Teaching the Art of Poetry

The Moves

Baron Wormser, A. David Cappella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135667047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Concise and accessible, this guide to teaching the art of poetry from Shakespeare to contemporary poets enables anyone to learn about how poets approach their art. Teachers can use this book to explore any facet or era of poetry. Any reader can use it as an entryway into the art of poetry. Teaching the Art of Poetry shows poetry as a multi-faceted artistic process rather than a mystery on a pedestal. It demystifies the art of poetry by providing specific historical, social, and aesthetic contexts for each element of the art. It is a nuts-and-bolts approach that encourages teachers and students to work with poetry as a studio art--something to be explored, challenged, assembled and reassembled, imagined, and studied--all the things that an artist does to present poetry as a search for meaning. This book advocates poetry as an essential tool for aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic literacy. It portrays poetry as an art rather than a knowledge base, and methods for integrating the art of poetry into the school curriculum. The authors' intention is not to fill gaps; it is to change how poetry is presented in the classroom, to change how it is taught and how students think about it.
Teaching the Art of Poetry:
* Emphasizes hands-on experiences. Over 160 exercises focus attention on the dynamics of the art of poetry. Activities include group work, peer editing, critical thinking skills, revising drafts, focused reading, oral communication, listening skills, and vocabulary, as well as mechanics and usage.
* Features a week-long lesson plan in each chapter to aid the teacher. These relate the main aspects of each chapter to classroom activities and, in addition, include a "Beyond the Week" section to promote further investigation of the topic.
* Promotes an integrated approach to poetry. The examples used in each chapter show poetry as a living tradition.
* Makes extensive use of complete poems along with extracts from many others.
* Does not talk down to teachers--is teacher oriented and jargon free.

1
Rhythm

Summary

Rhythm is the key physical basis of poetry. It is what gets a poem into us; it is visceral. Since English is an accentual-syllabic language, the play of those accents among the words that make up a poem’s lines is a main determiner of rhythm. In traditional English-language poetry, accents are patterned so as to form meters in which each line has a definite number of accented units. In the free-verse poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, accent is looser and embodies the provisional, moment-by-moment quality of daily living and speaking. Free verse is less arch and dramatic than meter; it is more conversational and open-ended. Whereas meter keeps a beat, the rhythms of free verse insinuate themselves.

There is no more subtly powerful compeller than rhythm. Rhythm literally defines life for us as human beings: Blood circulates within us, we breathe in and out, we lie down and get up, we chew our food and walk down the street and make love, and for decades of their lives half of the human race menstruates each month. Rhythm is all around us and woven into us in the seasons, day and night, tides, lives and deaths. Living in Maine, we feel the winter solstice as a rhythmic depth, a near stillness, whereas the summer solstice is the elongated height of light. The equinoxes are poises, fulcrums, balances. (1)

Rhythms are surging, lilting, insistent, and we humans convey all manner of rhythm as we chat, dance, strut, orate, sing, clap hands, whistle, drum, run, chant. Rhythm expresses emotions that range from a parent’s intimate, calming pat on an infant’s back to the chilling, mass display of goose-stepping Nazis. Rhythm is the motive feeling of the life force, the “green fuse” as Dylan Thomas (a very great rhythmer) put it. In poems rhythm is capable of producing trance-like states of mind. Rhythm puts us so deeply into ourselves that we may feel we are outside of ourselves. (2) In the section of N.Scott Momaday’s poem “New World” printed below, the reader is made to experience the primal pulse of life-energy in lines that are as rhythmically stark as is possible—typically one accent for each of the two syllables that make up each line:

At noon
turtles
enter
slowly
into
the warm
dark loam.
Bees hold
the swarm.
Meadows
recede
through planes
of heat
and pure
distance.

The stillness of the scene absorbs and mesmerizes us; we hear a beat that is, at once, insistent and minimal. It is as if Momaday captured on the page the very rhythm of time. There is no racing through the poem, each line—though it is little more than a second—will have its say. (3)

As an oral and mnemonic art poetry always has honored the force of rhythm. Poems are meant to be spoken aloud and the rhythmic force communicated in a poem insists on the passion in the human voice. Every poem is the movement of words in time and that movement as it embodies the particular soundscape of a particular language conveys some shade of rhythm, from the tight structure of meter to the amble of colloquial cadence. A monotone seems inhuman and the adjective is a term of opprobrium because a monotone rejects the rhythmic pulse of being. The vocal rises and falls that distinguish human utterances, the stuff of pitch, energy, and loudness, are part of the body’s instinctive rhythmic feeling. Every articulation from an elaborate oration that piles orotund clause upon orotund clause to a simple exclamation (“Yikes!”) be-speaks rhythm. (4)

English is an accentual-syllabic language and it is no exaggeration to say that it is a language with a built-in pulse. All multi-syllabic English words have an accent; long ones have a primary and a secondary accent. As for monosyllables, one cannot go through three of them without accenting at least one of them to some degree (unless, of course, one speaks in a lifeless monotone). English abhors a rhythmic vacuum. To say “for the sake of our dogs” is to voice a readily discernible accentual texture, as “sake” and “dogs” seem relatively strong in relation to their companion words. The syllables we speak are rising and falling, falling and rising, always surging and lolling on the throbbing tide of rhythm. To the force of dictionary-defined accent, there is always being added the pressure of human meaning. (5)

The simplest and strongest rhythm is that of alternation: Tides rise and ebb, valves open and shut, feet (and hooves) go up and down. Duple rhythm (as it is called) is the rhythm of alternation and it has been the workhorse of Englishlanguage poetry. One syllable is relatively stronger than the other syllable, thus an accented syllable follows an unaccented syllable, an accented syllable follows an unaccented syllable. This relative strength may be patterned (weak/strong, weak/ strong, weak/strong) to create a momentum that is, at once, brisk and lulling, that creates a trance of sorts. This is the rhythm of the majority of metrical poems in English and any reader of poetry will have her or his favorite that comes immediately to mind. We have always especially liked Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 30,” which begins:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste…

The terms (such as iamb and foot) that are used to describe this rhythmic occurrence are derived from classical prosody via the Elizabethans and though they have the merit of timehonored usage are not particularly helpful in apprehending rhythm. Indeed, they are probably more of a hindrance as they promote the dissection of lines into units that make accent seem compartmentalized, one- dimensional, and altogether neater than it is. A prosodic concept based initially on the syllabic rules of Greek poetry, the so-called foot has in all likelihood confused more people than it has helped. Talk about “trochaic substitutions” (replacing weak/strong with strong/weak), for instance, has an artificial, pedantic quality to it as if poems were the sums of numerous organized effects and the poet a clever engineer. We do well to remember that the root of the word “rhythm” means “flow” and its physical source is a word for stream. The foot-unit is a notional convenience of sorts while the physical truth remains the salient fact: The art of pulsation is rooted in the rhythm of alternation. Thus when Mad magazine changed Irving Berlin’s “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” into “Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady” and Berlin sued for copyright infringement, Berlin lost the case. The judge reputedly scolded Berlin for not being willing to share worldwide rights to the iambic (weak/strong) rhythm. Certainly, it is much more important to listen than to fret about terms and procedures. The play of accent among the syllables is sturdily audible. (6)

The prominent artistic issue of duple rhythm is how forcefully the poet wishes to assert it. To maintain a strict accounting of duple rhythm is to write in meter, the patterning of syllabic accents so many to a line: weak/strong, weak/strong, weak/ strong, weak/strong, weak/strong=Shakespeare’s “With éyes sevére and béard of fórmal cút” (The accent mark over each stressed syllable is known as an “ictus”). The virtues of meter in the hands of a competent poet are numerous: Its pace is even, yet unless the author is repeating identical phrases, every pair of alternations differs from the proceeding and following pair; it is engaging without being overbearing, persuasive yet measured, comforting without being boring. A metrical pattern is artificial in the sense that we do not routinely talk in meters but it isn’t perniciously artificial. As poetry is a heightening of language (we do not go around speaking poetry), so meter is a heightening of rhythm. (7) The numerous monosyllables and rising rhythm of English-language speech make meter’s orderly heightening of accents perfectly plausible. The five-beat, accentual-syllabic line that has been the rhythmic hallmark of English-language poetry from Chaucer to Robert Frost has no affectation about it. It is flexible, commodious, capable of great suppleness yet possessing an unflinching backbone. The time from “O mighty Caesar, thou dost lie so low?” to “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches” is centuries; the tones are vastly different yet the integrity of the meter, its compelling aptness, is unassailable. The contexts of poetry change greatly because the ways people live change greatly. However, as Paul Fussell has noted, “essential changes in the structure of the English language cannot be willed.” The accents endure and the rhythm of alternation endures. (8)

It has always taken a firm hand to adapt meter to the poet’s concerns. As a pattern it is a sort of engine and easily can get the upper-most of an inexperienced poet. The poet must, at once, relish its possibilities and subdue it to his or her expressive ends. There are rich cadences such as Christopher Marlowe’s

Now eyes enjoy your latest benefit,
And when my soul hath virtue of your sight,
Pierce through the coffin and the sheet of gold,
And glut your longing with a heaven of joy.

Tamburlane the Great, Part II

and unassuming ones such as William Wordsworth’s

A freshness also found I at this time
In human life, the daily life of those
Whose occupations really I loved…

The Prelude, Book IV

There are balanced deliberations such as Alexander Pope’s

Some beauties yet no Precepts can declare,
For there’s a happiness as well as care.
Music resembling Poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.

“Essay on Criticism I”

and expressionist clamors such as Hart Crane’s

O, I have known metallic paradises
Where cuckoos clucked to finches
Above the deft catastrophes of drums.

“For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen, II”

These quotations are from different eras and they remind us that meter exists in a social context, that it is historical and as an artistic medium changeable so that although we can say that Shakespeare and Frost both wrote in meter, the language each poet was deploying was hardly identical. Pronunciations, usages, meanings, poetic customs (such as elision and word order) all change, to say nothing of human outlooks. It was precisely the degree over centuries to which meter in all its varied usages—songs, nursery rhymes, ballads, nonsense verse—became synonymous with poetry that spelled a lessening of the vitality of meter. To assume something must be a certain way in an art form is a sure way to weaken the medium, for art thrives on practicable surprises. There is no point in doing what already has been done. Poets, as Robert Frost put it, don’t imitate, they emulate, and, indeed, for his own part Robert Frost matched the cadence of New England speech to meter—something new in the annals of rhythm. Allen Ginsberg, to cite another instance, took Walt Whitman’s long lines and made them even longer, giving them a breathless, out-of-control quality—again, something new. Eternal as rhythm is, its manifestations change. (9)

Whether artists at any given time and the public at large want to acknowledge the issue of change is another story. Many poets in the latter part of the nineteenth century felt that rhythm should not change. Well-regarded poets such as A.C.Swinburne felt that submitting to a metrical imperative was an affirmation of the eternal value of poetry. Poetry was above history; its rhythms were timeless:

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

“A Forsaken Garden”

Lovely stuff that is technically known as logaoedic verse—lines combining duple rhythm (weak/strong as in “with rocks”) and triple rhythm (weak/weak/strong as in “In a coign”). The swing is the thing here; the context is simply the excuse for rhythm to vaunt its thrilling, hypnotic wings. Swinburne wants to captivate and captivate he does. Meter exists unto itself in Swinburne’s hands; it literally is calling the tune.

Swinburne’s lines are a sort of performance and that is what is troubling about them. In the hands of a poet such as Swinburne, meter seems like an ultimatum, a last resort, a self-conscious reveling in the magical powers of poetry in a world devoted increasingly to commerce, steel, and speed. It was an understandable enough impulse but in many ways a heedless one. Donald Justice, one of the most acute craftspersons of the second half of the twentieth century, has noted that in meter “a subjective event gets made over into something more like an object.” This facility is precisely what Swinburne indulged in, yet a talent may be too facile for its own good. In the course of the nineteenth century, poetry became more and more (in Cynthia Ozick’s stern but just words) “a useless bellows that had run out of breath.” Swinburne was hardly breathless but scads of published poems in the latter nineteenth century and well into the twentieth seem rote exercises in meter. Meter as a dumb, dependable pulse could dignify staple sentiments, ad infinitum, and did:

If this be but a house, whose stone we place
Better the prayer unbreathed, the music mute
Ere it be stifled in the rifted lute;
Better had been withheld those hands of grace…

This is by Robert Underwood Johnson, a founder of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and bears along with its burden of poeticism (i.e., artificial language) and stilted syntax a thoughtless reliance on meter as a sine qua non of a poem. The lines were written in 1921. Meter thus came to seem not so much an instrument of rhythmic artistry, as the accomplice of a wearisome afflatus. The lively pulse had become a trivial clog. (10) A syllogism of sorts was at work: meter bequeathed stature; poetry was written in meter; therefore poetry had stature. The free verse of Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot typically was decried as “unmetrical,” hence not really poetry.

Poets of the twentieth century (and some in the nineteenth) thoroughly skewered the metrical syllogism. Particularly in America this revolution resulted in an important rhythmic change, from meter to free verse. The rhythmic medium was decidedly not above the hubbub of history; it was implicated in the tide of human events. Although there is still a certain degree of shouting on both sides of the divide (metrists complaining that free verse is artless and free-versers complaining that meter is restrictive), most readers and writers are happy to acknowledge the successes free verse has wrought and also how it has made meter rethink and thus reinvigorate itself. Free verse opened up new artistic territory and for that act alone it deserves respect.

To be appreciated properly the freedom of free verse must be viewed in the positive light of its freedom to pursue new rhythmic courses as opposed to the negative supposition that free verse means nothing more than jettisoning meter. What free verse says is that meter is not everything, although for centuries meter has appeared to be everything. This is similar (to personify a bit more) to what abstract art said at the beginning of the twentieth century, namely that representational art was not everything although for centuries it too had appeared to be everything. There were other modes of apprehension and they were not inferior but different. (11)

The artistic successes of free verse are inarguable. It has broadened the spectrum of poetic rhythm and opened up new areas of expressiveness. What is twentieth century poetry in English without the gravely sinuous poems about animals by D.H.Lawrence; the indelible sensuousities of William Carlos Williams; the sheer, sad tumult of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”; the delicate yet sinewy legerities of Denise Levertov? Between the poles of strict meter and the abandonment of the rhythmic line-unit in the so-called prose poem (see Chapter 19) lies an enormous range of rhythmic shadings. The accentual pulse, after all, never goes away. Again, the great issue is what the poet chooses to do with that pulse. Rarely is it an issue of all or nothing. Indeed, much of the greatest poetry of the century lies in the realm that at once acknowledges the pleasures and strengths of meter and the subtleties of looser rhythms. One need look no further than T.S.Eliot who over the course of his career culminating in “The Four Quartets” demonstrated how the conclusiveness of meter could consort with ephemeral tags of conversation, random observations, names, and disconnected exclamations to create a whole that was profoundly life-like and profoundly artful.

What exactly does free verse offer? More things than are simply categorizable. It offers the amplitude of declamation, the sheer volume of incidents and feelings and geographies that Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century deployed in his long meter-dwarfing lines:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

“Song of the Open Road”

The breath and breadth of the United States could not be held in mere parcels, and one feels that free verse retains for Americans an aspect of national feeling, of almost ungovernable diversity and plenitude. However one judges the products of Whitman’s epigones, of poets such as Carl Sandburg and Allen Ginsberg, the rhythmic truth of Whitman’s poetry seems undeniable: it is an impulse that has no use for meting out anything, that must speak vastly and variously as if to embody the g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• How To Use This Book
• Introduction
• 1: Rhythm
• 2: Sound
• 3: Line
• 4: Syntax
• 5: Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization
• 6: Word Choice
• 7: Details
• 8: Metaphor
• 9: Image
• 10: Architecture (Stanzas)
• 11: Form (Sonnets, Sestinas, etc.)
• 12: Tone and Lyric
• 13: Repetition
• 14: Endings
• 15: Narrative
• 16: The Didactic Poem (How Poems Instruct)
• 17: Place and Politics
• 18: Occasions (The Social Contexts of Poems)
• 19: Variations (Found Poem, Prose Poem, Shaped Poem)
• 20: Coaching the “Moves”: On Teaching Poetry in the Classroom
• Epilogue: Getting Started
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors