POEM #4 : SYLLABIC VERSE

DUE THURSDAY, FEB 13th

Read: MoP (136-155). RR (17-25). And below.

The first poems many of you ever wrote were haiku—a verse form borrowed from the Japanese in which each line has a prescribed number of syllables: 5,7,5 (this, regardless of the number of stresses). Japanese, as well as other languages which tend to emphasize stressed syllables less (Finnish, modern French) have several forms that organize their poetry by counting syllables rather than stress (in English—the most common type of verse form is that organized along an accentual-syllabic [stress-counting] meter, as in iambic pentameter [Shakespeare and sonnets], iambic trimester and tetrameter [ballads], and the more galloping anapestic and dactylic feet—see Rhyme’s Reason).  However, many poets in English have fallen in love with the more subtle number-pleasure that syllabics offer and have organized their poems accordingly in one of two ways.  


1. By having all lines of a certain length:

In My Craft or Sullen Art   BY DYLAN THOMAS

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Lions Are Interesting   BY JOEL BROUWER

Each morning in the little white cabin  

by the river they woke to a raccoon  

clawing under the floorboards or banging  

in the wood stove. They did not discuss this.  

Instead they said it was a perfect day  

to pick blueberries on the hill, or that  

a hike to the old glassworks sounded good.  

They were beginning to speak not in meat  

but in the brown paper the butcher wraps  

around it. Brown paper around dirty   

magazines. Like dirty magazines, they  

only traced the contour of substance: silk  

over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over  

bone. What’s under bone? Marrow? Their forks so  

small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell  

dolls from animals because the latter  

are made of meat. Many eat it, also.  

Lions are interesting. Lions don’t eat  

the flesh of their kills right away, but first  

lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched  

nearly white. White as the little cabin  

by the river they stayed in that summer.  

White as the raccoon covered in ashes,

his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.

2.  Or by creating stanzas or different syllabic line lengths that then repeat (Marianne Moore [1887-1972] was the high-priestess of this form):

No Swan So Fine   BY MARIANNE MOORE

“No water so still as the

     dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,

with swart blind look askance

and gondoliering legs, so fine

     as the chintz china one with fawn-

brown eyes and toothed gold

collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth

     Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-

tinted buttons, dahlias,

sea urchins, and everlastings,

     it perches on the branching foam

of polished sculptured

flowers — at ease and tall. The king is dead.      

Poetry  BY MARIANNE MOORE

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

      all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

      discovers in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

      they are

   useful. When they become so derivative as to become

      unintelligible,

   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand: the bat

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

      wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

      that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician--

      nor is it valid

         to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make

      a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

      result is not poetry,

   nor till the poets among us can be

     "literalists of

      the imagination"--above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"

      shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness and

      that which is on the other hand

         genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Five Haikus   BY RICHARD WRIGHT

1.

I am nobody:

A red sinking autumn sun

Took my name away.

2.

I give permission

For this slow spring rain to soak

The violet beds.

3.

With a twitching nose

A dog reads a telegram

On a wet tree trunk.

4.

Burning autumn leaves,

I yearn to make the bonfire

Bigger and bigger.

5.

A sleepless spring night:

Yearning for what I never had

And for what never was.

NOW YOU

Your assignment is to create a syllabic form for yourself (all lines 13-syllables long, or a repeating stanza of 2-7-11-5 or 1-1-2-3-5-8, or 9-5-3.) Only caveat: the poem must be a minimum of 12 lines long. Experiment with line length to see what the effects are.  If you are having trouble—write 5 or 6 lines that are 10-12 syllables (a common thought/phrase unit in English) and then start dividing them in a way that heightens your meaning and draws attention to ideas and units that increase the power of the work. Good luck.