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    The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
    The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
    The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide

    By Robert Pinsky

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    About this ebook

    The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works.

    "Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing."

    As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud.

    He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart.

    This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 19, 2014
    ISBN9781466878495
    The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
    Author

    Robert Pinsky

    Robert Pinsky was the nation’s Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. An acclaimed poet and scholar of poetry, he is also an internationally renowned man of letters. His Selected Poems was published in paperback in March 2012. His other books include The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide and his bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.

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    • 3/5
      Pinsky's slim volume is eminently readable albeit not engrossing. I found his instruction on rhythm and meter to be particularly helpful as I find my ear for poetry can at times be found wanting. Overall this is an instructive book I will return to but not one I'd recommend to anyone searching to explore the joy in poetry, for that I recommend Edward Hirsch.
    • 2/5
      It seemed like it would be fun when it started, an analysis of how the different elements of language, (syntax, line length, meaning, etc.) interact with each other to land on us. After a while, it seemed repetitious and pointless. He didn't link patterns of sound the effects they evoke. I kept thinking of the line from e.e. cummings "i would rather hear one bird sing than teach ten-thousand stars how not to dance", or in this case words to sing.

      I give it two stars because Pinsky's writing is lovely. I might come back to this book if I'm in the throes writing a poem that doesn't sound right.
    • 4/5
      A very interesting book on some interesting subjects. I was a little thrown by the way Pinsky tried to keep everything from getting too analytic - for example, the way he introduced terms but did not want readers to bother remembering them or think they were too important.

      Mostly, though, he walked that line really well, drawing the readers' attention to certain things, but taking none of it too seriously. For me it worked for a refreshing/clarifying course on the things we went over in my college stylistics class, and the section on free verse was really interesting and insightful.

      Also, he mentions Fred Astaire, and references the "Who's On First?" routine. Baseball AND my favorite movie star/dancer. Win.

      I'll be keeping this one, and referring to it often.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Pinsky’s book is a seemingly simple, five-chapter (“Accent and Duration,” “Syntax and Line,” “Technical Terms and Vocal Realities,” “Like and Unlike Sounds,” and “Blank Verse and Free Verse”) guide “to help the reader hear more of what is going on in poems, and by hearing more to gain in enjoyment and understanding” (3). He says he will avoid accent marks (6) and indeed uses no symbols for stressed or unstressed syllables, caesuras, or divisions between feet. The unspoken rule is that he will not interpret lines when he quotes them, but merely point out the features of sound.Pinsky’s idea is that we already know how subtle accents and sound changes convey meaning in ordinary discourse. And he argues that there are no rules outside of practice; therefore the best guides to poetry are the poems: Yeats for traditional metrics, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens for “so-called free verse,” Emily Dickinson for short lines, Hardy for the use of ballad meter. “No instruction manual can teach as much as careful attention to the sounds in even one great poem” (7).For Pinsky, the sounds of poetry are at once more complex and more simple than the “rules” of prosody would suggest. “There are no rules” (7) he begins. “Accent is relative . . . sometimes reinforced by quantity [duration] and sometimes not” and the reader is capable of hearing how a poet uses accent: “it is not a matter of some mysterious gift, but of habits, vocabulary and a kind of attention” (17). Syntax plays against line in the same way that actual stress patterns play against regular metrical pattern expectations. “I think one can learn a lot by typing a poem up as a block, trying to arrange it in lines that you think bring out the rhythms in the most effective way possible” (49). A special pleasure is Pinsky’s use of examples; some recur, such as Frost’s “To Earthward” and Stevens’s “The Snow Man.”Terminology, Pinsky thinks, should try to describe meter and not rhythm—the sound of an actual line, which is unique.Pinsky makes similar points about like sounds: aside from repetition—the ultimate in like sounds—rhyme and other sound likenesses are matters of both unlikeness and likeness. “Rhyme . . . is a matter of degree, and not necessarily an either/or toggle” (81). One of his examples is Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night” which has so many rhymes and sound likenesses that read aloud, it belies its blank verse form.In the last chapter Pinsky goes through examples of three and two-foot lines that come together as pentameters (Frost’s “To Earthward” again) and the opposite situation in order to show a relation between pentameter and free verse. He quotes Pound: “to break the pentameter, that was the first heave” (98). But “the cadences and patterns of like sound persist” in free verse. He ends by pointing at poetry’s beginnings: “Rhyme and emphatic rhythms help us to memorize. Verse in this way is a technology for memory, using the sounds of language, created by a human body, as writing uses marks” (115).

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A basic text for understanding poetic form and diction. This volume shows that poets can write clearly on occassion. Deceptively clear and straightforward, but decidedly precise as well.

    Book preview

    The Sounds of Poetry - Robert Pinsky

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright Notice

    Dedication

    Epigraph

    Introduction

    Theory

    I / ACCENT AND DURATION

    II / SYNTAX AND LINE

    III / TECHNICAL TERMS AND VOCAL REALITIES

    IV / LIKE AND UNLIKE SOUNDS

    V / BLANK VERSE AND FREE VERSE

    Recommendations for Further Study

    Index of Names and Terms

    Permissions

    By Robert Pinsky

    About the Author

    Copyright

    To Biz

    Nor is there singing school, but studying

    Monuments of its own magnificence.

    —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, Sailing to Byzantium

    Introduction

    The idea in the following pages is to help the reader hear more of what is going on in poems, and by hearing more to gain in enjoyment and understanding.

    Every speaker, intuitively and accurately, courses gracefully through immensely subtle manipulations of sound. We not only indicate, for example, where the accent is in a word like question, but also preserve that accent while adding the difference between Was that a question? and Yes, that was a question.

    It is almost as if we sing to one another all day.

    We do not need to be taught such things: if they were taught in school, we would find them hard and make a mess of them.

    In this regard, the way we use the sounds of language is like the way we use down and up with certain English verbs: I have never heard a child, however small, or anyone, however stupid, make a mistake when discriminating among such expressions as: Can you put me up? and its cousins—Don’t put me down, It brings me down, I wasn’t brought up that way, Then what it comes down to is, why bring it up? and so forth. If we learned these distinctions by making charts and memorizing them, or by rules, we would blunder.

    It is the same with what Robert Frost calls sentence sounds.¹ Because we have learned to deal with the sound patterns organically, for practical goals, from before we can remember, without reflection or instruction or conscious analysis, we all produce the sounds, and understand them, with great efficiency and subtle nuance. Because of that skill, acquired like the ability to walk and run, we already have finely developed powers that let us appreciate the sound of even an isolated single line of poetry—even if we have very little idea of the meaning—that someone might quote with appreciation, like,

    The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs

    Or,

    In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on, amused

    Or,

    Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace

    Or,

    Back out of all this now too much for us

    Or,

    Let be be finale of seem

    Or,

    Further in Summer than the Birds

    Or,

    Sorrow is my own yard²

    The hearing-knowledge we bring to a line of poetry is a knowledge of patterns in speech we have known to hear since we were infants. If we tried to learn such knowledge by elaborate rules or through brute, systematic memorization, then just as with the distinctions involved in putting up with me and putting me up, we would not be able to use them as fluently as we do.

    And yet, having learned these graceful, peculiar codes from the cradle—the vocal codes that poets have used to make works of art—we can gain a lot by studying the nature of what we learned long ago without study: learning to hear language in a more conscious way can enhance our pleasure in lines and poems. Athletes, by study or coaching, can learn to walk or run more effectively.

    Study of that kind is the intention of this book: to enhance the reader’s pleasure in poetry through knowledge of a few basic principles and their tremendous effects. I try to explain the principles in plain language, with a minimum of special terms, objectively, by paying close attention to particular poems and specific words. Technical language, vague impressions about the emotional effects of sounds (the supposedly exuberant or doleful w’s, the anxious or sensual t’s, etc.), elaborate systems, categories that need memorizing, little accent marks and special typographical symbols—all these, I work to avoid.

    This is a brief guide: my goal is not an all-inclusive map but a brief, plain, accurate presentation of the most important points. More exhaustive approaches characterize such good books as Alfred Corn’s The Poem’s Heartbeat, Harvey Gross’s Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, and James McAuley’s Versification. In these sources the reader can find excellent accounts of terminology, detailed discussion of exceptions and anomalies, aesthetic and semantic theories, definitions and examples of received forms.

    A wonderful historic account is John Thompson’s The Founding of English Meter, from which I have learned a great deal. Thompson’s book first sent me to George Gascoigne’s sixteenth-century Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of English Verse or Ryme, the first such essay in English and still one of the best.

    Often, I quote some poetry without identifying the author. (In such cases, the poet is identified in the notes at the back of the book.) The purpose is to defer interesting matters such as a given poet’s reputation, themes, biography, historical context, and so forth, in order to concentrate for the moment on this book’s one subject: the sounds of poetry in English.

    Theory

    There are no rules.

    However, principles may be discerned in actual practice: for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines poets have written. If a good line contradicts a principle one has formulated, then the principle, by which I mean a kind of working idea, should be discarded or amended.

    Art proceeds according to principles discernible in works of art. Therefore, if one is asked for a good book about traditional metrics, a good answer is: The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, or The Complete Poems of Ben Jonson. Two excellent books about so-called free verse are the two-volume Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. One of the most instructive books on short lines is The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. To learn a lot about the adaptation of ballad meter to modern poetry, an invaluable work is Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems. No instruction manual can teach as much as careful attention to the sounds in even one great poem.

    But a guide can be helpful. The theory of this guide is that poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

    Moreover, there is a special intimacy to poetry because, in this idea of the art, the medium is not an expert’s body, as when one goes to the ballet: in poetry, the medium is the audience’s body. When I say to myself a poem by Emily Dickinson or George Herbert, the artist’s medium is my breath. The reader’s

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