The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Writing poetry
195
you, and rhyme may also have surprised poems into your memory:
Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
now
Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.
Sumer is i-cumen in –
Lhude sing, cuccu!
loudly
Groweth sed and bloweth med
blooms / field
And springth the wude nu.
buds / wood
Sing, cuccu!
Poems are made up of lines of words that do not usually reach the far side of the page. Words themselves possess a small amount of music because they are made up of syllables, which are themselves made up of short and long speech sounds, and gradations between, just like birdsong. You can guess-measure this length by saying them aloud. As you speak them, you will also hear how we breathe out harder on some syllables than others we stress certain syllables more than we stress others, and all the gradations between. This lends spoken language its rhythmic coloratura.
There is no final science about this stresses change when we catch our breath,
and every language has its own music – every accent too and even the mood we are in affects the way we speak. A lover may sound their words rather differently than a murderer, although a good poet might play on this distinction. Yet, as we speak, our larynx, teeth and tongue – even our upbringing and intention inject stress patterns into the words we speak, the beats of rhythm. Poetry raises the voice in language, and sings, says, whispers and shouts – intentionally. If poets possess verbal cunning, then, like dramatists and novelists, they exploit the lively variousness of speech too.
For ease of conversation, we talk about lines of poetry having a metre which counts these stressed syllables and arranges them in patterns called feet and we give terms to various patterns of stress (such as a ‘spondee’: two stresses one after the other. These patterns reveal themselves in speech without the need for stress marks urging hark! – a spondee! The most common stress pattern in
English verse is called iambic pentameter. An iamb is afoot with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. It makes the k´ınd of noise this sentence makes. Yet even as I speak the sounds will change. A lump of stress is catching in my throat. As you can hear, no two iambs are the same. And, given the fluidities of language and speech, stress patterns are always approximations to the real thing.
Poets play with these patterns, often intuitively, in order to create verbal effects because they have trained their ears to listen for these effects not only in

196
Creative writing
speech but in listening to the rhythms in the world. Boisseau and Wallace offer an excellent example from the first line of Richard Wilbur’s The Juggler’:
A ball will bounce, but less and less.
The iambic line (of four stresses) imitates the ball. As they put it, Within regularity or, rather, because of it, small differences in stress give the effect of less and less force and so seem to imitate the way a ball slows to a stop in smaller and smaller arcs (2004: 54). Poetry is a form of creating such epiphanies through making lines of language, the internal musical arrangement of which,
as with Wilbur’s ball, carries the poem into memory.
In the same way that paragraphs of prose have the effect of herding words into a point, lines of poetry are gathered into stanzas to make a triangulation of meaning, sound and shape. We sometimes use forms of poetry to shape lines and stanzas. Many of the traditional forms had their origin in song and the oral transmission of poems. Regular metre, rhymes and forms help you to remember the poem. Memory has its metres, and various verbal strategies glue words into place. Alliteration, for example, alerts us that language has a larynx,
and offers an afterlife through being stickily memorable:
No trembling harp,
no tuned timber, no tumbling hawk swerving through the hall, no swift horse pawing the courtyard.
from Beowulf (NP These word strategies are terrifically important and primal. After all, poems once carried the stories of our species through time. In Aboriginal culture, song- poetry governs the mapping of territory and sacred sites. Of course, some of the newer forms of poetry have their origin in speech, or even visual appearance.
However, the form known as free verse is still a shaping pattern for poetry’s language and the form called syllabics is shaped by speech’s mathematics.
Forms and patterns are shaping devices whose purpose is not to restrict but to create units of time for language, and to provide open spaces for saying and transmitting. You should try them all.
‘Rhyme’ and time sound the same to my ear, but only because my verbal memory blends them so. As words, they look very different, and a thousand years ago many words would not have sounded the same way, as the poem about the cuckoo demonstrated. Rhyme emerges from listening to the music of language, as do line, metre and form. Like them, rhyme is elastic and subject to change. This is why poets have always exploited the range of rhyme and the essential plasticity of verbal sound. A ‘full-rhyme’ like full time can be

Writing poetry
197
played on by a half-rhyme like ‘fall-time’ or full room, and many gradations between.
Repetition devices, like restrictive devices, are ways of shaping a poem, and carrying a poem forward as speech. They plant avenues of words to help drive a poem forward they plant a simple repeating pattern to serve out rhythm;
they plant a simulation of rhyme also:
I am the womb of every holt,
I am the blaze on every hill,
I am the queen of every hive,
I am the shield for every head,
I am the tomb of every hope.
from the Irish, sixth century
Hearing your own nature
Poetry is more natural an art form than you might have been led to believe.
Lines in your poetry are units of your time. Those units of time operate with the rhythm of language, the beat of your species and of you. It maybe what drew you to creative writing in the first place. The heartbeat of your mother heard by you in her womb then the nursery rhyme, the children’s song, the rhythmical poems and speech of childhood – all these lodged in your memory because of their rhythms. They are locked into you by many early synapses;
and they were made because of your perfectly natural sensual pleasure in them.
The music of language was your first teacher. This was the birdsong of your species of you as a species of one individual. That song marked the territory of your perceptual world, one that grows if you keep developing the talent and ear. Poems can be seen as charms, as modulated enchantments, but they are also weapons made of speech.
Now, imagine somebody standing before you, and afire between you and him. He places a poem and a thousand-dollar bill in the flames. How does this make you feel As Richard Hugo suggests, how we feel about ourselves may colour how we write poems, and even account for poetry being part of our lives. It is a fine line a question of value. As you will see, this chapter oscillates around this line. There are cherished values in writing poetry. For example,
many poets teach the technical apparatus of metre and versification. I endorse such an approach unequivocally (as I hope I have shown rather than told, but only when the student has decided they are already on the side of poetry. In my experience, a purely technical focus in the early stages can make a beginning writer run for cover, leaving them with a somewhat exoskeletal idea of poetry’s

198
Creative writing
structures and forms. The task here is more inward and basic. It is to invite you to see writing poems as an activity worth your time and attention, so that you may eventually feel like reaching into flames on a poem’s behalf – you may then find one day you are also that poem’s author. In the remaining part of this chapter we unfold some maps for finding our way into the language of poetry;
explore some introductory modes for making poems and explode one or two myths that may otherwise hold you back from reaching evermore deeply into language.

Download 2.89 Mb.

Share with your friends: