Well, I never had any issues against end rhymes but what concerns me more is the way poems are discussed... Yes the technique of poetry is fundamental to the art of poetry but do we need to be so obsessed by them? Hmm.. its hard to make my point. Let me tell you about Maupassant. When Maupassant actually began writing he had a tall order: he had to satisfy his extremely meticulous uncle Flaubert. It is said that Maupassant had to rewite his first stories as many as 30 times before they were accepted by his mentor. But as Maupassant began to write more and more stories he found his artistic groove and as we all know wrote short stories which are master pieces of aesthetic precision and subtlety. Now when Maupassant was at the height of his powers someone asked him to elucidate the techinque that he used to write his stories. Maupassant was impatient, he merely said that he didnt know how he wrote his stories. Then came the shocking statement: "If I could find that perfect woman who would completely satisfy me I will never write another line of story." Its easy for us to take this either as an arrogant statement of artistic sacrilage or as a psychological insight into the well springs of creativity. But if we consider the kind of training that Maupassant underwent, and the kind of stories he wrote in his subsequent years, its very hard to miss the essential fact that he had internalized all the techniques in his formative years so much so that he was completely oblivious of the fact that he was using them to perceive and structure the world in a certain way and with a certain degree of artistic and emotional tension. So when writing had become so natural an act for him it frustrated him when people expected him to come up with some complicated theory to explain his art. And it was very natural for him to compare writing to the act of making love as writing had become such an organic and intensely intimate act for him. But the techniques learnt in the early years under uncle Flaubert were always there to mould his thoughts and impressions into extremely evocative and intense artistic reality. But they were acting through him without his knowledge. There was an organic connection between his technique and content. Its fine for a critic to analyse and unearth the techniques involved in the formation of the story or a poem but to be overly conscious of metres and techniques actually intervenes in the act of creation and hinders the inherent harmony present in the poem. I am not at all suggesting that the use of rhyme and metre is some kind of sophistry, but am merely stating the fact that a poem which has achieved the inner integrity has benifited from metre and rhyme in a certain organic way so that what hits us when we read the poem is the insight or the deepened perception of the poet rather than the too obvious structure. In such a poem the technique is actually assisting the content to achieve greater precision of detail than becomin the vessel which holds the content of the poem. A great poem will create its own technique as its impossible to say what has been said in such a poem in a different way. I am not ruling out the possibility of improvement but a great poem is a phenomenon in itself. Yes one can certainly improve upon it but it still remains a phenomenon. Yeah Vivek rhyme might be the child-like heart of poetry, and as poets we all know how ridiculous the source of inspiration (if I may call it that) could be, but something takes over as we begin to play with words and transforms it into a wonderous work of art. And its unfair to ignore this process of transformation just because we do not understand it, and attach exaggerated importance to the structure of the poem so much as to make it the only topic of discussion. I must admit that personally its very hard for me analyze poetry: I judge a poem almost intutively. So as a poet I have shared my experience but a critic may have a different way of looking at the whole thing.
Ankur.
Vivek Narayanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I resent that you call Laura Riding, Graves' consort! She was much
more, on the isle of Majorca and elsewhere; she was instrumental in
bringing him to modernism, and, for my little money, the better and far
more original poet.
That having been said (ahem :=) ) I'm not sure I would make the same
equation between end rhymes and symmetrical forms = rigidity and "free"
verse = fluidity. Much of what passes for free verse today is quite
stilted and rigid and unadventurous (while believing itself to be free)
and much of the best of symmetrical form, going right back to Wyatt and
swimming back up through Shakespeare and Milton and Blake is very
fluid. It breaks "the rules" all the time-- adding a syllable, juggling
the metre-- but at interesting places and for good reason. The joy of
reading it is listening to how it plays into and out of the rules. The
interesting part of symmetrical poetry is the controlled variation away
from the rules and not any robotic adherence to them. And the rules are
not iambic pentameter, for there is a very wide range of other forms and
metres to tap. Let's move away from this idea that all "traditional"
English poetry is written in this mysterious thing called iambic
pentameter.
This principle has been best summed up by the brilliant, and textured
rapper Mos Def:
"Black, you know the motto--
stay fluid even in staccato!"
And I think it is unfair to speak of end-rhymes as "unfashionable".
When did they go out of fashion? Right after Eliot you had Auden, a
super-modern poet and incorrigible end-rhymer. You had Lorca and his
rhyming gypsy songs. Then you had Larkin; then you had the likes of
Lowell, Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, Heaney, Walcott, Carol Ann Duffy,
Rita Dove who all were and are guilty, guilty, guilty of deliberate,
premeditated end-rhyming several times in their lives. You had, Nissim,
Keki, Adil, Shahid, and many other Indians who were guilty of the same.
Now you have Muldoon, who pushes his end-rhymes a bit far, but is still
guilty. You have rap, which is bringing it all back, which is not going
away, and which all the major poets like Heaney and Walcott have said in
public is sometimes full of far more verbal energy than a lot of what
appears in the literary journals. You have secondary orality, which
takes the relationship between performance and the page back to Shakespeare.
Neither end-rhymes not any of the deep sonic resonances that poetry has
relied on for centuries have, or are going away. You can call it
superficial ornamentation, Ankur, and it is that, but it is also in some
ways (as the poet Veronica Forrest-Thompson wrote before she died)
something even more fundamental to poetry than meaning , it is the
childlike heart of poetry before the fake profundity that many poets
profess. It is both the heart and the surface of poetry, and the
meaning lies in between: this is the contradiction.
But what I think Rajan is saying (and he may please correct me if I am
wrong) is not that free verse is bad or evil but that even if poets
write only in free verse, or only in prose lines (like one of my
favourites St. John Perse) for public forums ,there is evidence of them
having trained, experimented with and cut their teeth on symmetrical
forms. If one hasn't practised end-rhymes, for instance, then I
suspect that one will find it a lot harder to hear rhymes when they
appear in other, more unexpected places. I find many people who have
written only in free verse actually don't hear a rhyme when it happens
in other places-- their ears hear only a mush. If they can then carry
that mush that they hear into their own poetry, more power to them, but
it's chancey, and in the end they may not know if they've done it or not.
This is my sense, though as always with poetry, there are bound to be
some exceptions. There are poets who have poetry without having to work
for it, but they are extremely rare and usually die young.
It's true that, as Lorca said, we have to go beyond form to the marrow
of form. But it seems like some are arguing for shortcuts to profundity
by dispensing with the practice of form altogether. They seem to be
saying, "Why go through the bother of rigorous meditation for fifty
years when one can just wake up in the morning and experience their
genius nirvana with their morning coffee?" If everyone arrives at that
position, that would be very sad if that happened. But it won't.
Vivek
jane bhandari wrote:
> Adil Jussawalla did a presentation on Robert Graves very recently,
> and I assisted him in the same reading by looking at poems by Laura
> Riding (who was Graves' consort for several years as well as
> collaborating with him on several works) and contemporaries of Laura's
> such as Elizabeth Jennings, Edith Sitwell, and Stevie Smith. Graves
> started with strict adherence to form and rhyme, as you would expect
> from a poet born in the Victorian period (just), but in later years
> moved to a more fluid style. Sitwell did much the same, but never
> achieved the same fluidity - which is not true of Jennings and Smith,
> who were somewhat younger and perhaps less contrained by the old
> perception that poetry is a male preserve. You should see my
> book-shelves...one shelf for the women poets, four for the men. Not by
> choice - there are simply fewer women poets. I think as you get
> older form matters less and content, and perhaps visual presentation,
> become more important. A more fluid style evolves which does not
> always conform to what purists see as immutable rules. Perhaps poetry
> as a performing art requires form, while poetry to be read to oneself
> can handle a looser style. Yet there is a rhythm inherent in our
> speech which translates itself into the most free-style of poetry; I
> think if you find a poet lacking inherent rhythm he will be a bad
> poet, and a lousy dancer to boot. Check it out: a classical singer
> friend showed me how most poetry can be tapped out, to find the beat,
> and it is becomes one of the tests of a good poem - but only one.
> There has to be imagery too, and I think economy of _expression_ is
> good. There is one aspect, however, which is that for quite a number
> of Indian poets English is not their first language (jayanta mahapatra
> being one) - their inherent speech rhythms may well clash with that of
> english; the iambic pentameter does not come naturally to the Indian
> tongue. Possibly, then, the song-shythms inherent in their native
> tongue would intrude. Perhaps this is what jars, because it sits
> uneasily with English. Can you tell me which Indian poets have
> thrown the baby out with the bath-water? I don't agree if you include
> Nissim Ezekiel, you might as well say TS Eliot too in that case. But
> then maybe you don't like either. Regards, Jane Bhandari
>
> */Rajan Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>/* wrote:
>
> Well Jane, I guess its fine if there are internal rhymes well
> yes it can get depressing if there is too much of the end rhymes
> but I do not ask the poets to write finished products with rhymes
> but try to play with poetry and the rhymescheme. I think we as
> indians have thrown the baby out with the bath wate. well yes keki
> daruwalla is sensistive to the form. Rajan */ /*
>
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