52 Ways of looking at a poem, Ruth Padel

some notes from the book:

End-rhyme is not the only sort. Internal rhyme has always been vital to English poetry and still is.

Rhyme can get that hanging together brilliantly, but is not the only way.

The challenge for poet is to relate particular sounds, and therefore the words and ideas that go with them, ............. Alexander Pope declared, 'The sound must seem an echo to the sense.'

An inportant way of creating that relationship of sound and sense is by the repetition of vowels and, sometimes, consonants.

A good poem is a love affair of sound and sense.

Even in blank verse, rhyme is still an important principle in the lines relationships with each other.

Blank verse - Henry Howard.

Apart from rhyme, the crucial thing about blank verse is its metre, iambic pentameter, the magically flexible line which has dominated English aural imagination since the sixteenth century.

Iambic pentameter = every line has five beats. When you count the number of beats you are counting the 'feet' of the line, and each foot is made up, like a musical 'bar', of stressed syllable, the beat, plus several others. The foot may be an 'iamb' (a unit of two syllables, the first short or unaccented, the second long or accented, as in caress, or, here, it drop - and then eth as).

In free verse you are free, as blank verse is not, to shorten or lengthen the number of beats in a line. You do not need to be consistent. You can start with four beats and move on to seven or eight. You bind the lines together not by rhyme but other techniques like balance, stress and the way you use the end-word, whether it rests and breathes the line or sweeps on to the next.

Rhyme itself has a far wider general meaning than a simple cat/mat fit. Some of the most important rhymes today are near-rhymes which often involve words of more than one syllable (slabika). Or 'imperfect' rhymes (dens/sirens, ring/striking), 'unaccented' rhymes where the unaccented last syllable rhymes (matter/lover), and 'half-rhymes' where the accented syllable rhymes (wily/piling, wilderness/building, cover/shovel). There are vowel (samohláska) rhymes where consonants don't matter (bite/strike/rhyme/tile), and consonant (souhláska) where what matters is the consonant at the end of the last accented syllable (design/maintain).

Poets since the sixties have been creating end-rhymes randomly, without a rhyme-scheme. Just as jazz brought syncopation, randomness and asymmetry into classical music, so since the advent of free verse poets may bind a poem together with rhymes that are are not in a worked-out pattern. But random does not mean uncontrolled. 

Saying the unsaid, the now
One of poetry's jobs is to transform real life imaginatively so we understand our lives new-paintedly, more fully. To make familiar things look strange so you see them new. It does this through the ear, musically, and through the mind - both intelect and feeling - in relation to the world outside.

............ they also go on tackling the fundamental human themes which poetry has made its own since it was first written. Which, in the West, means in power and injustice, parents, parenthood and children, ageing, illness, the social and physical landscape around us, religion, sorrow, loss and memory, jealousy, guilt, joy, desire, and every kind of love.

Philip Larkin said that a poem is a knife and fork partnership. The fork identifies an emotion, spears it, lands it on the poem's plate. The knife is analytical and technical, wants 'to sort out the emotion. Chop it up, arrange it and say either thank you or sod the universe for it'. The fork is what makes readers reach for poetry in a crisis. A poem can express deep, significant feeling and thought more that's what they are for. Larkin also said poetry begins with emotion in the poet, ends with the same emotion in the reader, and the poem is the instrument that puts it there. Sex, death and the rest are not just subjects for poems. They matter to everyone. People who don't normally have much to do with poetry turn to it in the big transformative rituals and crises, the wedding, the funeral, the making and braking of love.

It is often said that bad politics make good art. (Regionalism, Thatcherism, Orgreave)

Poems had to work implicitly; not spell things out but slide under the censor's eye, 'say the unsaid' to readers desperate to hear their truth, while pretending it hadn'ot been said. Through the sixties and seventies, various Eastern European poets found ways of doing this by giving a new, quasi-surreal status and transformative power to what has always lain at poetry's heart, the image.And not just image but the imagination to see things otherwise, for which that word 'image' stands.

Poetry devices

Rhyme 
Robert Frost Fire and Ice
...
From what I have tested of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

Emily Dickinson Heaven Is What I Cannot Reach!

The color on the cruising cloud,
The interdicted ground (similar pronunciation)
Behind the hill, the house behind, --
There Paradise is found!
...


Repetition
Robert Frost Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
...
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Edgar Allan Poe - The Bells
...
From the bells, bells, bells, bells
Bells, bells, bells


Alliteration
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Excelsior
...In happy homes he saw the light
...
Edgar Allan Poe - A Dream
...
That holy dream - that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,

Assonance
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) How Do I Love Thee?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
...


Consonance
Edgar Allan Poe - A dream
...
What though that light, thro' storm and night,
...


Metaphor
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) How Do I Love Thee?

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;

Emily Dickinson The Grass so Little has to do -
...
And even when it dies - to pass
In Odors so divine -
Like Lowly spices, lain to sleep -
...
Edgar Allan Poe - A dream
...
Hath cheered me as lovely beam
...

Alliteration - poetic devices are in no way exclusive to poetry

Two or more words in a line of poetry that begin with same initial sound.

Kids collecting cash

Aristotle's fourth element

Expression is at the heart of creative writing: the use of language to evoke, entrance and enlighten.

Poetry and theme - exercise 1

Which one speaks about place in relation to identity and exile?

Definitely the C. The poetry places the imagination in Dublin Bay. There are feelings of sadness, missing, good buys......


Which one purely evokes a sense of place?

A. I got a picture of a beautiful valley where is a peace and greatness of the world we live in.


Which one makes a social comment about progress and place.

B. It is a state of a war. Full of bombs. Place where an army is operating, tinned everything, I imagined big tent, desert nad boxes full of equipments.

My first interaction

I made a thing where is a little interaction with texts, clips, sounds. It is not finished but I like how it works. It was done in Animate and now I now that I must change it. There is problem when someone start with Problem the end is revealed first. I will make it more linear.

MIND DESIRE PROBLEM first version