The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (29 page)
When you have finished, try this as the second part of your rhyming exercise. Take your notebook and wander about the house and garden, if you have one. If you are not reading this at home, then wander around your office, hospital ward, factory floor or prison cell. If you are outside or on a train, plane or bus, in a café, brothel or hotel lobby you can still do this. Simply note down as many things as you can see, hear or smell. They need not be nouns, you can jot down processes, actions, deeds. So, if you are in a café, you might write down:
smoking, steam, raincoat, lover’s tiff, cappuccino machine, sipping, flapjacks, cinnamon, jazz music, spilt tea
and so on–whatever strikes the eye, ear or nose. Write a list of
at least
twenty words. When you’ve done that, settle down and once more see how many rhymes you can come up with for each word. You may find that this simple exercise gets your poetic saliva glands so juiced up that the temptation to turn the words into poetry becomes irresistible. Yield to it. A random, accidental and arbitrary consonance of word sounds can bring inspiration where no amount of pacing, pencil chewing and looking out of the window can help.
Rhyme Categories
- 1. Masculine rhyme–
box/frocks, spite/tonight, weird/beard, amaze/delays - 2. Feminine rhyme–
breathing/seething, relation/nation, waiter/equator - 3. Triple rhyme–
merrily/verily, merited/inherited, drastically/ fantastically - 4. Slant-rhyme:
- Assonance–
pit/kiss, mean/dream, stub/rug, slack/shag, hop/dot - Partial consonance–
coils/gulls, wild/fold, mask/tusk, stump/ramp - Full consonance–
coils/cools, wild/weld, mask/musk, stump/stamp
- Assonance–
- Eye-rhyme–
fool/wool, want/pant, heard/beard, mould/could, rove/love - Rich-rhyme–red
rose
/he
rose
, single
file
/nail
file, nose/knows, eye/I
R
HYMING
C
OUPLETS
Know then thyself, presume not God to
scan
;
The proper study of mankind is
Man
.
A
LEXANDER
P
OPE:
An Essay on Man
R
HYMING
T
RIPLETS
What Flocks of Critiques hover here
today
,
As vultures wait on Armies for their
Prey
,
All gaping for the carcass of a
Play
!
J
OHN
D
RYDEN:
Prologue to
All for Love
C
ROSS-
R
HYME
The boy stood on the burning
deck
Whence all but he had
fled
;
The flame that lit the battle’s
wreck
Shone round him o’er the
dead
.
F
ELICIA
H
EMANS:
‘Casabianca’
E
NVELOPE
R
HYME
Much have I travell’d in the realms of
gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms
seen
;
Round many western islands have I
been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo
hold
.
J
OHN
K
EATS:
‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’
CHAPTER THREE
Form
I
The Stanza
So we can write metrically, in iambs and anapaests, trochees and dactyls. We can choose the length of our measure: hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter. We can write accentually, in three-stress and four-stress lines. We can alliterate and we can rhyme, but thus far our verse has merely been
stichic
, presented in a sequence of lines. Where those lines terminate is determined, as we know, by the measure or, in the case of syllabic verse, by the syllable count. Prose, such as you are reading now, is laid out (or
lineated
) differently–as I write this I have no reason to start a new line (to ‘press the return key’) until it is time for a new paragraph or a quotation and you certainly won’t
find me doing this
or
this
, for that
matter; it would be
highly
odd,
not to mention confusing:
in poetry such a procedure
would not be considered
strange at all, although as
we shall see, how we
manage the lineation of our poems is not a question of
random
line
breaks, or it had better not be…
Our first clue that the written words on a page might qualify as poetry may indeed be offered by lineation, but an even more obvious indicator is the existence of
stanzas
. The word derives from the Italian for ‘stand’, which in turn developed into the word for ‘room’ (
stanza di pranzo
is ‘dining room’, for example). In everyday speech, in songwriting, hymn singing and many other popular genres a stanza will often be referred to as a
verse
(meaning ‘turn’, as in ‘reverse’, ‘subvert’, ‘diversion’ and so on). I will be keeping to the word stanza, allowing me to use verse in its looser sense of poetic material generally. Also, I like the image of a poem being a house divided into rooms. Some traditional verse forms have no stanzaic layout, for others it is almost their defining feature. But first we need to go deeper into this whole question of form…
What is Form and Why Bother with It?
Stephen gets all cross
By
form
, just so that we are clear, we mean the defining structure of a genre or type. When we say
formal
, the word should not be thought of as bearing any connotations of stiffness, starchiness, coldness or distance–formal for our purposes simply means ‘of form’,
morphological
if you like.
In music, some examples of form would be sonata, concerto, symphony, fugue and overture. In television, common forms include sit-com, soap, documentary, mini-series, chat show and single drama. Over the years docu-dramas, drama-docs, mockumentaries and a host of other variations and sub-categories have emerged: form can be undermined, hybridised and stretched almost to breaking point.
Poetic forms too can be cross-bred, subverted, made sport of, mutilated, sabotaged and rebelled against, but
HERE IS THE POINT
. If there is no suggestion of an overall scheme at work in the first place, then there is nothing to subvert or undermine: a whole world of possibility is closed off to you. Yes, you can institute your
own
structures, you can devise new forms or create a wholly original poetic manner and approach, but there are at least three major disadvantages to this. First, it is all too often a question of reinventing the wheel (all the trial-and-error discoveries and setbacks that poetic wheelwrights have undergone over two millennia to be caught up with in one short lifetime); second, and this flows from the first point, it is fantastically difficult and lonely; third, it requires the reader to know what you are up to. Since human beings first sang, recited and wrote they have been developing ways of structuring and presenting their verse. Most readers of poetry, whether they are aware of it or not, are instinctively familiar with the elemental forms–for a practising poet to be ignorant of them is foolish at best, perverse and bloody-minded at worst. We can all surely admit without sacrificing any cherished sense of our bold modernity and iconoclastic originality that a painter is in a better position to ignore the ‘rules’ of composition or perspective if he knows exactly what those rules are. Just because poems are made of our common currency, words, it does not mean that poets should be denied a like grounding and knowledge. Besides, as I have emphasised before, initiation into the technique of poetry is all part of becoming a poet and it is
pleasurable
: one is in the company of one’s forebears, one is not alone.
Ezra Pound, generally regarded as the principal founder of modernism, wrote of the need to refresh poetics: ‘No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.’ He went further, asserting that extant poetical language and modes were in fact defunct, he declared war on all existing formal structures, metre, rhyme and genre. We should observe that he was a researcher in Romance languages, devoted to medieval troubadour verse, Chinese, Japanese, Sicilian, Greek, Spanish, French and Italian forms and much besides. His call to free verse was not a manifesto for ignorant, self-indulgent maundering and uneducated anarchy. His poems are syntactically and semantically difficult, laden with allusion and steeped in his profound knowledge of classical and oriental forms and culture: they are often laid out in structures that recall or exactly follow ancient forms, cantos, odes and even, as we shall discover later, that most strict and venerable of forms, the
sestina
. Pound was also a Nazi-sympathising, anti-Semitic,
1
antagonistic son of a bitch as it happens: he wasn’t trying to open poetry for all, to democratise verse for the kids and create a friendly free-form world in which everyone is equal. But if the old fascist was right in determining that his generation needed to get away from the heavy manner and glutinous clichés of Victorian verse, its archaic words and reflex tricks of poetical language, and all out-dated modes of expression and thought in order to free itself for a new century, is it not equally true that
we
need to escape from the dreary, self-indulgent, randomly lineated drivel that today passes for poetry for precisely the same reasons? After a hundred years of free verse and Open Field poetry the condition of English-language poetics is every bit as tattered and tired as that which Pound and his coevals inherited. ‘People find ideas a bore,’ Pound wrote, ‘because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.’ Unfortunately the tide has turned, and now it is some of Pound’s once new ideas that have been stuffed and shelved and become a bore. He wrote in 1910: ‘The art of letters will come to an end before
AD
2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.’ It might be tempting to agree that ‘the art of letters’ has indeed come to an end, and to wonder whether a doctrinaire abandonment of healthy, living forms for the sake of a dogma of stillborn originality might not have to shoulder some of the responsibility for such a state of affairs.
Add a feeble-minded kind of political correctness to the mix (something Pound would certainly never have countenanced) and it is a wonder that any considerable poetry at all has been written over the last fifty years. It is as if we have been encouraged to believe that form is a kind of fascism and that to acquire knowledge is to drive a jackboot into the face of those poor souls who are too incurious, dull-witted or idle to find out what poetry can be. Surely better to use another word for such free-form meanderings: ‘prose-therapy’ about covers it, ‘emotional masturbation’, perhaps; auto-omphaloscopy might be an acceptable coinage–gazing at one’s own navel. Let us reserve the word ‘poetry’ for something worth fighting for, an ideal we can strive to live up to.
What, then, is the solution? Greeting-card verse? Pastiche? For some the answer lies in the street poetry of rap, hip-hop, reggae and other musically derived discourses: unfortunately this does not suit my upbringing, temperament and talents; I find these modes, admirable as they no doubt are, as alien to my cultural heritage and linguistic tastes as their practitioners no doubt find Browning and Betjeman, Pope, Cope and Heaney. I will try to address this problem at the end of the book, but for now I would urge you to believe that a familiarity with form will not transform you into a reactionary bourgeois, stifle your poetic voice, imprison your emotions, cramp your style, or inhibit your language–on the contrary, it will liberate you from all of these discomforts. Nor need one discourse be adopted at the expense of another, eclecticism is as possible in poetry as in any other art or mode of cultural expression.
There are, to my mind, two aesthetics available when faced by the howling, formless, uncertain, relative and morally contingent winds that buffet us today. One is to provide verse of like formlessness and uncertainty, another is (perhaps with conscious irony) to erect a structured shelter of form. Form is not necessarily a denial of the world’s loss of faith and structure, it is by no means of necessity a nostalgic evasion. It can be, as we shall see, a defiant, playful and wholly modern response.
Looking back over the last few paragraphs I am aware that you might think me a dreadful, hidebound old dinosaur. I assure you I am not. I am uncertain why I should feel the need to prove this, but I do want you to understand that I am far from contemptuous of Modernism and free verse, the experimental and the avant-garde or of the poetry of the streets. Whitman, Cummings, O’Hara, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Jandl, Olsen, Ginsberg, Pound and Zephaniah are poets that have given me, and continue to give me, immense pleasure. I do not despise free verse. Read this:
Post coitum omne animal triste
i see you
!
you come
closer
improvident
with your coming
then–
stretched to scratch
–is it a trick of the light?–
i see you
worlded with pain
but of
necessity not
weeping
cigaretted and drinked
loaded against yourself
you seem so yes bold
irreducible
but nuded and afterloved
you are not so strong
are you
?
after all
There’s
the problem. The above is precisely the kind of worthless arse-dribble I am forced to read whenever I agree to judge a poetry competition.
2
It took me under a minute and a half to write and while I dare say
you
can see what utter wank it is, there are many who would accept it as poetry. All the clichés are there, pointless lineation, meaningless punctuation and presentation, fatuous creations of new verbs ‘cigaretted and drinked’, ‘worlded’, ‘nuded’, ‘afterloved’,
3
a posy Latin title–every pathology is presented. Like so much of what passes for poetry today it is also
listless
, utterly drained of energy and drive–a common problem with much contemporary art but an especial problem with poetry that chooses to close itself off from all metrical pattern and form. It is like music without beat or shape or harmony: not music at all, in fact. ‘Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,’ Robert Frost wrote. Not much of a game at all, really.
My ‘poem’ is also pretentious, pretentious in exactly the way much hotel cooking is pretentious–aping the modes of seriously innovative culinary artists and trusting that the punters will be fooled. Ooh, it’s got a lavender reduction and a sorrel jus: it’s a pavane of mullet with an infusion of green tea and papaya. Bollocks, give me steak and kidney pudding. Real haute cuisine is created by those who know what they are doing. Learning metre and form and other such techniques is the equivalent of understanding culinary ingredients, how they are grown, how they are prepared, how they taste, how they combine: then
and only then
is one fit to experiment with new forms. It begins with love, an absolute love of eating and of the grain and particularity of food. It is first expressed in the drudgery of chopping onions and preparing the daily stockpots, in the commitment to work and concentration. They won’t let you loose on anything more creative until you have served this apprenticeship. I venerate great chefs like Heston Blumenthal, Richard Corrigan and Gordon Ramsay: they are the real thing, they have done the work–work of an intensity most of us would baulk at. Of course some people think that they, Blumenthal, Corrigan et al., are pretentious, but here such thinking derives from a fundamental ignorance and fear. So much easier to say that everything you fail to understand is pretentious than to learn to discriminate between the authentic and the fraudulent. Between lazy indiscipline and frozen traditionalism there lies a thrilling space where the living, the fresh and the new may be discovered.
Fortunately, practising metre and verse forms is not as laborious, repetitive and frightening as toiling in a kitchen under the eye of a tyrannical chef. But we should never forget that poetry, like cooking, derives from love, an absolute love for the particularity and grain of ingredients–in our case, words.
So, rant over: let us acquaint ourselves with some of the poetic forms that have developed and evolved over the centuries.
The most elemental way in which lineation can be taken forward is through the collection of lines into
STANZA FORM
: let us look at some options.
II
Stanzaic Variations
O
PEN
F
ORMS
Tercets, quatrains and other stanzas
–
terza rima–ottava rima–rhyme royal–ruba’iyat–the Spenserian stanza
A
TERCET
is a stanza of three lines,
QUATRAINS
come in fours,
CINQUAINS
in fives,
SIXAINS
in sixes. That much is obvious. There are however specific formal requirements for ‘proper’ cinquains or sixains written in the French manner. There is, for example, a sixain form more commonly called the
sestina
, which we will examine in a separate section. Forms which follow a set pattern are called
closed forms
: the haiku, limerick and sonnet would be examples of single-stanza closed forms. Forms which leave the overall length of a poem up to the poet are called
open forms
.