Messiah

I'm singing Messiah tonight as part of the fact/staff choir.  It should be a nice concert.  We have a chamber orchestra and soloists from the voice faculty. Yesterday I went to Vespers, an almost 2 hour concert of holiday music.  

Anyway, at rehearsal I was taking conscious note of the fact that strong metrical beats in the text fall on the 1 or the 3 of the musical measures. This is a banal fact of text setting, so well known that few people even take the time to articulate it. I would say this: everyone would notice an instance in which this rule was not followed. It would sound wrong and jarring.  It would, in fact, be like accenting the wrong syllables while speaking.  

"O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion"  That one's in 3/4 time.  The emboldened syllables fall on the 1.   A lot of the libretto is from Isaiah, with a bit of Luke and Malachi thrown in.  The language doesn't have to be metrical: you can just squeeze the unstressed syllables between the strong beat however you want.   Another kind of obvious thing: you don't need a lot of words. The entire libretto is a few pages long, though the piece would last 3 hours (?). (We are only doing part 1). Mostly, we just repeat the lines over and over again.  Vocal music doesn't have to be wordy. **** I was also listening to some social poetry sung by Paco Ibáñez.  "La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro."  Some of it is super awkward to sing.  "Maldigo la poesía concebida como un lujo cultural por los neutrales."  Ouch.  It's bad poetry in the first place, and it also isn't "cantabile."  The songwriter hasn't constructed a very tuneful melody for it, but uses a kind of lilting, up and down, recitative style.  You can sing prose (Isaiah) but not prosaic poetry of this sort. It's the tone, the string of 3 or 4 unaccented syllables that are difficult to cram in between the beats, the passive voice, the crudity of the sentiment, the Marxist jargon.  "I curse poetry conceived of as a cultural luxury by the neutral ones."   *** So the rules of vocal setting so far:  alignment of beats / no enjambment / wordiness is awkward: a little text goes a long way.  Now I realize why I am a bad lyricist:  I was trying to write words to melodies with a lot of notes.

Generative metrics

 I guess, the generative metrics people care what makes a verse metrical or not, analogously to what makes a sentence grammatical. It doesn't get very far at answering why metrics exists in the first place. One example is the severe downplaying of rhythm in Fabb and Halle. For them, it's almost as though rhythm were an accidental byproduct of meter, rather than the reason it exists in the first place. Fabb even denies that meter is temporal in character.  

I'm looking again at Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing to see whether that might be applicable.  

The idea

 The idea is that metrical mastery is not achieved at the level of the single line, but in the construction of larger structures.  It is pretty simple-minded. It would be like looking at musical composition at the level of the phrase instead of the entire composition. Why would you want to do that?  

In my first draft of this article I realize I didn't articulate how important this step is.  

Metrical signatures

 I was thinking of the concept of metrical signatures: the Gestalt of any given poet in terms of metrical preferences or tendencies. What makes that poet sound like him or her self. 

With Claudio, the enjambment of adj / noun is one element of his signature.  I've found it in Baroque poetry, like Quevedo's "postrera / sombra." There is some of it in Góngora.  Góngora seems to be thinking strophically, not line-by-line, even in stanzas without enjambment.  

Another element of his signature would be what you might call awkward syntax in metrical sound forms, or seeming variability and irregularity, with the simultaneous presence of a strong forward pull in the meter.  

This seems to be virgin territory. Sure, there is a lot on prosody, but it tends to be geared toward establishing the basic facts rather than exploring nuances.  

drums

 I played drums for years  but was never in a band. It was kind of pointless from one point of view. But I love drumming and drums, cymbals. I love the fact that drummers are obsessed with cymbals and snare sounds. The sound of a good Zildjian Constantinople  is just divine, even though you might not be able to hear it in context, always. 

I am also rhythmically obsessed, and learned complex polyrhythms, like five against four. It is part of my ear-worm / prosody obsession. Neurologically, I am just wired that way. 

Also, just the ability to play bass drum with right foot, high hat with left, ride cymbal with right hand, and snare and toms with left, well, it is just a cool thing to do.  

Morae

Haiku are not measured in syllables, but in morae. For example, a long syllable counts as 2 morae, or a consonantal ending (n). It is really a quantitative meter, not a syllabic one. 

Japanese words tend to be polysyllabic, so there's that too. And the syllables are typically lighter being consonant vowel, consonant vowel.  

What this means is that the 17 syllable haiku in English has zero to do with Japanese haiku, prosodically speaking. 

Of course, it could work on its own terms, though generally syllabic forms don't work very well in English, because nobody can hear seven syllables in English.  

Wooden

 Te duchabas mil veces, te ponías

fijador en el pelo, y la esperabas

impaciente en la puerta del colegio.

Luego ibais a sentaros a aquel banco

del bulevar, o a casa de tus padres.

Pasó el tiempo. La magia de la cita

te llenó la cabeza de ilusiones. 

"Estoy enamorado" comentabas, 

orgulloso y feliz, a tus amigos. 

Let's look at this again.  It scans perfectly well as 11-syllables lines. The first line, for example, has accents on 3, 6, and 10, a perfectly acceptable combination:  

Te duCHAbas mil VEces, te POnías... 

Why, then, does it sound so wooden?  Maybe because it has a prose feel. The lines are enjambed (nothing wrong with that) but the enjambment isn't really doing anything. It would be fine as a paragraph of prose:  

Te duchabas mil veces, te ponías fijador en el pelo, y la esperabas impaciente en la puerta del colegio. Luego ibais a sentaros a aquel banco del bulevar, o a casa de tus padres. Pasó el tiempo. La magia de la cita te llenó la cabeza de ilusiones. "Estoy enamorado" comentabas, orgulloso y feliz, a tus amigos. 

But it isn't well written prose. Even literary prose, as in a typical novel, has more metaphors or other tropes than this, is less pedestrian. Has at least some wit or edge to it. It is the banality of what the words are saying and the arbitrariness of the phrasing that makes the poetry so unmusical, not the actual sounds of the words, though I would say "Luego ibais a sentaros a aquel banco" is unmelodious, for example. 

Here's a slightly better poet, no genius, but one who at least understands you have to try a little harder: 

AHORA, juntos, vivimos la hermosura

de esta tarde de junio,

el fulgor de las horas en que nos entregamos

al conocimiento de la verdad del amor,

a la gran llamarada del encuentro.

It's still cliché-ridden, but it's poetic cliché, not mere prosaic cliché. We understand the "el fulgor de las horas" [the radiance of the hours] is more "poetic" than "la magia de la cita." These poets pride themselves on being easy to understand. We understand that the beauty of the June afternoon is beautiful, like the knowledge of truth of love or the great flame of the encounter. 

I was often criticized as being dogmatic for not liking this sort of thing.     

Law of lengthening limbs

 I once devoted substantial time to research the “law of lengthening limbs,” that states that “Friends, Romans, countrymen” or “Pride and Prejudice” sound better than *“Sensibility and Sense” or *“Lucinda and John.” I found it in legal doublets ("aid and abet") and in soap opera titles (“The Bold and the Beautiful,” The Young and the Restless"). This seemed both well-known and under-analyzed. My own subtitle (“Translation, Parody, Kitsch”) violated the rule, as did Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” but I could find more evidence for it than against it. The real object of study here is my own weird fascination with things like this! One of many research “dead ends.”  

The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses

The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses.” This line, from the first section of Wallace Stevens's "Things of August," has a distinctive ring to it. One notable effect is the clash in registers between the informal (honky-tonk) and the literary. Honky-tonk has a reduplicative construction characteristic of slang words, like "rinky-dink," "somnolent," the polysyllabic flavor we associate with Latinate vocabulary. The line stretches out in the final anapest and feminine ending:  "...the SOMnulent GRASSes." Part of the sound of the line derives from the meaning of the words and the sounds of the lines surrounding it. It has a contextual prosody, then. Later, he speaks of “the high poetry and low.”  

Garcilaso

 El dulce lamentar de dos pastores,     [2, 6, 8, 10]            A

Salicio juntamente y Nemoroso,            [2, 4, 6, 10]           B

he de cantar, sus quejas imitando;        [1, 4, 6, 10]            C          

cuyas ovejas al cantar sabroso            [4, 8, 10]                 B

estaban muy atentas, los amores,       [2, 6, 10]                   A

de pacer olvidadas, escuchando.        [3, 6, 10]                   C

Tú, que ganaste obrando                [1, 4, 6]                        C

un nombre en todo el mundo        [2, 4, 6]                            D

y un grado sin segundo,                [2, 6]                                D

agora estés atento sólo y dado    [2, 4, 6, 8, 10]                    E

al ínclito gobierno del estado    [2, 6, 10]                               E

albano, agora vuelto a la otra parte,    [2, 4, 6, 10]                F

resplandeciente, armado,                    [4, 6]                            E

representando en tierra el fiero Marte;        [4, 6, 8, 10]        F

Look how only three lines have an accent on an odd-numbered syllable.  There are no accents on odd numbered syllables after syllable 3. My rules are simple. Content words get an accent; articles, clitic pronouns, one syllable prepositions, etc... do not.   Note how seamless is the combination of lines of 7 and 11 syllables. Every line rhymes, but not predictably.  

hendeca

 You can think of the Spanish 11 syllable line as an iambic pentameter, with a feminine ending, and a more "lilting" sound than in English:  

Los invisibles átomos del aire

The stress on syllable 10 is obligatory: 

Los invisibles átomos del aire

Syllables 7, 9, 11, cannot have accents (with a few exceptions).

Siempre la claridad viene del cielo.  [note stress clash here between syllables 6 and 7]. 

There is almost always a strong stress on 4 or 6.  If the stress is on 6, there will also be a stress on 1,2, or 3 (usually).  If there is a stress on 4, there will also be a stress on 8 (typically).  

We could see the structure as relatively free in the first four syllables of the line, and then resolving in a cadence in the seven syllables at the end:   

oXoooXo

This is also a typical rhythm for the 7 syllable line.   

So the line could be conceived of as iambic:

oX oX oX oX oXo

But it is more typically this:

oXoooXoooXo. [el dulce lamentar de dos pastores]. 

or this:

oooXoooXoXo

Flexible, flowing verse paragraphs can arise from the combination of lines of 7 and 11.  Note the tendency of accents to fall on the even numbered syllables. The enjambment, the unpredictable alternation of lines of 7 and 11, the unpredictable rhymes. This is the equivalently fluid verse paragraph that corresponds to English blank verse. (If you look at free verse in Spanish, you will see that it derives from this. All you have to do is add in some lines of 9 and 14 syllables and stop rhyming.  Then you have Vicente Aleixandre.)  

Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra                                4,6,10
nacida sombra, al cielo encaminaba                       2,4,6,10
de vanos obeliscos punta altiva,                            2,6,8,10
escalar pretendiendo las estrellas;                        3, 6, 10
si bien sus luces bellas,                                        2,4,6
exentas siempre, siempre rutilantes,                    2,4,6,10
la tenebrosa guerra....                                           4,6

Obsession

 That peculiar American obsession with prosody does not appear in Spain in the same way. Creeley has been translated into Spanish, but I'm not sure it can be appreciated in translation. There is just something too specific to a particular poetic culture. Not even in the UK, I believe, is his prosody intelligible. I remember Thom Gunn in a poetry workshop reading aloud a poem by Williams, and me thinking at the time he didn't now "how it went." I would tend to put an accent on the first preposition:

BY the road to the contagious hospital 

UNder the surge of the blue 

and then put a pause after the word blue, rather than saying "blue mottled clouds" without a pause, as Gunn did (I think).  Of course, I also think Williams reads his own poetry "wrong," so let's take that with a grain of salt. 

The obsession with prosody comes from Williams, Zukofksy and the objectivists, and then Olson, Creeley, and Levertov, Cid Corman, and other poets of that ilk. The New York school did not obsess over prosody like that. The beats had a longer line, usually, and emulated Whitman (though not exactly). 

Neruda

 Limpia con este trapo

las fronteras,

los techos de los hombres, escarba

el oro

acumulado

y reparte

ios bienes

escondidos

I discovered long ago that Neruda's free verse is pretty scannable:

Limpia con este trapo las fronteras,  [11]

los techos de los hombres [7]

escarba el oro acumulado [9] 

y reparte los bienes escondidos [11]. 

The traditional combination of 11 and 7 goes back to Garcilaso. Modern poets mix in lines of 9 with that, which makes sense. The odd numbered lines usually have that binary rhythm.  

More prosody

 Few people seemed to understand the enjambed free verse of Williams or Creeley. I wrote my first article on this subject 40 years ago, originally a paper for Sorrentino's Williams class. I had been struggling to understand it myself already since I was about 14.  People used the technique in their own poetry, but often without understanding it very well themselves. 

Sort of average, bland free verse without much enjambment, that has prevalent, sounds a bit like this. It isn't really very musical sounding. It might as well be a translation from an Eastern European language. Simic uses imagery and ideas, but not much attention to logos or melos: 

This strange thing must have crept

Right out of hell.

It resembles a bird’s foot

Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,

As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:

Its head which like your fist

Is large, bald, beakless, and blind. {Simic} 

enjambed

 That particular form of enjambed free verse with short lines, as in WCW or Creeley, doesn't exist in Spanish in a very prominent way: 

As the cat

climbed over

the top of 

the jamcloset...  

The usual forms of free verse in Spanish are long, endstopped lines combining traditional forms of seven, eleven and fourteen syllables. There is also a free verse with short lines, but with mostly end-stopped lines.  

The idea of prosody at Key West

 Take some line from "The Idea of Order at Key West."

Caused constant cry, caused constantly a cry 

or

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.  

They don't really go "da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum."  

The first one puts two stronger syllables in "weak" positions of line, and reinforces that with alliteration.  The second only has three stresses, putting weak syllables in strong positions. It also ends with an extrametrical 11th syllable.  In context, these lines sound like this:  

... and yet its mimic motion 

Caused constant cry, caused constantly a cry 

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. 

The sea was not a mask, no more was she...  

Here we see that Stevens allows himself to write in the "da dum da dum" mode in individual lines. He will even produce a sing-song sound with several lines like this in a row. The unit of analysis, then, is not the line, but the verse paragraph. Enjambment, the use of polysyllabic words, the variation of accents (usually between 3 and 5), the used of rhyme and alliteration, combine to create metrical effects across various lines. 

This is English 101 stuff, I know. What I'm after is a way of reintroducing it into my own field at an eloquent level. Prosody is badly taught in my field, where most profs think it is a matter of counting syllables and nothing more.  

Prosody

 1. I am washing a soccer game on tv in Spanish, but I'm getting sleepy so I lay down on the couch and close my eyes, but keep the sound on. Without even listening to the words of the announcer, I know when to sit up and pay attention, by the tone of voice, volume, pitch, velocity of speech to convey excitedness, culminating in the cry of GOOOOOOOOOOOOL.  [PROSODY AS EMOTION[ 

2. I know the difference between a yes-no question and a statement in English, or Spanish, by the way the pitch goes up or down at the end of the sentence. [LINGUISTIC PROSODY] 

3. I say "thanks a lot" with a tone of voice that gives this phrase its opposite meaning [PROSODY AS PRAGMATICS]. 

4. A linguist writes an article about the meter of Shakespeare's sonnets. [PROSODY AS A BRANCH OF LINGUISTICS, USING INSIGHTS FROM BOTH LINGUISTICS AND POETICS.] 

5. A Shakespearian actor recites a soliloquy on stage. There is an awareness of the meter, but also a particular stylized form of trained performance. [PROSODY AS PERFORMANCE]

6.  Bob Dylan sings the phrase "like a rolling stone." He is setting his own words to music, and the particular melody and rhythm of the phrase conveys the exact emotional nuance he wants to convey. It is at once an emotional, a linguistic, a poetic, and a musical use of prosody. [MUSICAL PROSODY IN TEXT SETTING]. 

This is not an exhaustive list, but just a short summary of some of the areas included in the domain of prosody. Why am I interested in it? I guess it's because every one has a certain expertise in it by being a speaker of the language, e.g. being able to understand all of this intuitively [except for 4 and 5, perhaps]. The gap between what everyone can do and the technical analysis of it is huge. That gap also is interesting to me.   

What does it mean to have an "ear"?

 It is odd, because what an ear is more literally is a capacity to hear, not to produce sound. So, listening and hearing come before producing. (An ear for verse, a musical ear.). If you can't hear Milton's blank verse as blank verse (not just prose, as some people thought when he started writing like that) then you probably couldn't write blank verse. 

I remember a famous poet telling me "Ashbery has no ear." William Logan writes that Brodsky had "a wooden ear" (in English, not in Russian).  I think I have an ear (passively, in my reading; actively in writing, I'm not so confident.).  What's interesting is that you have to be able to hear what you yourself are doing, like hearing a melodic phrase before you play it on your instrument.  

I dislike Hopkins, but he heard things in a particularly unique way and was able to write that way, to put that on the page. With other poets I can't hear anything. 

***

It was funny looking back at that Andrew Gelman post, that someone in the comments said that I didn't know much about poetry, because I was obviously unaware of the genre of the prose poem.  But prose poems still have prosody in them (by the way, no etymological connection between the pros of prose and the pros of prosody.). They still have to do something to charge language with meaning.  Think of the first page of Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said.  It is though the division of lines into verse could prod the reader's attention to rhythm, with the same readers being deaf to the sound of a paragraph of prose.  

Random thoughts

 I'd like to conceptualize adaptation studies under the category of reception, and have it include everything from translation to illustration, musical setting, and apocrypha.  It seems Hutcheon just perceives it in a conventional way, as novel to film, or film to video game, or things in that paradigm. Mostly larger narrative structures.  

***

I was reading Carlos Piera's dissertation on Spanish metrics, from 1980 or so. It still stands up pretty well. I just had a random email in my box with a link to download the pdf.  It humbled me a bit because he begins with the distinction between prosodic rules and metrical rules, and I couldn't figure out what the difference is! 

Anyway, I was thinking of metrical patterns, and you could think of the metrical paradigm easily seen in a line like this---

"Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow" 

--as being rare.  In other words, a line of zero complexity is both rare and somewhat bad (of course, if is not bad here, because it is used on purpose, and almost as a kind of metrical joke!).  

So the next category would be the statistically average, or the rhythmic instantiations most frequently found. What is the "average" degree of metrical complexity? The corpus would have to be, say, a particular poet or a long work.  

The next category would be "optimal." This might overlap a bit with the "average," in the sense that the most skillful verse will also fall somewhere in the middle of the complexity range. 

Metrics itself cannot tell us what optimal means. We would have to first agree on what poets we thought of as optimal, according to our own ears, and then see what their averages are.  I might like a poet of more complexity, or less, than you do.  Also, you would want to see what happens from line to line, the movement of the verse, and what we might call the prosodic intelligence. Poets, to me, have a certain metrical "signature" that I can visualize with my eyes closed. It is the overlay of the sounds of words, the syntax, and the particular rhythms.  

So what is the exact relation between the "average" and the "optimal"?  That would be the question.   

Via language hat:

There are three good reasons for studying metre. First and most important, the study of metre increases our appreciation of the poem as a work of art; without it, we cannot read a poem adequately, even to ourselves, and all its musical qualities will be lost to us. Secondly, and understanding of the subtleties of metre adds to our aesthetic pleasure an intellectual pleasure; the skill of a great poet in handling a difficult and complicated metre can be an object of admiration in itself. Thirdly, a knowledge of metre is of the greatest use in textual criticism; the fact that a line has been corrupted in transmission may be revealed by a defect in scansion which in itself may be an invaluable guide to the true reading.