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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Monday, November 18, 2024

Here's one

 Cuándo hablaré de ti sin voz de hombre para no acabar nunca, como el río no acaba de contar su pena y tiene dichas ya más palabras que yo mismo. Cuándo estaré bien fuera o bien en lo hondo de lo que alrededor es un camino limitándome, igual que el soto al ave. Pero, ¿seré capaz de repetirlo, capaz de amar dos veces como ahora? Este rayo de sol, que es un sonido en el órgano, vibra con la música de noviembre y refleja sus distintos modos de hacer caer las hojas vivas. Porque no sólo el viento las cae, sino también su gran tarea, sus vislumbres de un otoño esencial. Si encuentra un sitio rastrillado, la nueva siembra crece lejos de antiguos brotes removidos; pero siempre le sube alguna fuerza, alguna sed de aquellos, algún limpio cabeceo que vuelve a dividirse y a dar olor al aire en mil sentidos. Cuándo hablaré de ti sin voz de hombre. Cuándo. Mi boca sólo llega al signo, sólo interpreta muy confusamente. Y es que hay duras verdades de un continuo crecer, hay esperanzas que no logran sobrepasar el tiempo y convertirlo en seca fuente de llanura, como hay terrenos que no filtran el limo.

I've written out the poem as prose, and bolded the rhyming words, which occur every two lines. The rhyme is i/o.  6 of these have punctuation following, and 9 are enjambed. This means that end-rhyme becomes practically internal rhyme.  And difficult to hear, since it occurs every 22 syllables and is assonant (only vowels). The most extreme enjambment is noun-adjective or adjective noun.  distintos / modos // sitio / rastrillado // limpio / cabaceo // continuo / crecer.  4 times!  3 of these with the adjective coming first, which is even more abrupt.  

Sentence length is long, in most cases stretching over multiple lines.  The line is not very often a self-contained unit.  


(Rodríguez Claudio. Antología poética (El libro de bolsillo - Literatura) (Spanish Edition) . Alianza Editorial. Kindle Edition.) 





Saturday, November 16, 2024

Free verse and its paradoxes

 There are two ways of looking at free verse. One, is that it should open the door toward greater metrical invention. It is an opportunity.  It is freedom to do something else.  

The other way: theoretically, it ought to lead to that, but in practice, it ends up being kind of dull and uninventive. Why? Because it is also the freedom to do nothing at all (or very little) prosodically.  

Thus, we have double movement: toward innovation, with a first two groups of innovators,  then mere stagnation.  

Part of it is that there is no meaningful way of talking about it. Free verse practitioners tend not to want to talk about technical stuff, in actual linguistic rigor, so it becomes almost a mystique. 

I say this because prosody could be almost the most objective thing there is.  Where the syllables fall and where the accents are. Instead, it becomes mystical and ultra-subjective. 



Thursday, November 14, 2024

Unlocking the secret of enjambment

 It is a mystery, because it is quite possible to have a whole tradition in which enjambment never occurs. For example, in many poems of Baudelaire.  Not every line ends with a punctuation mark, but usually there is a pause, and the next line begins with a prepositional phrase, or the predicate of a sentence. If you wrote it out as prose the metrical divisions would still be obvious. Despite the fact that French lacks accent.  

At the other extreme are traditions in which enjambment is the norm, like English blank verse.  The question is to what extent the line of verse coincides with the grammatical unit.  Also, the particular rhetorical effects of enjambment. Is it a poetic device? Is the end stopped line a poetic device, or just a norm? 

It's possible to say that the end-stopped line is limiting, and transcending it is a good thing, without thinking there is anything wrong with Racine or Pope. 

I'm sorry my thinking on this is very murky, but I promise I will come to some clarity at some point. 

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Dream of father and aunt

 My aunt had been working for a winery in a significant role.  I argued with my dad that this was inappropriate,  because my aunt had never tasted wine. He argued that this was irrelevant, did a cancer doctor need to have had cancer? Similar nonsensical arguments. I couldn't get him to see my point at all, nor could I understand his, and the argument turned quite heated. I guess you could work as an accountant for a winery without drinking wine, but her role there seemed more crucial. (Of course, both my father and his older sisters are no longer among the living; none of them drank,) 

Saturday, November 9, 2024

Dream of a school / movie

 

I was in a school. The headmaster was stern, and fired a teacher for coming late. Then we were sitting at tables. I was a student and listening closely to what he said. I asked at one point if we were going to have classes or whether we were just sitting around talking all day. He said there would be classes. He had some aphorisms, like "Don't wait any longer" or "Do it now." We discussed it and I guessed the meaning was don't procrastinate. Another was about saying the best thing last, and I said that was about "recency." 

I was eager to know what movie we were in, because in this dream I was a participant in a movie, as myself. I wanted to watch the movie later to get all of the headmaster's ideas. There was a sticker on the door that said "Dark Sabbath," but that didn't seem the right genre. I went out the door unto the street and tried to ask people about what movie featured a school and charismatic headmaster. Nobody could tell me.

Toward the end, I realized I had to catch a train or bus in 15 minutes. I started sprinting down the street. A teacher, a woman in uncomfortable shoes, also had to catch the bus. I was wondering whether to slow down my running so we could go together.  Then I realized I was waking up from the dream and didn't have to rush. 

The pedagogical method seemed a good one: talk to people about ideas. Find solid general principles. The dream seemed to last a good part of the night, and I was making a solid effort to learn and to remember what I was being taught.  


Thursday, November 7, 2024

Take these successive lines


No está en mí; está en el mundo; está ahi enfrente.

Necesita vivir entre las cosas. 


They are very different in their effect, but both have 11 syllables, metrically, with accents on three, six, and 10: 

No está en mí, está en el mundo; está ahí enfrente. 


Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Enjambment in Notley



 


Here the lines seem enjambed, but are really not, because the line break acts as a punctuation. 

"I dreamed you brought home a baby / Solid girl, could already walk / In blue corduroy overalls/ Nice and strange, baby to keep close / I hadn't thought of it before..."  

So she only needs punctuation in the middle of the lines. There is some true enjambment later in the poem "door / of building."  

The balance between continuity and the integrity of the line is ideal (for my ear).