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Orca's
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Poets so often get hung up trying to learn (or "remember"), the FORMS of poetry. You'll note that I avoided talking too much about "forms" in past write-ups, no doubt to the puzzlement of eager new poets, and the consternation of those old cows who consider adherence to poetic form akin to a Puritan religion, so vital are these rigors for the new poet to prove both sanctity and mettle. Well, you won't hear all that stuff from me. Count me among the miscreants inside Old Salem, wearing some big red letter like Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. This writer believes it is far more important for a poet to master poetic sensibility before he or she messes too much with the fixed forms of centuries of English and world poetry. That means learning about and trying out in all manner of experiment--and followed by hard practice--the art of sound recognition and the use of sound, the weapon of metaphor, and the extension of English grammar and syntax into the tight, essential world of verse. After that, the "forms" of poetry, both fixed and traditional, or otherwise radical and new, can further fuse a poet's message into a light all readers can follow with profit, and without, hopefully, having the bloody torch shined in their eyes. With that sizable caveat, my little Pearl, we begin
the schoolbook discussion of FORMS.
TYPES OF METER We have touched on this in past write-ups. Here's a bit more. Meter is the measure of a poem's lines. The line of a poem can be measured just by syllables, or by where the accents or stresses in a line are (say a line aloud, naturally, and you HEAR the stresses), or by a combination of both syllables and accents made into Poetic Feet. A foot is a group of syllables arrayed in a set pattern, consisting of stressed (accented) and unstressed syllables. CONSTRUCTION OF FEET AND LINES A poem in fixed meter will have a pattern of lines with particular numbers of weak syllables, strong accented ones, or in a combination, those things called feet. There may be the same number of feet in each line, or the poet may set up a different, though fixed pattern of lines with different, but preordained numbers of feet within each set of lines. Most of the modern poetry you' ll run into, and much of the romantic poetry you remember in school, is based on the third choice above, the combination of syllables and stresses we call accentual syllablic meter. Such meter follows a particular pattern, and much of it is in a weak (unstressed)-then-strong (stressed) pattern of syllables in each foot. (That particular style of foot is called iambic, or an iamb.) That pattern can be set VERY "regular" (all iambs), or it can be varied, with additional syllables added to or subtracted from some feet either before or after a stress. The number of total stresses, or "beats" in a line (you can count them off in your hand) could be one, two, three, four, five beats, or even six beats (or more.) Number of stresses (beats) AND their unstressed syllables are laid out this way in feet: Monometer: (one foot to a line) Dimeter: (two feet to a line) Trimeter: (three feet to a line) Tetrameter: (four feet to a line) Pentameter: (five feet to a line) Hexameter [also called Alexandrine]:
Octameter: (eight feet to a line) and so on... The most common line-length used is pentameter, although the slightly shorter tetrameter is a close second-- and the latter is also the length of many of the simplest, sweetest poems you first learned. The combinations of iambic pentameter and iambic tetrameter are the most common poetic lines of all-- since they are the poetic utterances closest to most human speech. (This does not mean that ALL the feet have to have of that iambic weak/strong configuration, unless the poet intends it to be that strictest of patterns. But a majority of feet in most lines will tend to be in that style.) Now, ALL STYLES of feet CAN be inserted to make the poem flow one way or another, or to alter the sometime monotony of too many iambs. The styles are detailed below, weak syllable being "duh", and strong/stressed syllable (a counted beat) being "DUH." iambic, iamb (duh DUH) we FLY monosyllabic foot (DUH) SHOOT! trochaic, trochee (DUH duh) MONster spondaic, spondee (DUH DUH) CANEBRAKE anapestic, anapest (duh duh DUH) to a MAN dactylic, dactyl (DUH duh duh) SUCcubus pyrrhic (duh duh, with no stress attached the CAMel's LIFE [is a] DREARry ONE in the middle of a line) [pyrrhic above in brackets] hypermetrical (as an extra "duh" to MISS, and BE withOUT a SIS (ter) after a STRESS at end of a line) [hypermetrical above in brackets] amphibrach (duh DUH duh) stuPENDous amphimacer (DUH duh DUH) CHARing CROSS tribrach (duh duh duh) ON [ly to be] DASHED [ly to be] is a tribrach molussus (DUH DUH DUH) COLD GRAY STONES bacchius (duh DUH DUH) maSADA antibacchius (DUH DUH duh) STILL WET the Ionic
The styles listed down through HYPERMETRICAL you see a lot in poetry. Those below that, you'll see, but less often. They come primarily from classical poetic forms, the Greek and Roman-- although you WILL see ANY of the above quite often in prose. So, here are your building blocks for poems. Next time, we'll start to arrange those blocks in actual FIXED FORMS. (Yes, yes, sonnets, villanelles, blank verse, the works.) Be there, ye goode boys and girls-- if not, well, one way or another, the pillory awaits. AL The sonnet carries with it many of the basic conventions and motivations poets write poems for, and for this reason, it is why sonneteers tend to linger in this particular fixed form. Well, to linger is not to loiter, less you be picked up for no visible means of support. What are those basics, that lure the sonnet has, and how can you make something of it? It is compact-- 14 lines A slice of the musical universe, a slice of being, or life. It carries what in music would be called the most pristine and perhaps logical form available-- actually what could be called a SONATA form--this being theme, variation, recapitulation (and, we might add--TRANSFORMATION of the listener/reader.) It dictates discipline--an adherance to ruled order, easily understood, a clef on which to hang scales, and on which to measure bars. it encourages and allows the daring poet to push its boundaries, since distinctiveness against rote form has come to characterize the greatest sonnets ever written-- of minute aspects of variation of the theme, of harmonics (both sound and symbolic reference) within the melody, to an occasionally suspended bar-line of rhythm (something other than iambs, perhaps), to an out-and-out dissonance even, to a wry agreement, and to a moment, at its very end, of utter transience, and clarity. When written badly, it is horrendous. When written well, it is more than you could possibly ask for. It's a lot, the sonnet-- so don't take it lightly, or you'll deserve the derision you face in the folly of doing so. Now that we've said all that, yes NOW (and not a minute earlier) we'll give you a few rote recipes-- just remember that in so doing you're striving to make ambrosia, not corn muffins, and Mozart, not music to mosh by. (da DUH), and the meter usually pentameter (five stresses, with their feet), although tetrameter (four) is also seen. We'll letter the lines according to their ending in like end-rhymes, with each NEW type of end-rhyme picking up its own letter. (Actually a sonnet does NOT have to rhyme, but it usually does, and in the forms here and below, it always does.) The poems can be divided, for purpose of not only form but of contemplation of meaning as the piece unfolds, to various parts. The first six lines are called the octave, the last six the sestet. In the English (Shakespearean) Sonnet, there are three four-line stanzas called quatrains, and one two-line stanza called a couplet. Now, this can be a bit of deceiving labelling, in that these stanzas (and including the couplet at the end) are usually brought together as a single block of text. (Often, though, the end couplet will be indented.) In the Italian, or Petrarchan Sonnet, there are two quatrains, followed by two trios of lines, called tercets. As stated, the tercets can be taken onto different rhyme schemes according to the direction the poet decides to take in that particular poem. Note the differences in the rhyming patterns between the three major forms. ENGLISH
ITALIAN
SPENSERIAN
OctaOctave
c
a
b Quatrain
Sestet
Of the above, the English, understandably perhaps, is the most prevalent form written IN ENGLISH. This is probably due to the deserved immortality of Shakespeare's massive 154 sonnets-- although, as an aside, not all of them are as incredibly good as some others of them, but they are all pretty darn good-- the same thing one could say, in music, of Beethoven's 32 immortal piano sonatas, or, to choke a fat horse, Scarlatti's monumental 555. The Italian is also popular, actually the most popular WORLDWIDE, and that's as it should be--since it was the form from which all sonnets actually came, back in the thirteenth century As you can see, the form gives the poet several standard variations he might follow toward the end of the poem. (Petrarch, then Dante, made these famous.) The Spenserian (which is also English, attributed to the poet Edmund Spenser) is less widely seen today, but was also an antecedent to the Shakespearian, or that which is is NOW known as the English Sonnet. More important than all this substructure for dictated rhyming is the concept of thematic set-up, variation, and release the sonnet embodies. In a sonnet the octave, the first eight lines, sets the scene or idea; at just that "mid" point, called the volta, the scene or idea "turns" in some way (just as most musical compositions do, and ALL sonatas do), leading the reader to a conclusion, ultimately defined in the closing couplet of the seset, that goes far from where we started in the aforementioned octave, but not so far that we can't see where we came from. In fact, nowhere in poetry should the "ah!" quotient we like to see on a poem's ending be as naturally profound as in the sonnet-- considering the formal construction of a planned buildup over the octave, transformed at the volta, and resolved in the seset. So important is this process that if you haven't paid attention to it, you may not have written a sonnet at all--just, instead, a bad rhyming poem with fourteen lines. So to write a sonnet for God's sake, have an idea what you want to say about life or people, or things, and set out in your poem to transform one particular scene into another, the one which you REALLY wanted to get across all along. If you like, look at this form almost like a giant simile-- this is this (Octave), but (the Volta) is REALLY more like (the Sestet) THAT (the inevitable closing couplet.) Now when you can do that, plus vary your pentameter (or tetrameter) and play artfully with your well-considered rhymes (OR NO RHYMES ALL--just OCTAVE and SESTET)--you'll be writing sonnets. Real ones. And if you're going to write sonnets, prepare for
an exploration-- of form yes, music too, but more, much more,
of transformation-- of the lines, of your reader, and maybe even,
of you.
AL
A villanelle is a poem of nineteen lines, five three-line stanzas followed by one four- line stanza, usually in lines of either all tetrameter (4 beats) or all pentameter (5 beats), with alternating end-rhymes patterned aba, aba, aba, aba, abaa, and with one other, vital twist. The first, then third line of the poem actually alternate as the last line of stanzas 2, 3, and 4, and then end stanza 5, and the poem itself, as a couplet. What does that look like? Like this: PRE-RAPHAELITES Beauty clouds by accident and surprise
In tempera, forms the icon we surmise
Sculpting virgins out of marble, pieces fly,
A crease, a curve, soft to sight, it lies
But you, bright love, who set yourself astride,
You know, too well, an artist knows he dies
Two of the most famous villanelles, also in pentameter, are Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" and William Empson's "Slowly the Poison the Whole Bloodstream Fills." (Empson wrote many villanelles, and was a master of the form.) Just as the sonnet's core was the "turn" of the poem's direction or meaning after the first eight lines, the villanelle, another fixed form with patterned rhyme, relies heavily on a specific artifice-- that of the two repeated lines. These lines, even as they are repeated, also change in both position and meaning through the poem, increasing in irony until the final couplet fairly shimmers with that special substance. In that sense, the villanelle is a first cousin to the sonnet, not in rhyme scheme or construction per se, but definitely in intent to be something more than at first it seems. Villanelles are NOT easy to write well, and the reason is not so much the meter, the repetition, or the rhyme. It is in building the impact of the repeated message high enough and clear enough (woven into all the supporting lines) not to be drowned by this poem's inherently complicated "form," but rather, enchancing and completing the form. Most attempted villanelles fail to do that well. It is the part than cannot copied, only created. The two repeating lines of the villanelle have
to be exceptionally strong, or the villanelle will be terrible.
If you don't have that strong core couplet--really the center of your poetic
thought-- you don't have a villanelle--you just have a piece of crap in
"villanelle" form. So work hard to find a couplet that can stand
the strain, one that might have two different, or even several different
shades of meaning, depending on how they are supported by the poem's other
lines. As with sonnets and other rhymed forms, find good, natural
rhymes or off-rhymes to go with those repeated lines, and let the poem
flow--don't force anything. If the couplet really is strong,
and you build throughout the poem, you might have something to be really
proud of. Otherwise, we'll have something to pick on you for.
So do the work. Like the sonnet, a villanelle is not just
a "rhymed, metered form." It is a well-planned and musical slice
of piercing, honest philosophy, a piece of life, a part of you, and maybe
me, and is only incidentally clever.
AL
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