Outside my window,
two women, two dogs,
and a child in a buggy.White van, grey car,
man jogging in shorts.
You can make a poem of anything if you let your mental flow flow itself into certain rhythms – but why would you bother? Those first three lines could be a haiku in form with the removal of one syllable and transfer of another between lines, but it wouldn’t be a haiku in spirit.
When I was checking up on terza rima last week, I was interested to learn that Italian lends itself particularly to rhyming forms because it’s quite a pure language with very consistent word endings that provide lots of rhymes, whereas English is more of a grab bag of influences from all over the place, and notoriously inconsistent when it comes to spelling, pronunciation and word forms – though by the same token we have the most gloriously extensive vocabulary to pick from. Plus, of course, where they have Dante, we have Shakespeare, who revelled in blank verse, playing games with words, and, when he couldn’t find the one he needed, inventing new ones of his own – which after four hundred years are so deeply ingrained that we take them for granted – I’ve probably used a few already this morning, without even knowing (not the child in the ‘buggy’ or the man ‘jogging’ – or maybe he did use them, but with different meanings).
The other thing I wanted to say about English is that it is very rhythmic, and it’s thought that the popularity of iambic forms of poetry in English (alternating stressed and unstressed syllables) is because that is the natural rhythm of English speech. It can be very banal (tum tee tum tee tum tee tum) like nursery rhymes: ‘Mary had a little lamb’ or sublime: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
Anglo Saxon poetry, like ‘Beowulf’, had no truck with rhymed line-endings, but was based very strictly on maintaining the rhythm, and also on alliteration – more emphasis on words beginning with the same sounds than ending with them.
Well, this is just me talking off the top of my head from my interest in poetry and language in general, no references, no citations. Just interesting nuggets that I’ve picked up from reading, listening and generally being interested in this stuff. But after having spent three weeks writing poetry every day, I suppose I’ve started to think more about where it comes from. It’s always been a bit of a mystery for me, how words come into my head and settle themselves into certain patterns. Because of the way my brain works, all my writing feels like taking dictation – the words come, then I write them down, or I don’t, and they wander off again.
Maybe in a past life (if I believed in such things) I was a bard, declaiming the old stories in a smoky hall, feeling my way through the rhythms and the sounds of words. I like that idea.