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Poetics

Tom Spencer

Poetic Cerebrations

Words are the musical notes of both poetry and prose. In prose you have a symphony of words that express the color, tone, pace, and mood of the theme the story relates. The emotions rise and fall throughout the work according to the maestro’s (reader’)s, life experiences. As the writer of prose, you have a multiplicity of opportunity to play with the emotions of your reader.

In poetry the composer coordinates the arrangement of the rhythms of musical notes (words) as movements. The poem is the sonata to the theme or storyline of the orchestration.

I find that with these thoughts in mind, theme poetry is easier to compose if you first write out the story that you are trying to convey to your audience.

Once you have your story, the poem or poems are often found in the prose by ferreting out the high impact emotions expressed, and setting these emotions in similar grouping.

A well written story has three parts; beginning (scene), middle (action), end (reaction/conclusion)

A poem often deals with one section of the prose composition. A poem can extract an epiphany from any stage of the prose story. Therefore, from any story you can write a minimum of three poems relating emotional value to the reader. Another choice is to write a three-part poem presenting a beginning, middle and end, encompassing the whole of the story, (ending in an envoy). The possibilities of poetry from prose is limitless. You can use form poetry to tell the same story in a multitude of different ways.

Example: Littletown was abuzz with rumors about the explosion. It was the week twenty-six seniors graduated from high school.

Jerry Bloomfield, the class clown, was critically injured by the explosion in the chemistry lab. Someone had left a Bunsen burner turned on without lighting it when they left the little room.

The blame was placed on Jerry by most of the community. "A practical joke gone wrong," was the opinion quickly turned to gospel by the rumor mills of the town.

Jerry was to be arrested when he recovered, if he recovered. The local police had had enough of his pranks, mostly harmless until the "big blast" at the end of the school year as it came to be known.

The investigation by the State police determined the blast was caused by a faulty valve in the Bunsen burner.

Jerry recovered and went on to become a community leader and member of the school board.

If I were to set a sonnet to this story I would start with the envoy. The envoy being a two-line, end rhymed, couplet in the English sonnet or a six-line envoy in the Italian sonnet.

I'll do the couplet:

Life was cast in the shadow of a blast
Justice redeemed the charges of the past

I would work the rest of the story leading up to the couplet in reverse order, one quatrain at a time until I have twelve lines of iambic pentameter in blank verse, leading up to the couplet (envoy) that I have already established.

I find if you know where you are going with your poem, it is much easier to compose it in reverse order. After I have the finished structure I edit to see if there might be a way to insert end-rhyme or internal-rhyme to better establish the rhythm of the meter.

If I were creating a sestina, I would set the tercet first. After setting the tercet I will find the nouns and verbs that each phrase presents. I will extract my six words from their position in the tercet and set them to their places in the spiral of the sestina.

I have worked sestina stanzas in many ways. A reverse order being the most common. However, the stanzas quite often demand a change in their order. This change of order of stanza will change the order of your repeat words, causing the whole of your structure to be rearranged and sometimes rewritten entirely.

My tercet for a sestina from this story might be:

A laboratory blast, Jerry's fate was cast
The law proclaimed the guilt, and justice would reveal
Bunsen was the culprit, failure was the cause

With the ending tercet of the sestina set, I work the body of the text, extracting the verbs and nouns from the tercet. I set them in order as they will occur in each stanza.

The first stanza will have ending verse words in this order: Blast, cast guilt, reveal, culprit and cause labeled in the order they occur that would be
a, b, c, d, e, and f.
second stanza f, a, e, b, d, c,
third stanza c, f, d, a, b, e,
fourth stanza e, c, b, f, a, d,
fifth stanza d, e, a, c, f, b, and
the final six line stanza b, d, f, e, c, a,

This is followed by the tercet that I have already created.

I have the order of ending words established for a proper sestina. I now have the choice of writing lines that have relationship to the story ending in each of the different key words. I usually write ten to twelve lines for each key end word trying to stay in nearly the same syllable count per line. I will choose the most relevant lines to place together in each stanza following the end word order prescribed by the form.

After composing the seven stanza sestina in this crude method I have an armature to work with in creating the finished poem.

I edit to (a) smooth out the relationships of lines, (b) make sure every line is capable of being understood when it is read independently, and (c) make sure I have used proper words for proper meaning (Always!!! check for inadvertent homonyms). This assures there is continuity of theme, and most of all, I assure myself it is a work that I can be proud of setting my name to as author poet.

If the sheep are all wether, or all weather, will make a difference in whether or not you poem is understood.

There are many poems to be written, a multitude of emotions to be explored, the world and all its foibles can be expressed in rhythms of words creating a symphony of poetry that makes the reading pleasurable as well as informative.

As writers and poets we grow as we write. Be kind to your aspirations and write every day.