I'm rather influenced by Paz's thinking on rhythm, I guess because it
accords with my own instincts (despite his own uses of the masculine
pronoun): rhythm is time, words in a poem are made in time. I'm not sure
about his idea of primordial time, although I admit some attraction to
the idea of ritual that idea catches up: the reenactments of origin that
are simultaneously makings in the present. Rhythm might be the best way
of catching that involuntary attention which most likely results in some
inner understanding in a reader, but I'm not sure how much that has to do
with "controlling" a response which is, surely and desirably,
uncontrollable.
I can't imagine writing poems without rhythm, largely because the playing
with rhythm and sound is an enormous part of the pleasure of it for me;
also because it connects the poem with the human voice and corporeal
mnemonic intuitions which matter to me. But then the real challenge is
to continuously break it up, to permit intrusions of the real,
dislocations, shifts, which perhaps admit other, larger rhythms into the
poem (beyond the line, I mean).
Best
Alison
>Verse is language in lines. (p 11)
>
>A poem is the language of an act of attention. (p 12)
>
>The prosody of a poem is the poet's method of controlling the reader's
>temporal experience of the poem, especially his (sic) attention to that
>experience. (p 13)
>
>Rhythm, in poetry, is the temporal distribution of the elements of
>language. (p 14)
>
>Prosody is the system of rhythmic organization that governs the
>construction and reading of a poem. (p 14)
>
>A meter is a prosody whose mode of organization is numerical. (p 17)
>
>"Free is properly a synonym for "nonmetrical" and it follows that the
>prosody of free verse is rhythmic organization by other than numerical
>modes. (pp 24-25)
>
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Literary Arts Magazine
PO Box 186
NEWPORT VIC 3015
Masthead online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home page: http:www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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