Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Commonalities in prosody, rhythm, and rhyme
The seamless book of poetry
Long-form genres

First and foremost, poetry—like any other kind of creative writing—should be entertainment. Sadly, over the years, it has become virtually the preserve of an academically affiliated elite, a handful of whom control the decisions of many publishers and major award committees (at least in the United States). Indeed, the average college-educated American and even many college English professors struggle to relate to or even make sense of much of the poetry being published today.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when almost all poetry was written in proper verse that rhymed and often appeared in newspapers for the pleasure of the public—it was still something of a democratic art form. Despite the slow swing toward an obscure and still-shrinking readership, poetry benefits even now from clever deployments of rhyme and scansion in making it memorable. The rhythmic form of the poem can even add value to the words used. Clearly, Shakespeare thought there was some merit in writing all his plays in iambic pentameter (de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum) while a metric form such as anapest adds the galloping tiddy-dum, tiddy-dum rhythm that puts pace and spirit into a narrative unlike any other writing form.

Almost all my fellow poets in academia would be chagrined that much of my own book of poems, albeit written in a language other than English and bearing a name other than Casey Clabough, possesses a fair amount of rhyme and scan. I have been informed these devices are now unnecessary in English and can restrict and shape what’s said. I argue that it makes things more difficult, challenging, and risky and, therefore, serves a purpose. Just finishing isn’t enough—it’s how you get there that matters. Surely there are times when more difficult is more enjoyable and making things easier—as in so-called free verse—serves only to take away the best of the challenge.

The rhythm of poetry

I introduced rhythm in Chapter 13, but let’s go into a bit more detail here. Sticking to matters of structure, rhythm, or meter, refers to the accented and unaccented syllables in verse, and so the foot is also known as a metric foot. The analysis of the composition of a verse is known as scanning or scansion. The following table offers a quick rundown of the most common types of meter.

It’s important to remember, however, that meter is not a template or pattern to be followed slavishly when producing a poem, but rather used as a means of describing what you’ve written. It’s easy to think the former because so much is written about the subject and it appears, on the face of it, to be so prescriptive. The most important thing is to write what feels and sounds natural and comfortable to you. Others might disagree, and that’s their right, but it’s perfectly acceptable to mix feet lengths and metric forms, as long as it sounds and reads naturally and is, of course, executed consistently.

IDEAS AND INSPIRATION

The Bard himself (in his iambic pentameters) regularly used accentless feet and ended lines with an extra unaccented syllable, making the last foot an amphibrach rather than an iamb (and sometimes known as feminine iambic pentameter). It’s also perfectly acceptable, in moderation, to vary a word’s natural stress to make it fit a verse’s accent pattern. If a reader criticizes part of a poem because it doesn’t “conform” in some way, as long as it sounds okay, be sure that if the depths of the theory of prosody are delved into, an exception could be found to justify being criticized. Use the rules of prosody to justify what you write, rather than as a mold into which you fit your poem.

It is possible, and perfectly correct, to mix certain metric forms in a single verse. An example of this can be achieved in an iamb plus an appropriate number of anapests (plus a spare unaccented or feminine syllable—more on masculine and feminine symbols in a few paragraphs):

Amphibrach amphibrachic trimeter:

Iamb + two anapests:

Robert Browning’s poem “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” uses a nice mixture of three amphibrachs and one final iamb, or one initial iamb and three anapests:

Three amphibrachs and an iamb:

I SPRANG to / the STIRrup, / and JORis, / and HE:

I GALLoped, / Dirck GALLoped, / we GALLoped / all THREE;

One iamb and three anapests:

I SPRANG / to the STIR / rup, and JOR / is, and HE:

I GALL / oped, Dirck GALL / oped, we GALL / oped all THREE;

It doesn’t matter how it’s described; the effect is the same—and this further illustrates the point that scansion describes rather than prescribes what’s written. It’s impossible to imagine Browning sitting tapping out the beat to see what he could write to conform to his meter. On the other hand, it’s absolutely easy to see him with this wonderful galloping rhythm beating in his head and the words flowing easily in response.

The rhyming of poetry

Rhyme is the repetition of the sound of one word or the last syllable(s) of one word in a second word or the last syllable(s) of a second word. What’s important is the sound and not the spelling. Thus, rough rhymes with buff but not with through. The rhyme is constituted by the vowel sound(s), and each part of the rhyme (the two words or syllables) must begin with a different consonant. Two words with totally different spellings and meanings but identical pronunciation cannot be rhymed. While rough can be rhymed with buff, it cannot be rhymed with ruff because the two words have identical sounds.

WATCH OUT!

In poetry, rhyming words would normally occur at the end of two lines, which may or may not be adjacent to each other. How the rhyming lines are arranged within the poem is unimportant, but whatever the pattern used, it must be consistent. So lines can quite properly rhyme a-a-b-b, or a-b-a-b or a-b-a-c or a-b-c-b where a represents the first rhyme sound; b, the second; and so on. (More on rhyme scheme in the following paragraphs.)

The word rhyme is sometimes seen spelled rime. If anything, this is the more correct spelling, although little used, because the word derives from the Provençal word rim. At some point in its history, the word was falsely identified with the Greek word rhythmos (from which the word rhythm, for “comes”), yet the Greeks had no concept of rhyme.

Rhyme is optional in many forms of verse, but there are many other forms in which a pattern of rhyming is fundamental to the structure. Where used, rhyme adds much to a group of words, enriching both the sound and the sense.

Where a line ends with an accented syllable, it is deemed to have a strong ending and is thus described as masculine rhyme. This is either achieved with monosyllabic words like mind, kind, or blind, or with polysyllabic words ending on an accented syllable like today, delay, or defray. Iambic or anapestic lines normally end in this way. Trochaic or dactylic lines can also end on an accented syllable but only if one or two unaccented syllables are truncated.

Rhyme ending on an unaccented syllable is said to be weak and, thus, described as feminine. However, although feminine rhyme ends on an unaccented syllable, it must also include a preceding accented one, and both syllables must sound the same to achieve perfect rhyme. Grammar rhymes with hammer, for example, but not with simmer or dumber, even though all end in the same unaccented sound. Feminine rhyme is also known as trochaic rhyme because it follows the pattern of a trochee, and a perfect trochaic line must have this type of rhyme.

There are many other rhyme schemes you can look up and study. Some of the more common ones include dactylic, near, imperfect, unaccented, half, spelling, identity, dissonance, assonance, alliteration, constant, and grotesque.

Usually, you apply rhyme in a fixed pattern. It requires two lines to create a rhyme, but these don’t have to be adjacent to each other. Where two successive lines do, in fact, rhyme, this is known as a rhyming couplet. This is the simplest and arguably the most common form of rhyme.

When denoting a rhyme scheme, the convention is to use a letter of the alphabet (starting with a) to denote each successive rhyme. Thus, the rhyme scheme of a rhyming couplet would be denoted as a-a, b-b, c-c, d-d, etc. Alternately rhyming lines would be represented as a-b, a-b. Typically, certain verse forms use established rhyme patterns such as these:

Couplet: a-a, b-b. etc.

Triplet (tercet): a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d. etc.

Quatrain: a-a-b-b, or a-b-a-b

Quintet (cinquain): x-a-b-b-a

In addition, certain stanza forms have fixed-rhyme patterns. For example, a four-line ballad stanza would rhyme x-a, y-a, where x and y are random.

IDEAS AND INSPIRATION

Rhyme can be used in poetry other than at the end of a line. Rhyme at the beginning or in the middle of a line is used to achieve effect much in the same way as alliteration. No pattern is necessary, and it can be quite random.

Having examined poems and their construction in greater depth, you now have some working tools and techniques for arranging your own into something book-length that constitutes more than the sum of its poems.

The culture of poetry in the United States may have grown obscure and not a little decadent in the grand scheme of art, but the craft itself remains the most powerful avenue for utilizing words to convey human experience.

The least you need to know

·  Identifying commonalities in your poems is essential to organizing your collection.

·  Common images and metaphors strengthen your bond with your readership.

·  Tracing density and intensity is important in identifying and grouping your poems.

·  Commonalities in prosody, rhythm, and rhyme conspire more than anything else to make you the kind of poet you are and place a signature of sorts on your collection.