poetics
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Reading Kate Clanchy‘s Samarkand the other week, I spotted the word “rheumy” in two consecutive poems*. It stood out enough in the first as that unusual beast, a rare cliché**, but for it to be found twice in not only the same collection but in such close proximity struck me as a significant slip-up in
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The previous post in this series examined the role of the onset in Wilfred Owen’s poetry. In this post, I’ll consider the subtle ways in which the onset participates in the rhyme scheme in a couple of poems by Simon Armitage. “Poem”Many contemporary poets exploit a wide variety of rhymes, often within a single poem.
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I’ve been musing a little about the usefulness or otherwise of the term “mainstream” in relation to Scottish poetry. I think it’s fair to say that, in UK terms, Hugh MacDiarmid would not be regarded as mainstream. His non-mainstream status is emphasised by the fact that he turns up in the marvellous PENNsound archive, which
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Gists and Piths is a newish British poetry and poetics blogzine, which seems to lean towards the experimental. I haven’t read the poetry on the site, but I enjoyed “Some thoughts on the mainstream” and the review of Daljit Nagra‘s book (which I also haven’t read yet). Should be worth following this blog’s development.
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Thank Heaven: the world is too much as it was.
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As I stated in the first main post in this series, the traditional conception of rhyme doesn’t allow for syllable onsets to play any role in rhyming, except in identical twin rhyme. The problem is that this analysis can’t account for much 20th century and contemporary rhyme practice, in which the onset muscles in on
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Thank Heaven: the world is hectic enough as it is.
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Over at desktopsallye, Sally Evans of diehard press and Poetry Scotland has begun writing about meter. She seems quite defensive of pentameter for some reason. Metrics is an interesting subject to explore, and is obviously related to a consideration rhyme, but trying to defend any particular approach against another seems to me like defending red
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Last time, I introduced the basics of my new terminology for rhyme. This post applies that terminology to the examination of more complex phenomena in rhyme. Remember that you can find a key to the symbols I use to indicate individual sounds here. You should be familiar with the use of slashes round a symbol
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In the previous post in this series, I briefly explored why rhyme terminology was ripe for revision. In this post, I set out the basics of a revised terminology. At one point, this entails using a wee bit more involved terminology from linguistics, which I’ll explain in a supplementary post so that this one doesn’t
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This post concerns itself with brief definitions of the basic rhyme phenomena and a quick critque of the traditional terminology. Throughout this series, it’ll be necessary to use some technical terms from linguistics and literary studies, but I’ll explain them as I go along. Rhyme involves a correspondence between two or more elements, usually, but
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Back in the dim and distant past, as a Linguistics student, I wrote an Honours dissertation on rhyme. It grew out of my reflection on rhyme practice as a reader and nascent writer of poetry and developed into a critque of a PhD thesis on rhyme by a Dutch linguist, Astrid Holtman. It struck me
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I like what Ruth Padel has to say about the so-called difficulty of poetry in her comment article last Saturday’s Guardian: Poetry, in other words, is not only good for you, and protects us against meaninglessness: by the pleasure it gives in its artifice, images and imagination, and in the little nudgy sensual relationships between
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Reading this review, I was struck by the American reviewer’s incomprehension of “the dichotomy … of accessibility vs difficulty” (an incomprehension I share to a great extent, as you might know if you’ve read my post on Geoffrey Hill). I was set to wondering what it is that makes this tribalism so British. It’s not
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I’ve been dipping in and out of Geoffrey Hill‘s new book, Without Title, lately. It’s not his most immediately captivating work, but there are flashes of the Hill brilliance here and there throughout. Hill is one of those poets considered difficult. I’m not about to deny that his work is dense and challenging, but I
Amy Jo Philip 