Lit 2: Versification

1. Lit 2: Versification Week 10 Lecture 2

2. What is a poem? • Mary Oliver: A Poetry Handbook • “Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive it – indeed the world’s need of it – these never pass.”

3. William Caros Williams: From: Williams's introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (NY: New Directions, 1969), p. 256. • To make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant. • Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

4. The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th ed) • A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice.

5. What is versification? • The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th ed) • What your eye sees on the page is the composer’s verbal score, waiting for your voice to bring it alive as you read it aloud or hear it in your mind’s ear. Unlike our reading of a newspaper, the best reading – that is to say, the most satisfying reading – of a poem involves a simultaneous engagement of eye and ear.: the eye attentive not only to the meaning of words, but to their grouping and spacing as lines on a page; the ear attuned to the grouping and spacing of sounds.

6. Rhythm, meter and rhyme • http://server.riverdale.k12.or.us/~bblack/meter.html

7. Rhyme • The agreement of two metrically accented syllables and their terminal consonants. (Mary Kinzie, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry) • End rhyme – at ends of lines • Internal rhymes – within lines and between lines • Assonance – repetition of vowel sounds • Onomatopoeia – the word/s sound like what they denote – “the caw of the crow, harsh as hessian” • Masculine rhyme – one syllable • Feminine rhyme – two syllables or more

8. No hard and fast rules for us! • All sorts of variations other than perfect rhyme – bend/mend – so the consonants can equate, the vowels can equate etc – it’s about the sound. • “Love rhymes with of” - article from Project Muse by Anne Ferry – says that the general acceptance of a looser rhyme marks the twentieth century.

9. Form • The ‘shape’ or ‘pattern’ or ‘genre’ of the poem. • For example the sonnet, or the villanelle.

11. How sleep the brave who sink to restBy all their country’s wishes blest!When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,Returns to deck their hallowed mold,She there shall dress a sweeter sodThan Fancy’s feet have ever trod. By fairy hands their knell is rung,By forms unseen their dirge is sung;There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray,To bless the turf that wraps their clay,And Freedom shall awhile repair,To dwell a weeping hermit there! Williams Collins – Ode Written in the Begniing of the Year 1746

12. Free verse

13. Free verse so much dependsupon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the whitechickens