BREATH - Poetry

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AG: .. ..(I cited some lines) from Hart Crane’s poem “Hurricane” as an example of dochmaic meter… and the whole poem is really interesting, and it’s just in the sequence of poems I’ve been referring to, one time or another, like William Carlos Williams’ poem about Thursday (air – coming in and out of his nose) , Shelley’s “Ode To the West Wind – (“Make me thy lyre even as the forest is’”… “Be thou me spirt fierce (the wind)”, or, “The breath whose might I have invok’d in song/ Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven” in “Adonais”, or a little Elizabethan poem that I’ve quoted a number of times about “What is beauty but a breath? ” Does anybody know that? – “What is beauty but a breath?” Does anybody know? The Phenomenology of Perception of the 20th c. ended the Neolithic period, 1910—the return of the possibility of a paratactic poetics, as with Pleistocene man, when poetry and mythology were one, mythos-logos intact. The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions. Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, or moras, depending on how rhythm is established, although a language can be influenced by multiple approaches. Japanese is a mora-timed language. Latin, Catalan, French, Leonese, Galician and Spanish are called syllable-timed languages. Stress-timed languages include English, Russian and, generally, German. [43] Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived. Languages can rely on either pitch or tone. Some languages with a pitch accent are Vedic Sanskrit or Ancient Greek. Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese and most Subsaharan languages. [44] There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to the anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a caesura (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a feminine ending to soften it or be replaced by a spondee to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular. [64] Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, iambic tetrameter in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur, or occurs to a much lesser extent, in English. [65] Alexander Pushkin

Not present in the poem, but perhaps subtly evoked by its narrative, is a related, traditional poetic pairing: “womb” and “tomb”. The poem summons images of new life (children, birthdays, the balloons themselves with their “futtery teats”) and makes us aware of the contrast of active, nurturing life and final, entombed breaths. Each of these types of feet has a certain "feel," whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable verse. [60] Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not show the varying degrees of stress, as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables. [61] Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910,[4] the trochee’s heave,[5] asks it of the younger poets.)

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Poetic form is more flexible in modernist and post-modernist poetry and continues to be less structured than in previous literary eras. Many modern poets eschew recognizable structures or forms and write in free verse. Free verse is, however, not "formless" but composed of a series of more subtle, more flexible prosodic elements. [84] Thus poetry remains, in all its styles, distinguished from prose by form; [85] some regard for basic formal structures of poetry will be found in all varieties of free verse, however much such structures may appear to have been ignored. [86] Similarly, in the best poetry written in classic styles there will be departures from strict form for emphasis or effect. [87] One of the Noh plays translated by Pound, whose introductory note declares, “The play shows the relation of the early Noh to the God-dance” ( Ezra Pound: Translations [New York: New Directions, 1963], p. 308). There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb, a four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. [55] Languages which use vowel length or intonation rather than or in addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic, often have concepts similar to the iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds. [59] Hail Sistersis a glorious evocation of mid 1970’s London as told through a group of female musicians who lived in squats and played their music in pubs or wherever they could get a gig. The poems are exhilarating, tender and brave, Reading them is like eating a juicy apple in enormous bites!’

Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy, and developed from folk epics and other oral genres. [9] [10]From Jon Fosse (1959), Stein til stein, Samlaget, Oslo 2013. The English translation comes from poetryinternationalweb.net, 2010.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you their bad advice- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles.Alliteration is the repetition of letters or letter-sounds at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other, or at short intervals; or the recurrence of the same letter in accented parts of words. Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur. This can be compared to an ornamental use of alliteration in most Modern European poetry, where alliterative patterns are not formal or carried through full stanzas. Alliteration is particularly useful in languages with less rich rhyming structures. You’re probably aware of the advantages of practising mindfulness meditation on a daily basis, especially if you are a member of MindOwl’s online community. However, without a more specific focus when we first begin practicing, it can be difficult to keep your mind on the present moment. This is where tools like mindfulness poetry can come into play. You are not required to memorise anything like a mantra, instead, simply read meditative poems like the ones in this post and use them as prompts to direct your thoughts. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do- determined to save the only life you could save. The irony is, from the machine has come one gain not yet sufficiently observed or used, but which leads directly on toward projective verse and its consequences. It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work. Harnessing poet Robert Creeley’s assertion that “form is never more than an extension of content” and Edward Dahlberg’s belief that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath:

The structure and metre of poetry can sometimes be similar to breathing – you have the rhythms, the ebb and flow, and the ins and outs (excuse the pun!) that can all help us to slow down and regulate our breathing. Most rhyme schemes are described using letters that correspond to sets of rhymes, so if the first, second and fourth lines of a quatrain rhyme with each other and the third line do not rhyme, the quatrain is said to have an AA BA rhyme scheme. This rhyme scheme is the one used, for example, in the rubaiyat form. [81] Similarly, an A BB A quatrain (what is known as " enclosed rhyme") is used in such forms as the Petrarchan sonnet. [82] Some types of more complicated rhyming schemes have developed names of their own, separate from the "a-bc" convention, such as the ottava rima and terza rima. [83] The types and use of differing rhyming schemes are discussed further in the main article. Collected Complete Poems by Iliassa Sequin is a book many of us have been anticipating for many years, exceeding all expectations! One of the most extraordinary avant-garde poets, she refused to publish a book in her lifetime. Her husband, Ken Sequin, has beautifully collected her inimitable poetry for us in this new book published by Grey Suit Press in London.’The poems in Cian Ferriter’s pamphlet (winner of the Fool for Poetry Chapbook) have a dark beauty and power. Emotionally compelling and rich with fresh and visually successful images, these poems often surprise us by making a shift from one place or time to another.’ It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problem, the moment he takes speed up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destruction (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size. In the third of three principles given in “A Retrospect,” e.g., “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome ( The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot [New York: New Directions, 1968], p. 3). Lines of poems are often organized into stanzas, which are denominated by the number of lines included. Thus a collection of two lines is a couplet (or distich), three lines a triplet (or tercet), four lines a quatrain, and so on. These lines may or may not relate to each other by rhyme or rhythm. For example, a couplet may be two lines with identical meters which rhyme or two lines held together by a common meter alone. [89] Blok's Russian poem, " Noch, ulitsa, fonar, apteka" ("Night, street, lamp, drugstore"), on a wall in Leiden A Japanese writer of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, also known as Motekiyo. In 1961, after reading a version of Seami’s Yashima in Origin, Olson wrote Cid Corman, “If you find anyone who has translated Seami’s Autobiography literally & entirely I shd be obliged to hear of it. I remain convinced of its importance (reading his new play you published emphasizes again what a flawless poet he is” ( O/CC 2 : 173).