Saturday 2 July 2011

Syllabics - an explanation

I was intrigued by remarks made by Tim Love in his review of Inventing Truth, plus his exchange with Sheenagh Pugh in the comments section of the same article, about the use of syllabics in poetry. Love stated "it had to be pointed out to me that the poems are syllabics", while Pugh replied with "I have never, ever noticed that a poem was in syllabics before it was pointed out".

These statements run contrary to my own poetic methods and are thus terrific points of departure for an explanation of my use of syllabics:

I'm 100% convinced there's a subtle syllabic music that runs through English-language poetry and lyrics, lying just below the stresses, often drowned out by the heavier resonance of the latter. When writing poems I never need to count syllables - I instinctively notice and feel them. In other words, an iambic pentameter is a decasyllabic line at the same time. If you are counting stresses you are inevitably and implicitly counting syllables too, as stress patterns are made up of clustered syllables.

What's undeniable is that stresses are a key element to the rhythms of English, far more than in languages such as Spanish, in which metrics are always pure syllabics. By this I mean that any English-language poet writing in syllabics simply must also be aware of stresses. I find that syllabics enables me to play with anapests, iambs, dactyls and trochées within a musical framework, a game that inversely provides me with greater freedom to do so than in free verse, all because the whispering music of syllabics underpins them. Rather than ignoring stresses, I'm doing quite the opposite, using them to create and disrupt aural expectations, seeking to bring together musical effects and semantics.

Editors', readers' and other poets' reactions to my use of syllabics have always been split, in that roughly half have fallen into the Pugh-Love camp, unaware of my metrics until they were pointed out. A large number, however, have instinctively and immediately picked up on my technique.

I'd like to end this post by underlining that it's not meant to be some kind of defence of my poetic methods. Quite the reverse: I hope it provokes thought and I welcome comments below.

4 comments:

  1. Oh bother - I spent ages writing an overlong and detailed comment and blogger just ate it!

    I made reference to:

    Auden's use of classical metres in Epistle to a Godson (and earlier texts), influenced by Latin and Greek poets and by Marianne Moore;

    Tennyson's classical experiments (e.g. with Catullan hendecasyllabics);

    Victorian women poets writing quantitatively (as explained by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a letter later edited and published by Alica Meynell) which includes her claim that Alexander Pope used the amphibrach in what I term a heroic couplet;

    The possibility that Victorian women poets were more likely to write quantitavely because they studied the classics alone and didn't chant metres in classrooms - the practice of chanting tends to convert the perception of metre to stress-accentual;

    Saintsbury's lengthy insistence that English poetry is quantitative;

    and concluded with@

    an assertion that it's possible to learn to enjoy the interplay between natural stress and quantitative metre in English poetry, despite an initial difficulty in attuning the ear (comparable to switching from equal to well temperament in music, perhaps); and

    my apologies for writing so much but my hope that you will write more on the fascinating subject of prosody in English (and other languages).

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  2. "If you are counting stresses you are inevitably and implicitly counting syllables too, as stress patterns are made up of clustered syllables." Undeniably the case, which is why "traditional" metrics are also called accentual-syllabic. I found it surprising that some students on my Poetry School Online course simply couldn't see the point of writing in syllabics. (They had to, though, for one exercise at least!)

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  3. Thanks for the note. You write - "When writing poems I never need to count syllables - I instinctively notice and feel them". It's not the same for me when writing sentences in prose or lines in poetry. I don't think I ever feel the word or syllable count while listening to a poem. I only notice such things on the page if all stanzas have the same irregular shape or if all lines are short (I then tot things up). I missed that WCW's Red Wheelbarrow had regularity.
    I think I'd hear a missing/extra beat in a trad sonnet but you could add or subtract words to your poems and I wouldn't mind at all. It's a constraint you ruthlessly obey, but it's one of the easiest to conform to, so I don't feel any tension in the language, any resistance.
    James Fenton in "An Introduction to English Poetry" wrote "Can the ear hear a 13-syllable line as consisting of 13 syllables? I don't think so, but I think that a series of 13-syllable lines (supposing that was the length chosen) would, after a while, begin to have a characteristic resemblance. For the most part, though, counting the syllables seems to be something that works, if it works, for the poet. It is a private method of organisation. (Auden once wrote a poem in which the principle of organisation was the number of words per line. He was very proud of having thought this up, and sorry that no one noticed.)". Acrostics are missed too, as are allusions and rhyme-schemes, but when these things are pointed out to me my experience of the poem's enriched. Not so when I'm told to count letters, syllables or words. As you say, people vary.
    When you write "I find that syllabics enables me to play with anapests, iambs, dactyls and trochees within a musical framework, a game that inversely provides me with greater freedom to do so than in free verse, all because the whispering music of syllabics underpins them. Rather than ignoring stresses, I'm doing quite the opposite, using them to create and disrupt aural expectations" I can make some sense of what you say if I relate it to my experience of meter vs rhythm, line vs sentence etc., but I still have trouble relating theory to practice. For example, Why isn't "In exile" a paragraph or 3 8-syllabled lines? Why is "Epilogue" in 8 syllable lines rather than 4-syllable ones? Why isn't "Home"

    My dear, forget
    about the hat.
    I need a place
    to lay my lips.

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  4. I wouldn't say there was no point in writing syllabics. From the writer's viewpoint, any form brings corresponding freedoms - it cuts down choices and also sends you in new directions. What I would say is that if, having written your syllabics poem, you find it's pushed you into a daft line break or monotonous rhythm, you may as well then abandon the rules and improve the poem, because the form was there to create the poem, not the other way about, and anyway folk aren't likely to notice.... I don't actually agree that those who count stresses also have to count syllables though, because a foot can be made up of one stress and any number of unstressed syllables which are elided so fast as to be unnoticeable. I don't count stresses, because I don't need to; I am instinctively aware of them, as you are of syllables. Maybe you have some Mediterranean ancestry?! I do think English is a language in which stresses are way more intrinsically important than syllable count.

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