A Prosody of Free Verse

Explorations in Rhythm

Richard Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317615040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

There is to date no comprehensive account of the rhythms of free verse. The main purpose of A Prosody of Free Verse: explorations in rhythm is to fill that gap and begin to provide a systematic approach to describing and analyzing free verse rhythms. Most studies have declared the attempt to write such a prosody as impossible: they prefer to see free verse as an aberrant version of regular metrical verse. They also believe that behind free verse is the 'ghost of metre'.

Running against that current, A Prosody of Free Verse bases its new system on additive rhythms that do not fit conventional time signatures. Inspiration is taken from jazz, contemporary music and dance, not only in their systems of notation but in performance. The book argues that twentieth and twenty-first century rhythms in poetry as based on the line rather than the metrical foot as the unit of rhythm, and that larger rhythmic structures fall into verse paragraphs rather than stanzas.

1
Introduction

Time

Rhythm is conventionally conceived in terms of regular beats in time. Time, at least in Western civilization, is assumed to be a continuum, running ‘horizontally’ from the past through the present to the future. Rhythm punctuates the continuum through repetition: “succession is repetition, time is nontime” (Paz 1974: 65). In other words, from this conventional point of view, rhythm lifts time beyond itself by creating a pattern that becomes ‘nontime’. It fuses past and future into a present that is patterned and physical and which moves the listener—sometimes actually physically moving the listener to tap his or her feet, get up and dance. Even if the listener does not physically move, he or she can be moved emotionally and/or spiritually and/or intellectually by the rhythmic configuration. As Jaques-Dalcroze suggests, “[I]t is rhythm that gives meaning and form to juxtapositions of sounds” (1921: 48).

The present in rhythm, though, is not just a single moment: it is usually a few seconds or minutes, or less likely, a few hours, in which the level of concentration of patterned, physical, repetitive action is sustained. During that period of time, patterns of regular beat may form the basis of a rhythmic shape. It would be tedious if the repetition were relentlessly regular during that period of time; rhythm is usually varied at different levels (that of the metrical foot, of the work as a whole) during the work so that the sense of a regular beat is felt at the foundation of the experience but variations on it are experienced along the way. The point of regular rhythm is to suggest that there is a pattern that can lift you up a level so that you can feel or perceive such patterns in the everyday milieu of your experience.

There is more in Octavio Paz’s Alternating Current (1974) that is relevant to this initial discussion of rhythm in poetry.

First, “[a] poem is rhythmic language—not language with a rhythm (song) or mere verbal rhythm (a property common to all language, including prose)” (1974: 65.). Paz’s notion that “a poem is rhythmic language” can be developed by saying that poetry brings to the surface the rhythmic identity of language by infusing it with principles of song and dance. It embodies in the words—in their layout on the page and in their expression in the voice and in performance—an emotional shape that underpins the experience of the cognitive content and associations of the words. What distinguishes poetry from prose is that the rhythmic underpinning is conscious, deliberate and evident to the ear. This is not a matter of an authorial poetic tone, as in a distant oracle-like delivery, that signifies to us that ‘this is poetry’. Rather, it is a subliminal patterning that says to us: there is something going on here that we should pay attention to and which is asking us to attend to the words in a different, more concentrated way than we would usually do so. We are being moved out of the conventional assumptions about time and asked to listen to a pattern that is above time and that tells us something about the relation of past, present and future and, furthermore, about the relationship of the present (if we compress past and future into it) to the breadth of contemporaneous experience. In these senses, then, poetry is halfway between language as song, on the one hand, and the “mere verbal rhythm” of everyday speech and prose on the other.

Second, “rhythm is a relation of difference and similarity: this sound is not that one, this sound is like that one” (1974: 65). This notion is straightforward: the dualistic principle of difference and similarity is accepted. However, whereas the difference described here is dependent on and based on the grounds of similarity, the unit of similarity that will be proposed in the present prosody of free verse is the line as the unit of rhythm (see Chapter 7).

Third, “rhythm is the original metaphor and encompasses all the others”. Another way to put this is to say that rhythm is the sine qua non of poetry. A poem without rhythm is not a poem unless it stands at the very borders of poetry and prose in the form of a prose poem, with the barest trace of rhythm patterning. Rhythm is not metaphorical in the sense that it takes an image and makes it mean something at a different level; rather, it takes any form of language (not necessarily the metaphorical) and lifts it to another level of experience and reference. In other words, the term metaphor is used loosely by Paz in this quotation; but what he is saying is that even non-metaphorical language moves to a different plane of reference if it is rhythmically informed.

Fourth, “whether lyric, epic, or dramatic, the poem is succession and repetition,¹ a date on the calendar and a rite. The ‘happening’ is also a poem (theatre) and a rite (fiesta), but it lacks one essential element: rhythm, the reincarnation of the instant” (1974: 65). The reference to theatre and fiesta is outside the range of the present book (Paz sees poetry from a distinctively Latin American perspective), but the idea that rhythm is a reincarnation of the instant is central to aspects of time previously discussed and to the notion of embodiment. Paz elaborates further when he says, “[T]he instant dissolves in the succession of other nameless instants. In order to save it we must convert it into a rhythm” (1974: 65). What this suggests is that rhythmic patterning is a form of preservation, a kind of aspic that captures time and relations and compresses them to a moment (lyric) or series of moments (epic, dramatic or narrative). This process of conversion of what Vygotsky calls ‘real relations between people’—the socio-historical-political nexus—into embodied rhythmic patterning of the moment is the distinctive cultural signature of poetry. In free verse, the rhythmic configurations are more additive and more small- and large-scale than the middle way of regular metrical verse.

Fifth, “a poem of a single syllable is no less complex than the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost” (1974: 66). Yes and no. From a metaphysical point of view, a single syllable can contain volumes, but it has no rhythm so, for the purposes of the present book, is not considered to be a poem (despite the potential metaphorical layering and resonance). At the other end of the spectrum of that statement, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost are large-scale, fugue-like poetic works. Each operates according to a basic metrical rhythm (the terza rima for Dante and the blank verse hexameter for Milton), but what we can learn from this reference for discussion later in the book is that fugue-like structures can carry rhythm at different levels (the line, the section or the whole work).

Finally,² a statement from Paz touches on the essence of the exploration in the present book: “in ordinary discourse one phrase lays the groundwork for the next; it is a chain with a beginning and an end. In a poem the first phrase contains the last one and the last one evokes the first” (1974: 67). This statement can be applied to free verse. The line, taken from ‘ordinary discourse’ and framed as the first line of a poem, establishes a rhythmic benchmark against which subsequent lines position themselves in the development of an additive rhythm. By the end of the poem, whether it be just a few lines long or a much longer work, the “last [line] evokes the first” in that the ‘end is everything,’ and its rhythmic character infuses and shapes our interpretation of the work as a whole, helping us identify the particular kind of rhythmic patterning that is at play. We cannot know the full rhythmic intention until we reach that last line.

The Problem of Periodicity

Explorations in rhythm have to address the problem of periodicity. The problem is as follows: if time is experienced as a continuum, with no beginning and no end, how do we conceive of, understand and manage time? The conventional answer is that we divide time into units based on diurnal and seasonal cycles determined by the movement of the planet within the solar system. Such mathematical categorization allows us to have a common time system worldwide and thus be able to meet each other at set times, provide frameworks for social activities, gauge the exact amount of time it takes to perform certain actions (e.g., to boil an egg) and measure performance in time. Metrical patterning is based on such a numerical system. Another way to compartmentalize time is via narrative, which provides a framework with a beginning, middle and end (and other more complex variations between the beginning and end).

But how is it possible to segment time that is not bound by mathematical principles or by narrative? The sense of timing of a musician or sportsperson—and even of a person engaging in everyday conversational turns or a business person deciding when to intervene in the market—is not so much metronomical as relative to other influences that include the physiological, psychological, aesthetic (usually based on some sense of order and proportion), circumstantial and serendipitous.

Hawking (1988: 21) explains that the theory of relativity “has revolutionized our ideas of space and time”. Furthermore, relativity “put an end to the idea of absolute time” (1988: 21). Without going into the details of the theory, it is perhaps not coincidental that Einstein was publishing his work on relativity between 1905 and 1915—at exactly the same period of Imagism, the embracing of vers libre within the Anglo-American poetic tradition and the breaking away from metrically based, ‘absolute’ rhythmic systems. Rather, a different kind of ‘absolute’ emerged for Pound: the notion that each emotional, intellectual and spiritual experience had a rhythm that expressed it.

Relativity, then, in the most general sense, has something to offer a pros-ody of free verse, viz. that no one line of free verse can be defined rhythmically without recourse to the lines that precede and/or follow it. In other words, we are unable to gauge the rhythmic identity of free verse without weighing up one line against another. There is no absolute ‘clock’ ticking beneath the surface of free verse to help us place the rhythmic identity, neither in time nor space. Hawking’s conclusion that “we must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time” (1988: 23) raises another factor to take into account. But to suggest that space—the arrangement of words on a page or in the air—especially when subject to individual variation in delivery and reception, is to push the connection between relativity and free verse too far. It is better, for the purposes of developing a theory of rhythmic movement in free verse, to retain the idea of time as a dynamic quantity and “a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it” (1988: 143) rather than as any kind of fixed entity. By a ‘personal concept’ however, the present book does not subscribe to the idea that free verse is individualistic in its composition or reception, rather that it arranges time to best suit the particular experience it wishes to express.

The Search for Order

Stravinsky suggested that “the phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man and time” (1962: 54).The explorations in the field of rhythm in the present book are not driven by a desire for order per se, but they are concerned with precision and the description of rhythmic patterning in free verse and in music. They are, at times, necessarily abstract. It is impossible to account for the complexity and variety of free verse rhythms without standing back and trying to see the patterns that inform the lines. Indeed, a prosody is an abstraction—but it is also a transduction from one mode (the aural or sound) to another (written in print). It is thus a multimodal exploration requiring the description of phenomena in one mode by means of another.

The desire for order is understandable. Like any theory, an abstract set of rules enables us to understand the relations between elements, to predict how future combinations might take shape and to gain a degree of intellectual control over a seemingly disparate set of phenomena. A prosody comes close to such a theory but does not constitute a theory in itself. It does not pretend to be able to predict free verse patterns or rhythms; it is not necessarily comprehensive; it describes more than explains.

The search for order in English verse is captured in Attridge (2013), who gives a full account of his search for prosodic principles. The present book uses his work as a starting point. Attridge identifies groups of beats as the basic principle of rhythm. Beats are

those places we are inclined to mark by a physical movement […] or by a mental registration of this potential bodily act. Beats occur in normal English speech when the series of stressed and unstressed syllables approaches a degree of regularity in its alternation; metrical verse is thus a heightening of a tendency present in the spoken language.

(2013: 3–4)

His journey in the exploration of rhythm in English verse moves from classical antecedents to studies on phrasal and syntactic rhythm and also to ‘beat prosody’, with its own technical diction. The underlying connection is the common basis in speech rhythms and their enhancement in poetic form.

The differences between the approach in the present book and previous approaches are several. First, the present work moves beyond speech on the assumption that rhythmic embodiment is not entirely captured by the verbal mode. Second, it differs from previous prosodies in that it does not seek regularity of pattern (the basis of metre); rather, it attempts to explore and define additive rhythms. Third, it does not take as its basic unit of analysis the ‘metrical foot’ (the relation between a beat and its adjacent, supporting syllables); instead, it looks to the poetic line as its unit of rhythm. Fourth, it both departs from and returns to choreography as a discipline to shed light on poetic rhythm. Fifth, it tends toward music rather than speech linguistics for precedents in descriptions of rhythm.

All these differences might suggest that the intention of the present book is not to foreground the verbal mode but to explore the physical and musical hinterland of poetic rhythm. That is exactly the intention, but it will not be at the expense of the verbal. The articulation of rhythmic expression in words, as opposed to music or dance, is at the core of the present project, and as such, it shares Attridge’s emphasis on the physical embodiment of rhythm, with its tension and interplay between regularity on the one hand and the melodic line of the verse on the other. What is also shared is the importance of the printed page to the appreciation of free verse rhythms. More often than not, the rhythmic challenge of free verse is presented to the reader as a distinctive arrangement of words on a page. There is thus a visual dimension to free verse rhythms that will be explored in the present book; the ‘score’ of the poem (to use a musical analogy) does not follow the regular patterning of a metrical poem nor of the conventional musical score.

It is, however, the contention of the present book that free verse rhythms are not individualistic departures from the regularities of metre but that they constitute a new form of rhythm—and that these new forms of rhythm require a new prosodic language to describe them.

Prosodies

Szczepek Reed’s (2011) introduction to the study of prosody in naturally occurring conversation enables a distinction between prosodies deriving from conversation analysis on the one hand and prosodies which aim to account for the rhythmic patterns in poetry on the other. The former use musical terms to describe aspects of speech; the latter draw on speech itself as well as musical patterning (especially rhythm and structure) to identify the movement of verse. As Szczepek Reed states (p. 1), the prosodic perspective on language “has been developed by researchers in the fields [of] conversation analysis (CA) and interactional linguistics,” whereas the hinterland for poetic prosodies is that of music, linguistics (in general), literary study and, as I will go on to argue, dance choreographies.

Szczepek Reed (2011) defines linguistic prosody as covering “all interactionally relevant, suprasegmanetal aspects of talk, comprising the features of pitch, loudness, time and voice quality” (p. 13), whereas poetic prosody will focus more on aspects of music such as rhythm, sequence and structure—and, to a much lesser extent, tempo. While sequence and structure are general features of narrative and other art forms as well as naturally occurring schemata, rhythm and speech rate or tempo can also manifest themselves in speech prosodies. Poetic prosody, too, must account for verse set out in a visual mode, through the medium of print or screen, and the relation of these to the spoken voice. A working definition of poetic prosody might therefore be a system for accounting for the rhythmic variations in verse.

Other studies of prosody in conversational analysis, intera...