- [Voiceover] With Richard Kenney.
He's a professor of English at the University of Washington.
His works include The Evolution of the Flightless Bird,
Orrery, and The Invention of the Zero.
Kenney is the recipient of numerous accolades,
including the Yale Younger Poets Prize,
the Lannan Literary Award, and the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
His most recent book is The One-Strand River.
- My name is Richard Kenney,
and I've been here for the year
at the Writers' Workshop.
What I'm gonna talk about is meter.
I'm gonna talk about fundamentals here.
Meter means measure, which implies counting and numbers.
In fact, poetry used to be called numbers.
Well, how many?
Well, let me think, one, two, three, four, five.
This is my poetic line.
We will measure it as the poets do.
We have five numbers, six, as many as we need, I suppose.
What gets counted?
Well, you could count anything, I suppose,
anything that you could whistle back
in a repetitive way so that you had
a symmetrical pattern, a noticeable pattern.
You could count unicorns.
Five unicorns in a single poetic line would ...
Well, you see the problem.
Sentimentality would be the least of it.
What you really want to count are
small things that don't have any meaning,
like syllables.
You know where this is going.
Syllables are one of the things
that famously get counted in meter.
What else?
Accents or stresses, which we know, get counted.
There are syllabic meters, and there are stress meters,
and then the third thing, which is the confluence
of those two traditions,
and constitutes the great metrical tradition in English,
is counting both at once, which means counting feet.
What I'm gonna do is illustrate
how one would make a line out of those simple elements.
To do that, like I said, I have props.
We'll do syllabics first.
These represent syllables.
Think I have enough.
The simplest syllabic form,
the one that everybody's familiar with
are haiku poems, right?
"Turnip farmer rose,
and with a fresh-pulled turnip,
pointed to my road."
We have, "turnip farmer rose",
"and with a fresh-pulled turnip", seven,
"pointed to my road."
Five, seven, five, easy.
Stress tradition, we have the Anglo-Saxons,
who, at the very root of English literature,
began English literature, wrote in the stress meters.
I can't speak that for you,
but during the Middle English period,
the alliterative revival, there was a poet called
"The Pearl Poet" who wrote
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", which begins,
(speaks in foreign language)
"It's close, you can hear, bang, bang, bang, bang."
There are five of those, five stresses in each line.
We're gonna use bolts for that.
I said I wouldn't use that word, but there it is.
It's five for the English tradition.
(speaks in foreign language)
Can you see these better if I turn them?
Five, five stresses.
That tradition survives, comes down to us
in the nursery rhyme tradition, so,
"hinx, minx, the old witch winks,"
"the beggars are coming to town,
"some in rags, and some in tags,
"and one in a velvet gown."
"We have" hinx, minx, the old witch winks,"
"the beggars are coming to town,"
"the beggars are coming to town,"
"some in rags, and some in tags,"
and "one in a velvet gown."
There you see a very famous rhythmic pattern
in the literature, it's the song measure,
it's, in this case, four stresses, and then three,
and then four, and then three.
And all of them,
"hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
"the cow jumped over the moon,
or one of my favorites,
"bow wow wow, whose dog art thou?
"Little Tom Tinker's dog, bow wow wow."
"Bow wow wow", it's not very hard.
It can be done in more complicated fashion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins is famous for it.
His poem "The Kingfisher" begins,
"As kingfishers catch fire,
"dragonflies draw flame,
"as tumbled over rim in roundy wells, stones ring,
"so each tucked string tells, each hung bell's bow swung,
"finds tongue to fling out broad its name."
Hopkins is counting stresses,
and these are accents which fall on particular syllables
in the course of the sentence.
No syllables, you noticed I'm not counting
any syllables at all.
They don't figure at all in this system.
The line, "hinx, minx, the old witch winks,"
is the same length as a line which would begin,
"Let me tell you a little story about a man named Herb,
"his daddy was a noun, and his momma was a verb."
That follows the pattern as a lot of songs do.
They don't need to count their syllables.
They don't lose track of where they are.
They know how many stresses there are because,
in the Anlgo-Saxon tradition, they would alliterate them.
In music, you strum the banjo,
and the music carries it.
That's the alliterative tradition,
and you're welcome to try it.
It's a powerful way of writing,
and the limitation here is not that you can't hear it,
but you sometimes have trouble deciding
where the stresses fall in long lines.
Now we come to the great tradition, as I said,
the accentual syllabic tradition
where I said you count both.
Well, how do you do two things at once?
The obvious way to do it is to combine them,
and that's where my props come in.
A stress will be coupled with
a number of unstressed syllables,
and you call that grouping a foot.
In English, there are really just
two rhythms that we're trying to approximate.
A rhythm would be a repetitive pattern
of a stress followed by some number of unstressed syllables,
which is always the same,
so that it would sound symmetrical.
In English, there are really just four of these.
There are two rhythms.
One is the heartbeat, lub-dub, lub-dub.
Lub-dub, lub-dub.
Dub-lub, dub-lub.
This one, I'm gonna couple them together,
when I do that, what I have is a troche from your position,
the bolt and the nut.
There's two rhythms that we try to approximate
using these feet, one is the double rhythm,
and that's the rhythm of the heartbeat.
It's the easy way to remember it.
Let's say the heart goes lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.
It goes unstressed, stress.
I have just made an iamb here
with the unstressed syllable, which is the nut,
followed by the bolt, lub-dub.
Now, in a long string, if I say,
"Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub,"
and I ask Chris back there, somebody else,
"I don't remember where I started,
"did I start on a lub or a dub?"
he would shrug and say, "Why does it matter?"
This is the distinction between
a troche and an iamb, is really minimal.
They're both trying to approximate this rhythm,
which propagates all the way through the literature.
The other rhythm that the poetic feet try to approximate
is the triple rhythm.
It's called a triple because there are
three syllables in it, two of them are unstressed,
here's a second, add it.
Now, instead of ...
Instead of lub-dub, I have diddy-dum.
Diddy-dum, diddy-dum.
These can be strung together.
In nursery rhymes,
"Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle"
has a bunch of them, a bunch of these in it.
The literature also, particularly in former centuries,
uses these feet, they're called anapests and dactyls.
The anapest rises up to the stress,
and the dactyl falls down from it.
The dactyl and the troche are the falling feet.
Bum-bum, or bum-bum-bum,
and the anapest and the iamb
are the double and the triple rising feet.
Out of these props, you can build a poem.
There are two measures which are common.
One is the pentameter line, the long line,
which sounds like speech,
and the other is the short line, or the song measure.
Many songs are in it,
and many serious poems too.
Okay, so this goes,
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
"Thou art more lovely and more temperate."
All right, that works.
"I'm tired of love;
"I'm still more tired of rhyme.
"But money gives me pleasure all the time."
It works.
The opening lines of Keats's famous Odes, The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" begins,
"Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
"Thou foster child of silence and slow time,"
excuse me?
That sounded really foolish,
and that's sort of the point of these meters.
The meter is purely mechanical,
and it isn't a feeling creature.
It's really a robotic sort of mechanical thing
made out of nuts and bolts like this.
It only knows stressed syllables and unstressed syllables,
and for this reason, it's really important
to understand that, when we say "stress"
in the context of accentual syllabic meters,
what we're talking about is elicit stress
or allowable stresses within a single word.
If a word accepts a stress,
if a syllable in a word accepts a stress,
if the dictionary says it accepts a stress,
primary, secondary, it doesn't matter,
it just gets a stress as far as the meter's concerned.
But you, feeling creature that you are,
will not read it foolishly like that in a sing-song fashion.
You will read it naturally,
and so, if I read that Shakespearean line again,
my robot reads it,
[robotic voice] "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,"
well, I would say,
[smoothly] "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day."
How many stresses is that?
Well, the number of actual stresses that I give it is four.
The robot reads it relentlessly and ruthlessly
giving the same amount of stress
to each of the stressable syllables.
The prepositions, the conjunctions get
as much juice as the nouns and the verbs.
They get as much stress as anything that
one would wish to emphasize
when one read it in a dramatic fashion.
An actor can read a line differently one day,
different from another day,
differently on Thursday than he does on Tuesday.
The meter never changes.
The meter is always ticking along underneath the surface,
but simply striking every allowable syllable,
every syllable in which the dictionary
will permit a stress, whereas you'll read it normally.
In a line like that,
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,"
"shall I compare thee to a summer's day,"
we have four rhetorical stresses,
four voice stresses, or rhythmic stresses, we would say,
but there are five metrical stresses.
Don't worry about it.
This happens in many, many lines.
Any line that has a conjunction, or a preposition,
or some grammatical word like that
will often have fewer stresses than five, rhythmic stresses.
The meter goes along underneath the surface
without any problem.
That's just about the whole story, really.
I could illustrate with four-beat lines.
I could illustrate with five-beat lines,
but just to do a couple more,
the opening lines of Keats's,
I'll do two of the Odes.
The "Ode on the Grecian Urn" begins,
"Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
"thou foster child of silence and slow time,
"Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
"a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme."
If you want to hear the robot read that metrically,
it would go like this.
[robotic voice] "Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
"thou foster child of silence and slow time,"
it sounds idiotic to put an accent on "and."
One wants to accent "slow" and "time."
"Thou foster child of silence, slow time,"
it's a beautiful line.
That disjunction, that disharmony,
that counterpointing effect is really
what makes accentual syllabic poetry so thrilling
because the part of your body adjusts itself,
your physical nature adjusts itself
to the clock of the meter and expects
these stresses to come, and when they don't come,
there's a little bit of a frisson,
a little bit of a hair goes up on your neck
a little bit sometimes.
You have a physical response.
There's one other version of that.
The next line is,
"Slyvan historian, who canst thus express."
Now, "Sylvan" can't be pronounced "Syl-van,"
but the robot wants to go,
"Syl-van historian, who canst thus express,"
can't do it, so what do you do?
Well, it's really easy, you just flip
the iamb around into a troche.
Now we have a troche.
Sylvan, and now we revert to iambs,
"historian, who canst thus express."
This happens all the time.
It happens very often in the first position
of a poetic line.
The opening of the "Ode to Autumn" is,
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
"close bosom-friend to the maturing sun."
Well, you know, you could imagine that
that was made out of troches because
it starts with "season,"
and "season" can't be pronounced "sea-son."
Now, my robot wants to say
"sea-son of mists and mellow fruitfulness,"
but I can't, so again, I turn the iamb around,
make a troche of it, and I go "season,"
and then I revert to iambs,
"of mists and mellow fruitfulness," and now we're done.
That's okay, everything works out.
If I were to take more time,
I won't, you should read the great poems,
and you'll find these effects happening all the time.
In the context of this little chat,
I'm saying, don't worry about it, it's okay.
If the meter gets violated occasionally,
it's fine, as long as you revert to the pattern.
Again, the pattern doesn't have to be
the way that one would actually say the line.
The syllables, where accents are supposed to strike,
as in the case of five of them in a pentameter line,
they simply have to be able to accept a stress.
With these props, I've been trying to show
how the armature can be laid out for a metrical line.
How does one write one?
One simply speaks
and moves syllables around so that
they can fit the pattern.
If you just have to say something
and it doesn't quite fit the pattern,
don't worry about it, as long as you recover
and return to the pattern.
Is it possible to write this way
and sound anything like a normal human being?
Will it necessarily sound like
some sort of faux Shakespearean?
No, it isn't very difficult at all
to do this day and night.
The fact is, I could speak that way for a long time
without you noticing.
I guess I'll say one last thing.
These meters don't exist in the world.
They exist in your nervous system.
I'll demonstrate that.
I propose that there are two rhythms,
the heartbeat and the hoofbeat.
I will propose that, of all the possible meters,
and if you say that there are six,
there are dimeters, trimeters, tetrameters,
pentameters, and hexameters,
and there are anapests, dactyls, iambs, and troches,
that should be 24 meters that you'd have to memorize,
it's not that way.
There are really only a few that actually happen,
and they are the meter which resembles song,
and that's called the song measure or ballad measure,
and that's some combination of four feet and three feet.
"Hinx, minx" works that way.
"Betsy from Pike" works that way.
"Clementine" works that way.
"The Yellow Rose from Texas" works that way.
"Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night,"
many, many poems work that way.
All the Christmas carols you know,
all of the ballads you know work that way.
They're some combination of
four stresses, and three stresses,
four stresses, and three stresses,
four, four, four, four, something like that.
The other famous line is
the line which approximates speech.
In English, that's the pentameter line.
This is the nature of poetry.
Its DNA is the twining of the strands of song and speech,
speech which resembles song, song which resembles speech.
Those are the two principle measures or line lengths,
a short line and a long line,
and the two rhythms are the heartbeat and the hoofbeat,
and the hoofbeat is really only used nowadays,
it's used principally in light verse, the humorous verse.
I started to say that the meters exist,
they're often talked about as though
they're in the world, but they're really
just ways of talking about things
that happen in the world, which are strings
of rhythmic patterns which appear in speech.
The line,
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,"
pentameter line, is it really?
Well, if the next line is,
"Thou art more lovely and more temperate,"
and the poem,
"Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,"
yes, it's a pentameter line,
but if that poem were to have continued, let's say,
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
"Thou art too prim and arch,
"more like February, say, complaining into March."
Okay, now we have,
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
"No, thou art too prim and arch,"
four, three,
"More like February, say, complaining into March,"
now I've made a little ballad out of that.
Does that mean that this ballad measure
has one pentameter line?
No, it just has a stressed tetrameter line,
it just has a few extra syllables in it.
What I'm trying to propose is that,
I began with counting and numbers,
just like professors always do,
and it's not about numbers and counting at all.
That's just the mind trying to understand it
at a level of detail which is,
in practice, all but irrelevant.
The truth is, these things are biological effects.
They happen in the body.
Music is the proof of that.
If you find yourself moving to music,
then you know that this happens
in a very unmediated kind of way.
I left the question of the journalist's questions,
who, what, when, where, why, how,
I tried to concentrate a little bit on what and how,
but the who, where, when, everybody, always.
That's who and when.
It's a cultural universal.
The anthropologists haven't found
a culture where this doesn't exist.
One presumes, there are bone flutes that go back
to the caves, one presumes that
this kind of thing was going on from the beginning.
It's everywhere.
Where? It's not only in poetry.
In fact, over the last century,
metrical verse, having dominated the tradition,
and probably all of the Western poetic traditions, anyway,
the only ones I know anything about,
since the beginning, in the last century,
meter took a back seat to some other poetic effects,
but the advertisers and the eduprop shamans
didn't leave it behind.
We hear metrical constructions probably more often
in advertising than, at least,
average people out there on the street
probably hear them in that context
and in the context of music more often
than they do in the context of poetry.
Why?
The advertisers know that it
kind of gets people's attention.
The music people know that, well,
we're all drinking wine, aren't we?
Why wouldn't we want to be here.
We like it.
You sometimes hear that meter is used
because meter was a technology or a method
which enhanced memory.
Okay, it's not untrue.
It strikes me, it's true in the same sense
that groceries enhance digestion.
Because we're inclined to.
The answer is the same as for music.
Why? Because we like it.
It's pleasing to us,
both in the hearing, and in the composition.
I guess that's it.
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