Well, it now appears that there was only one poem (by Goioa) all along! I
don't know how many people besides Michael and myself misread Robin's post
as comparing two stanzas of "The Next Poem" to a stanza by Auden, but that
3d "detail" stanza is in fact Gioia's as well. In looking at the whole of
"The ext Poem," though, I noticed "details" as the end word of a line in
another stanza, and I think it makes my point about stress vs.
pronunciation. See what you think when I put it together with the stanza
Robin quoted (and given first here):
The music that of common speech
but slanted so that each detail
sounds unexpected as a sharp
inserted in a simple scale.
....
But words that could direct a friend
precisely to an unknown place,
those few unshakeable details
that no confusion can erase.
(God, I almost dropped off while typing this--the rhythm's so monotonous!)
Anyhoo, doesn't "details" in that second stanza "naturally" get stressed as
deTAILS, given the way the preceding "unshakeable" distributes its own
stresses as it sloooows the whole line down?
Candice
on 7/16/01 7:09 PM, Candice Ward at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I don't think it would have mattered where he wrote it. He didn't lose his
> Brit accent over here (I heard him read just before he left the U.S. For the
> last time), and his sense of rhythm would hold no matter where he was,
> surely--? English is stress-based here as there, innit?
>
>
>
> on 7/16/01 6:50 PM, Michael Snider at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> Can I take that back? It's "each detail" in BOTH poems, innit? Did
>> Auden write that one while he was in the States?
>>
>> On Monday, July 16, 2001, at 06:44 PM, Michael Snider wrote:
>>
>>> On Monday, July 16, 2001, at 06:19 PM, Candice Ward wrote:
>>>
>>>> on 7/16/01 5:50 PM, Printmaker at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Michael Snider wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sunday, July 15, 2001, at 01:18 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> twist the normal pronunciation of
>>>>>> DEtail to deTAIL.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Two American data points: I say it both ways, and the American
>>>>>> Heritage
>>>>>> Dictionary lists both pronunciations, deTAIL first.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Isn't deTAIL what they pin on deDONKEY?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> (sorry guys but there is no other god but the OED - at least
>>>>> in my philosophy, all else are just regional variations)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> From DE donkey's perspective, it would surely be DE tail--a case
>>>> of _DE
>>>> ixis narcissisi_ (_ipse dixie_-loik)?
>>>>
>>>> But isn't the stress in this case a function of the meter? With "each"
>>>> preceding "detail" in that (Auden?) line, how could it possibly end
>>>> with the
>>>> stress on "de"?
>>>>
>>>> Robin, your learn`ed opinion, please!
>>>>
>>>> Candice
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In the Auden, it's DEtail, in Gioia, it's deTAIL. In both cases, both
>>> regional and metrical.
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