Syllabics

 If you were to come across a ten-syllable lined poem, you would probably expect it to be iambic pentameter. And you would probably be right. However, regular meter is not the only possibility when creating a poem with a regular number of syllables. 

A poem with a regular number of syllables, but without meter, is known as a syllabic poem. There can be something charming in such a poem, where the regularity of the lines creates the pattern. The inclusion of other patterns--end rhymes and alliteration, for example--can bring a little more poetic order to the irregularity of the rhythms within the lines. 

Syllabics is hardly a new form for most people. Most people are familiar with the haiku, a popular Japanese form. The haiku is created by counting syllables and putting them into three lines. Five syllables, followed by seven, followed by five. (Note, a poem is only a haiku if it's a nature poem; if your 5-7-5 syllable poem isn't about nature, it's a senryu.) Thus, a haiku (or senryu) is a syllabic form. This is the case with many Chinese and Japanese forms, because of the sound structures of the languages. However, as the popularity of this form among Anglophone poets indicates, English can certainly fit well into these forms. 

How I Was Moved to Feed the Birds

The black grackle hopped

Up onto the patio

Its feet puddle-damp.

As you can see, the above is a proper haiku. If you are concerned about being too constricted by the number of syllables, you can always give it a nice, long title, as I have done with this one. Let me show you a poem in which I balance out the syllabics (10-count in this case) with rhyme:

Constructal Trees

I love the branching form of dicot trees--
Order, chaos, criticality please
The eye with expectation and a tease
Of difference. The bald cypresses have knees
That clear the water. Mangroves border seas
And branch above and below their trunks. Breeze
Brings movements to branches as their leaves seize
The air. A few have flowers, attract bees
And bats and birds and butterflies. Decrees
Are sung from their branches. We feel disease
If we're too far away from their firm lees
And their shadow darkening a few degrees
From the heat. And what other guarantees
Our air, ensuring that we do not wheeze
Through life? (Unless their pollen makes us sneeze.)
Complex beauty belongs to all of these--
We thus must always be all life's trustees.

The use of the same rhyme in each line is intended to box in the poem a little more, making up for the looseness of the syllabics. Of course, you don't have to do that at all. You can just leave it loose, which itself creates its own sonic feel:

 Rebirth

The man I was, the child I've become

Are separated by the gulf of Hell--

A sea-voyage past terrible islands,

Into storm-tosses seas of chaos--without

The benefit of the taste of Lethe.

Surrounded by black flames and spirits I

Wrestled with the Devil until I won

The right to sail from the storm and away

From the beautiful islands of joy--bliss

Blew in from the west to carry me, cold, 

Up to the rising sun creating new 

Horizons of rosy-red, orange, and gold 

Spread across the sea--evening's rainbow sea

Shining smooth in front of me in blue miles.

Nothing can be the same for me from now.

I have returned to these stone shores, reborn,

A child once again, I'm living wonder--

A child returned from graves of living men--

A child with eyes that learned to understand

In ways the man I was could never do,

Blinded by my dark, preconcepted world.

Now, I see the world I thought I knew--dark

Is light. I return to these shores, reborn. 

There are some who may, perhaps, consider this a kind of prose with line breaks (I have complained about such in the past), but the regularity of the line breaks creates a different feeling than if the line breaks were more irregular. This makes it something other than free verse. Forms are all created through regularities.

I think that syllabics are more interesting once you have mastered meter. There's a difference between creating syllabics because you want to and creating them because you don't know how to write in meter. I encourage you to work on mastering meter first, and then trying your hand at syllabics. There's a lot of potential in syllabics, but only among the most skilled at the other poetic forms. 

Bob and Wheel

 Different languages have developed different poetic traditions because of the sound structures of those languages. For example, the Germanic languages had, early on, before the influence of Latin poetry and those of the Latinate languages (especially Italian and French), been dominated by alliterative forms. 

Alliteration is, of course, the repetition of initial sounds. The Old English poem, Beowulf, and those Norse Sagas written in verse are all alliterative. There are fewer words with end rhymes in the Germanic languages than in the Latinate languages, so as a consequence, other sound patterns emerged. Further, the languages are dominated by hard consonants, so it would be natural for hard consonants in particular to emerge as a rhythmic structuring device. 

In the Latinate languages, we find a lot of end rhymes. Thus, we should not be surprised to find that there is a lot of use of end rhymes in their poetry. Latin poetry was heavily influenced by Greek poetry, which emphasized rhythms such as iambic (which the Greeks considered to be a comic rhythm). As French and Latin entered into the English language, their styles of poetry did as well. Regular rhythms emerged, as did end rhyme. But of course, these things did not just happen overnight.

Thus, after the Norman conquest of England in the 11th Century, it's not surprising that we would find transitional poetry such as that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the 14th century. While the main part of each stanza of The Green Knight is alliterative, each also ends with what is known as a "bob and wheel," in which regular rhythms and end rhyme come into play. 

All three translations I have of The Green Knight include the bob-and-wheel, but only two--Marie Borroff's and Brian Stone's translations--attempt to alliterate throughout the work, while W.S. Merwin's does not (nor do his bob-and-wheels rhyme correctly). The latter does, however, have the original on the facing page. We'll discuss issues of translation at a later date, so I will only note that in the tension between meaning and music, some translators tend toward one over the other. 

The stanza structure in The Green Knight is approximately 15-25 alliterative lines followed by a bob-and-wheel, which has the following structure:

rhythm    rhyme     structure

u/u/           a            bob
u/u/u/        b            wheel
u/u/u/        a            wheel
u/u/u/        b            wheel
u/u/u/        a            wheel

Here is an example of Stone's translation of stanza 30, the last two alliterative lines leading into the bob-and-wheel:

And there was none but said his nay, for never in their lives

Had they set eyes on someone of such hue

        As green.

    His way was wild and strange

    By dreary hill and dean.

    His mood would many times change

    Before that fane was seen. 

I would perhaps have made "many times" "often" in order to perfect the rhythm, but you get the idea of what this structure looks like. In any case, you will note that the bob is enjambed with the last line of the alliterative portion of the stanza. This ensures the continuity of the alliterative portion with the bob-and-wheel.

I've played with this structure myself, though I created a longer bob and a shorter wheel:

        Guide Light

        In the blue is the moon, a milk mass
        Whose place is purple dawn, a pregnant
        Betrayal of time and expectation
        When the sun is supposed to be set in the sapphire
        Alone to light our lives. Who's she
                Who'll be
                So free
            Beside the sun --
            Why won't she run?

        I thought the dark was destined to draw
        Me through my life, to thread and to threaten
        In ceaseless new moon nights that would nudge
        Me graveward and grant me a gravity that death
        Couldn't strangle out of me. Still the steel,
                Reveal
                The wheel
            That turned my life
            From death's blue knife.

        But the moon that is doubling the day will dip
        Into the night enough so that nothing
        Is encompassed by the dark that has come to claim
        My mind -- she will mend my heart and move
        Me to the dawn so the devils will dance
                The lance.
                Entrance
            Me to the day
            Where I can stay.

Certainly, there are other ways you can play with the bob-and-wheel structure, or you can simply use it as originally conceived. While alliteration has gotten a bad name in English poetry for a long time, I suspect that bad name has come about from a degree of Latin-based snobbery. I think there's probably a lot of potential still in alliterative verse, especially to the degree that it draws us into the Germanic origins of English through sound. More, I think there's something charming about the bob-and-wheel structure. It's something worth playing with. What can you create using this transitional structure? How might it become a transitional structure for you? 

Concrete Poetry

 

George Herbert's "Easter Wings" is perhaps the most famous and most successful concrete poem ever created. With concrete poetry, it's the arrangement of the words on the page to create an image which is what's important--far more than the poem making sense, or any other poetic element. 

Concrete poetry goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. It should be obvious that it's a product of writing, and in many ways it truly emphasizes the ways in which writing transformed poetry. It also can be understood as part of a shift to the visual in the arts. While an oral form, rhythm and rhyme and other elements typically considered "poetic" were necessary to maintain in memory; writing allowed these rules to be loosened, for writers to play with words that sound the same but have different spellings and words that are spelled the same but have different sounds, and for the creation of images. 

But let me ask you this: is this work by Todd Camplin (yes, he's my brother) a concrete poem?

It's made up of words, but they are arranged to create different kinds of patterns, with those patterns and the colors coming to be emphasized. Yet, how different is this from other forms of concrete poetry, especially those in which there is no real meaning to the poems other than the patterns created out of the arrangement of the words?

Concrete poetry challenges the boundaries between the visual arts and the literary arts, creating meaning in the images--sometimes in addition to the meaning of the poem, sometimes despite the words themselves not seeming to have any linguistic meaning (a concrete poem of a swan that used the word "neck" in the swan's neck is clever, but does it really contribute to the meaning?). 

For my money, the real challenge in writing a concrete poem is for it to have linguistic meaning as well as visual meaning. Anyone can construct an image out of random words. Herbert is cleverer than that. And while there is something to be said for people who do things like Josep Maria Junoy in his "Ars Poetic," once it's done, it's done. You're just copying Junoy after that.

The same can be said of Louis Aragon's concrete poem "Suicide":

Aragon and Junoy are both Modernist poets, and both are clearly experimenting with a kind of poetic minimalism. The titles of each concrete poem is doing the work of creating the meaning, causing us to ask why what we see is being called "the art of poetry" or "suicide." The complete dissolution of words and letters into a pure visual field by Todd Camplin is a postmodern approach to concrete poetry, as you have no linguistic meaning whatsoever and are left with nothing but visual meaning--and even that meaning is more an appreciation of the design, as we often find in postmodern art. 

Concrete poetry can range from having linguistic meaning as well as visual meaning to a complete breakdown into pure visual meaning alone. When it no longer has linguistic meaning, though, can we truly call it a poem? Or has it become something else? And where does that line exist? Or is that line itself fuzzy? Those are all things you can investigate in creating concrete poems. 

Metamodern Poetry: A Discussion of My Book, Diaphysics

 In this interview, I discuss my book, Diaphysics*. While it's a work of philosophy, it's wide-ranging, and there is an extensive discussion of language. Since this blog is titled The Metamodern Poet, there will be a few discussions of that world view. After viewing this video, think about what these ideas might mean for poetry. How might different ways of thinking, different values, affect your poetry? My philosophical ideas may simply be a bunch of nonsense to you, and that's fine. I only hope it will stimulate thought, and if it gets a reaction of any kind, and if it stimulates the creation of poetry, then it will have done its job.