National Blog Posting Month
Syllabic Verse
When Ceridwen invited me to join read. write. poem., she suggested I add a piece to this list about syllabic verse. Though it has been somewhat delayed, here it is.
Syllabic verse,
most simply put,
is structuring
line breaks so that
each line of the
poem has a
certain amount
of syllables,
without regard
to syntactic
structure or stres-
ses of the line.
The previous verse
had lines of 4
but it can
be an-
y
or
vary
so long as
there is a pat-
tern you can count out.
It certainly creates opportunities for interesting enjambment but falls somewhat flat when read. Since the line breaks follow no rhythm, the syllables, which vary in spoken length, don't form a unit to the ear, it is an entirely visual form of counting. I'm not familiar with, well any, poets who use syllabic verse, but Steve Kowit, in "In the Palm of Your Hand," mentions Phillip Levine's "What Work Is," and Sylvia Plath's "Metaphors" (169-70). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics lists Robert Bridges and Marianne Moore as the two most major poets of this loose form, but mentions Elizabeth Dayrush, Kenneth Rexroth and Dylan Thomas as having works in syllabic verse as well (1249).
The Americanized Haiku, or American Sentences, are an example of syllabic verse, and it is more common in Japanese or French poetry- languages based more on syllable than stress, as noted in John Hollander's "Rhyme's Reason" :
Thus decasyllabic verse in French or
Japanese, unacented, will sound like
Something strage to English ears, which still lust
For downbeats, drumbeats (something) in a line... (24)
Syllabic verse has a strange feel when compared to the chanting effect of accentual verse (Stuff like Beowulf) or the even rhythms of patterned metrical poetry, like Shakespeare or Pope writing in iambic pentameter, coming much closer to free verse, but not quite being free. It has a strange in-between-ness to it. With 30 days of blogging ahead of us, if you want something a little different one day, you might want to pick an arbitrary syllable scheme and try to fit something into it.
Syllabic verse,
most simply put,
is structuring
line breaks so that
each line of the
poem has a
certain amount
of syllables,
without regard
to syntactic
structure or stres-
ses of the line.
The previous verse
had lines of 4
but it can
be an-
y
or
vary
so long as
there is a pat-
tern you can count out.
It certainly creates opportunities for interesting enjambment but falls somewhat flat when read. Since the line breaks follow no rhythm, the syllables, which vary in spoken length, don't form a unit to the ear, it is an entirely visual form of counting. I'm not familiar with, well any, poets who use syllabic verse, but Steve Kowit, in "In the Palm of Your Hand," mentions Phillip Levine's "What Work Is," and Sylvia Plath's "Metaphors" (169-70). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics lists Robert Bridges and Marianne Moore as the two most major poets of this loose form, but mentions Elizabeth Dayrush, Kenneth Rexroth and Dylan Thomas as having works in syllabic verse as well (1249).
The Americanized Haiku, or American Sentences, are an example of syllabic verse, and it is more common in Japanese or French poetry- languages based more on syllable than stress, as noted in John Hollander's "Rhyme's Reason" :
Thus decasyllabic verse in French or
Japanese, unacented, will sound like
Something strage to English ears, which still lust
For downbeats, drumbeats (something) in a line... (24)
Syllabic verse has a strange feel when compared to the chanting effect of accentual verse (Stuff like Beowulf) or the even rhythms of patterned metrical poetry, like Shakespeare or Pope writing in iambic pentameter, coming much closer to free verse, but not quite being free. It has a strange in-between-ness to it. With 30 days of blogging ahead of us, if you want something a little different one day, you might want to pick an arbitrary syllable scheme and try to fit something into it.
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by pepektheassassin on
-
I love writing syllabic verse -- half of my book In Willie's House is syllabic. I haven't figured out how to format it on my blog so it looks like it does in the book. All the lines and straight left margins, and I like to break them otherwise sometimes. But, Oh well.... This was a good piece!
-
-
And = Are. Haven't figured out how to edit comments either. But I will definitely do a syllabic on one of my November posts!
-
Permalink Reply by Thomas Adam on -
Pepek, you can try using the span tag [span style="margin-left:10mm"][/span] with the margin you want in inches (in), pixels (don't know), or the millimeters (mm), and, of course, with the square brackets replaced by angle brackets. And thanks!
-
Permalink Reply by Christine on -
Thanks for sharing this. I'm coming back to English poetry after many years of teaching and studying Spanish, and I've noticed this syllable counting going on. For me it's very natural, since Spanish is like French that way. The stress of Spanish is so predictable, that meter isn't taken into account, accept at the end of the verse.
Lately I've been writing cadae and fibs. They're fun, and I'm thinking they would be considered syllabic verse. Plus, they're short, which works for thirty days of poems.
-
Permalink Reply by Thomas Adam on
-
Christine,
I'm not familiar with either of those forms, though I will likely go look them up now. More important than the syllable count, though, is that you have fun writing them, especially if you're trying to blog poems every day. I think I would go nuts and type gibberish or start repeating myself, but I guess either one could be considered post-modern... hmmm...
-
Permalink Reply by Thomas Adam on
-
There are so many poets and so many books of poetry, it is crazy-hard to keep track of them. People find out I'm a poet and ask me if I've read... well, the last one was... I can't even recall, but the incredibly famous one by Richard Aldington where the guy offs himself. I can only respond probably until I read it again.
I have a tendency to avoid patterned form. I'm not sure why, exactly, but it never works out terribly well for me. I'll stick with vers libre and leave the rules to all of you. :) Enjoy.
-
Permalink Reply by polkadotwitch on -
this sounds fun .... challenging for sure ... i may have to give myself more syllables per line to achieve it ...
-
Permalink Reply by This Girl Remembers on -
Hey everyone,
I'm excited about participating in Nablopomo as well as read.write.poem! I was struggling with something I was writing this morning and decided to try out a variation on syllabic verse - I ended up with a poem with six four-line stanzas, each with a 10-10-10-5 syllable pattern. Not sure I'm thrilled with the result, but it was fun to put together! (It's up on my blog as "Where Others Were" for anyone who wants to check it out - the link is in my profile.)
I've actually found, sometimes, that I'll write something in a relatively strict, concise structure, which helps me focus on the essence of what I want to say, and then I'll fill it out and create a more informally structured poem from it, with a more organic rhythm and wording. Some of the things I've been most pleased with were produced that way.
Does anyone else use structured poetic forms as steps along the poem-writing path, rather than end points in themselves?
-
Permalink Reply by Thomas Adam on
-
I'm probably not the best person to comment on this, since I usually avoid patterned poetry like ebola zaire. I think it's really hard to have an objective viewpoint on one's own work, so consider that a caveat to what I say. I don't usually find I have a hard time focusing on what I want to say and I don't know that I have a particularly "organic" rhythm or sense of diction. Idiosyncratic is probably a word better fitting my work. I have a much harder time fitting what I want to say into any sort of structure, which, when I manage to write something I like in a more formal poem is especially exciting because it is that much more difficult.
Clearly, form works for a lot of poets, historically and contemporarily, as an end, and I would suspect as a step in the process. It worked well for your piece ("Where Others Were"), but I prefer to keep the two styles far, far apart.
-
Permalink Reply by sbpoet on -
I believe Marianne Moore did a lot of work in syllabics. I haven't read her in some time, but I recall poems that seem to have no structure at all, until you begin to count syllables. Some very long lines, some very short.
I've never set out to write a syllabic poem, but have sometimes found it to be the solution when I have a hard time with line breaks. I'm with Ceridwen (I never remember how to spell this. Hmm, I bet it means something. I'd better go look it up) in her point that syllabics can help prune a poem.
Also -- I'll go on record, too, that I'm not intending to post a poem every day. I'm doing NaNoWriMo, too -- so poetic energy is likely to be sparse.
[edited to add: looked it up -- magical! and timely]
-
Permalink Reply by maeham on -
I like this idea. It's more generalized than American Sentences and I can use it in the construction of the art forms of my world. I'm not generally a poet but the forms and energies do serve me in those times when both my soul and mind need to talk to each other. I needed a song form that was not familiar or poetic, This suits perfectly. It also has the property of mystery, with the system not being readily felt. A good place to stash a coded message.
I'll be sure to note with a post if and when any of these ideas find a place in the novel.
-
Permalink Reply by Christine on
-
Here's a link to my poem, The Fighting Cholitas of the Andes. I give writting prompts credits to.... everyone who inspired the post. Each line is ten syllables long, and it's made entirely of declarative sentences. Does it work? I don't know, since really I just finished it. It was fun to write.
Christine
Ads
Donate
Use PayPal to donate $1 to NaBloPoMo.
Thank you!
Thank you!
Badge
© 2009 Created by Eden M. Kennedy
