While there are tons of benefits to grad school, the downside is not having time for extras. Dear reader, you are certainly more than an extra, but what I’m saying is that I’ve been inundated with writing, reading, marking, blah, blah, etc. All the balls juggled in my new life are right now up in the air, however, and I’ve got some time to type up some thoughts regarding poetry.
I was reading an interview about a month back on the poet Joshua Trotter, who said that he rarely worked on projects per se because they just “morph into new projects, which morph again.” As I read this line in the interview, I felt complete kinship with this peripatetic aesthetic. (Even now I’m fighting the urge to digress into my imagination towards a Fringe play about a gangsta rappin’ Aristotle. In one of the performances, so the tangential story goes in my head, there is an actual shooting…) But indeed, I do digress.
Over the past year, my twitter poems have been the place where I’ve been able to unleash this literary wanderlust. I’ve moved from the overarching concept of a twitter epic, to dirty limericks, to quick-sketched impressions of the world outside my window and today I wrote up some acrostics. The trend over the past week, has been to incorporate some poetic form into my 140 words. A sestina on Tuesday (first stanza 123456, next stanza 615243 and on an on into further permutations with each number representing a word) then a pantoum on Wednesday (entire lines repeated). Not that I wrote these out in 140 characters, but I tried to incorporate the idea of these obsessive forms into my own poem. Today I worked on a far simple form, the acrostic. My acrostic begins by spelling out the word itself: Acrostics Crawl Rectangular On Strange Typose In Casements Stilted. In this line I’m imagining an awkwardly framed window, which is shattered in the second and final line: I elbow smash a sash of the window to breathe in the wandering wind. A simple form that I had some fun with.
The elements of prosody – meter, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, metaphor, etc – seem to be the engines (or fuel) for poetry. This might be best understood in the preponderance of rhyme in hip-hop. Once a word ends a line and there’s an expectation for the next to rhyme, the brain hurries towards a certain subset of words to find the most appropriate. Free-style rapping turns this process into a habit of mind, a familiar challenge that drives the verses forward. Even in the absence of a theme, topic or story, this habit towards rhyme maintains the flow of words. I suspect the same principle is at work (in varying degrees of urgency) with other elements of prosody. An ear attuned to assonance, consonance or alliteration, will also set up expectations, which the language part of the brain will attempt to fulfill. In simple terms, we might say that prosody is the setting up of expectations that are fulfilled, unfulfilled or surprised in satisfying or unsatisfying ways.
Some thoughts alongside the tangents twittered out on a limb.
