his prejudices:
Sunset Dawn
Sunset is dawn on the other side of the world.
Our life is but a day to the eternal soul.
Do we live night and day lives that we do not see?
Have we breathed on other days forgotten by most?
Our life is but a day to the eternal soul.
If a life is a day, many days make the life.
Have we breathed on other days forgotten by most?
We live our lives with only short-term memory.
If a life is a day, many days make the life.
How many tiers of lives as days until we wake?
We live our lives with only short-term memory.
Lives like epispirals on greater spirals still.
How many tiers of lives as days until we wake?
Complexity by simple fractal equations,
lives like epispirals on greater spirals still,
when will we know that we are finally awake?
Complexity by simple fractal equations,
do we live night and day lives that we do not see?
When will we know that we are finally awake?
Sunset is dawn on the other side of the world.
That last is a pantoum. It’s a Malayan form based on repetition.
Definitely a poem.
Contrast in the Looking Glass
Ugliness
Repulsive, Unattractive
Revolting, Transfixing, Disgusting
Horror, Distaste, Splendor, Temptress
Alluring, Charming, Pleasing
Gorgeous, Magnificent
Beauty
There is another form that does not depend on rhyme or meter.
And, an old Persian form:
Prayer Wheel
There are many things that do not seem right, O Lord.
Man’s jurisprudence is not filled with light, O Lord.
Let me know Thy will for me in all ways;
Let me be sure in deepest, darkest night, O Lord.
Let me see the good in all happenings,
Or at least have the faith to know your might, O Lord!
Give me the strength to keep my eye single.
I am stayed on Thee in most dreadful plight, O Lord.
Let justice and mercy rule through thy will.
Give me the will to continue the fight, O Lord.
Let me know that whatever may happen,
It is ordained in your book what is right, O Lord.
It is thy will and determination
That events will come to pass in thy sight, O Lord.
I am one with the One Holy Spirit,
Infilled with gratitude of holy light, O Lord.
Sorry, my point stands. If the word “poetry” is to have meaning, then it must have limits. Perhaps the boundaries can be blurred, but they exist nonetheless. How do y’all define poetry if not in the traditional English manner?
As I said before, I can accept meter without rhyme or vise versa, granted a clear form. But merely breaking prose into lines doesn’t make it poetry.
Maybe this highlights a failure of translation. If another culture does not have a tradition of poetry like ours, it can be tempting to assume both are poetry and consequently dilute our own definition to squeeze the two together. But perhaps that assumption is false. Perhaps the various ways of playing with language and arranging it a brief, atypical form are not all poems but rather merit distinct definitions.
In any case, definitions are relative. For a single object, various labels might be used depending on what about it one hopes to communicate in a particular situation. There are times for precision and times for generality.
Perhaps our disagreement on definition regards a difference of purpose.
I can respect poetic prose and foreign or ancient traditions of this sort without considering them poetry. I might enjoy them separately. I just wouldn’t put them in a book together.
Your definition and understanding is small. What you consider the English tradition was invented by a guy named Geoff Chaucer to try to mediate between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon and the traditions of Norman French. It has changed every generation since. Shakespeare’s generation went with a more strict form and prosody. Why? Because the generation before them went with much looser prosody. What you think you know about poetry is an emotional construct. There is nothing wrong with that. And, in saying that I have a broader definition does not mean that I think anything goes. I prefer my art constrained by disciplines, I just don’t limit it to either this one or that one.
And if you are going to tell me that there was no poetry before Geoff Chaucer, just because he invented a prosody that worked well for Middle and Modern English, well, have fun with that belief. I suppose you will claim the Iliad and Odyssey are not poetry, either. They are in one of those ancient forms.
Poetry comes from a Greek word that means “made thing.” The literal interpretation of poet is “maker.”
Oh, dear. How about we just say that Aaron Miller prefers lyric poetry of a style that uses both rhyme and meter. Given what you have said, I don’t believe that is relative.
Two Ricochetoise
Cat
Four-legged mammal,
rough-tongued, warm-blooded, fluffy,
Meow, hiss; rattle, hiss
Fork-tongued, cold-blooded, scaly,
Limbless reptile,
Snake.
Dunno how you got center-adjusted text to extend over more than one line, though. Cats is magical, maybe.
That and I had to edit it about five times for it to take. (I hate WordPress!) Here is the descriptor of the Diamante form for you.
Again, I’m not implying a difference of value. I’m not saying “Ours is better”, nor that I dislike the alternatives. I’m suggesting only that the variations are differences of kind rather than of method. Homer’s tale is as different from a poem by Robert Frost as a symphony is from an advertising jingle for hot dogs. They are similar, but not part of a set.
When one is comparing a car to a bicycle, one uses the word “car” or “automobile.” When one is comparing a style of car to another, one uses “sports car” or “sedan” or “SUV”. When one is comparing a particular car to another, one says “Honda Accord” or “Ford Explorer”. That is all I mean by relativity. Each word is selected for its relevance to a particular conversation. The degree of specificity necessary varies by conversation.
We use the word “poetry” to distinguish a literary work from “prose”. That is its relevance, its purpose. If one cannot distinguish the two, then the labels become useless.
The word “poetry” in English vernacular does not refer to general making. But I suppose if I’m going to reference mainstream vernacular then I have surrendered to the Orwellian modern definition which lacks all definition.
You can have the last word if you want it. We don’t seem to be making progress. But that’s to be expected in an artistic dispute!
You think WordPress is bad? I typed most of those comments on my phone with Auto Correct fighting me the whole way. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it just wanted to suggest words. But it kept adding extra letters, splitting words into gibberish, replacing half a word with the word after it, and so on.
I will have to viciously murder Auto Correct in a future poem.
Aaron Miller: When one is comparing a particular car to another, one says “Honda Accord” or “Ford Explorer”
Right. Good analogy. You like rhymed verse of accentual-syllabic meter. This is like your Ford Explorer example, or better, Ford SUVs and trucks. There is also a world of unrhymed accentual-syllabic. This might be comparable to Ford cars. Together, they make Ford’s line-up of automobiles. But Ford also owns the Lincoln nameplate. This is like pure syllabic metered poetry. Yes, there is rhymed and unrhymed: cars and SUVs or trucks. Then they have the Troller nameplate. That’s like Quantitative Measure. Then they have Mercury, which are like the pure accentual forms. Not used so much anymore, but could still be revived. Then there’s FPV, which might be like Podic verse. So, there are five brands of metrical poetry. They are all poetry as all of these Ford cars and trucks are automobiles.
But, wait, there are more cars and trucks than are produced by Ford Motor Company. Likewise, there is more than just metered verse. For instance, Japan has poetry that is based on the Japanese language, and forms that have been translated in various ways for use in English and other Western countries and languages, just as Toyota makes vehicles that are sold in the markets of Western countries, many even built here. So, Japanese poetry includes the haiku, tanka, renga, etc. A Toyota is still an automobile. It’s not a Ford truck, but it is an automobile.
This doesn’t even get into Ducati motorcycles and their poetic equivalents.
So, what I’m saying is, you’re looking at the Ford nameplate, mostly at Ford trucks and saying, “These are automobiles, yeah, I guess even the Ford nameplate cars are included. But I won’t accept the Lincolns, Mercuries, or any of these others. I certainly won’t accept Toyotas or Ducatis. They just aren’t automobiles. They’ll have to call themselves something else, because I only like and want to drive Ford trucks.”
Your limited idea of what poetry is does not limit poetry. It only limits your vision and understanding of poetry..
I fully support you in this and in creating the Auto Correct song, which will earn you millions.
While feeding the cats, I thought of another fun (or really obnoxious) analogy. Having a highly-restricted definition of poetry is like saying, “Only White males are humans. I like White women, and all, but they’ll just have to come up with a new name for themselves. East Asian men are also not humans. They’ll need a name of their own. I like East Asian women, too, but…” Now, I realize that there are folks who have a “vernacular” definition of human that does not involve minorities, just as your “vernacular” definition of poetry does not involve anything outside of rhymed and/or accentual-syllabic. But the generally-accepted and scientific definitions of “Human” are broader, just as the generally-accepted and academic definitions of “poetry” are broader.
Well, I could just type the definition from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, but that could take a few weeks. So, a shorter version: poetry is a verbal art centered around the line, rather than the sentence of prose. As an art, poetry aims for a higher plain of expression through use of a heightened mode of discourse, specifically deploying heightened language and a higher density of poetic devices, which may also include traditional mnemonic devices used in the past before the art of writing had been developed or fully spread.
These mnemonic devices include rhythm and rhyme, anaphora, alliteration and assonance, and many others that were important to a pre-literate society.
I was honestly surprised when you wrote this. With it’s melting-pot variety, I thought English would be one of the best for rhyming. Are other languages much more suited? do you speak other languages?
And – – why ‘sardine’?!
How many end-letters would we have to rhyme in Italian? Five? Almost everything ends in a vowel. The French don’t pronounce half the word, especially final consonants. They also have five nasal sounds where it doesn’t matter if the word ends in, say “on” or “om” or “ont” because they are pronounced the same. Most French verbs are in one of three regular forms, which makes any verb often rhyme with another. Likewise, in German, they have case endings which means almost any two nouns can rhyme if they are in the same number and case. In many Indo-European languages, you can tell what part of speech a word is just by looking at the end of it, the rhyming end. So, you use the same parts of speech at the end of two lines, and you’re golden.
English was such a mix of different languages that we gave up on case endings and regular verbs long ago.
Have you ever been sitting around with a bunch of crazy friends and wanted to come up with a name for a new product, and the juices started flowing until you were all laughing so hard your sides hurt? That form is a mixture of the Petrarchan sonnet (from Italy) and the redondilla (from Spain). One suggestion was sonondilla. Another was that since Corsica was between Italy and Spain and the lines are shorter than in most sonnets, it could be called a Napoleonic sonnet. (Boney was from Corsica, of course.) There were several other suggestions, but another regarding geography noted that Sardinia was also between the Italian Peninsula and Spain, and the lines, being shorter, might be considered tightly packed. While I originally stuck with Sonondilla, everyone else loved sardine, and so it is today. If I remember rightly, I even used an open can of sardines as the cover graphic for my magazine in the month we featured the form.
Putting it another way playing off this, the problem is too much variety. We have words from lots of different root languages. In those root languages, nearly everything is standardized. It’s not that we don’t have standards that produce rhymes, it’s that we have far too many standards. Also, the words and phrases that we absorb often get changed as they go. But, if they don’t, and if they are known as a foreign phrase where the vowel sounds used are foreign, then they don’t rhyme with English words that are spelled the same. After all, does en passant rhyme with “ant” or “want?” So, that actually exacerbates the rhyme problem.
That made me laugh.
The guy who came up with both Napoleonic sonnet and sardine is Chuck Lipsig, a poet and playwright who lives in Florida. He is truly a character.
um, I did make an ode to the Ricochetti back in December – I mention it just in case you didn’t see it, and everyone who has commented here is named, in the spirit of silliness. It’s here. But truly it is the lightest of light verse.
I was struck by your explanation that poetry as a means of communication may persuade or inform. Isn’t that more the job of prose? I’ve always thought lyrical poetry is mainly intended to express feelings, make observations, or to describe things. Narrative poetry tells a story. In that regard, I can see how poetry informs.
But how has poetry been used to persuade? (And as I type that, I can already think of an answer or objection to my point …) Anyway, if my purpose is to persuade, isn’t it more effective just to use prose instead of poetry? (And here I betray I’m a philistine.)
Well, it is often doggerel, but are you familiar with product jingles? How about these ads.