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SunWinks! June 8, 2014: The Poetry of Barbados Joe Walcott
Dear SunWinkers:
We’ve been talking about a whole ‘nother aspect of the music of poetry: figures of speech, a.k.a. rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures are ways to manipulate the rhythms of speech to give your poetry or oratory or prose rhythm, momentum, and impact. I just used three of them.
“a whole ‘nother” is a tmesis: splitting a word in two, usually to put another word in between.
“…rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures…” is an anadiplosis: repeating a word or phrase from the end of a clause or sentence at the beginning of the next.
“poetry or oratory or prose” is polysyndeton: using extra conjunctions (that is, “or” instead of a comma between “poetry” and “oratory”.
We can’t cover all of the 60 figures of speech described in Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn [Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982]. If you want to get all obsessive over this, I mean, if you want to make a methodical study of this topic, you can get ahold of Quinn’s book or go to a wonderful website called The Forest of Rhetoric http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ which describes many times 60 rhetorical figures.
Many of the figures we’ve looked at are repetitive figures, and I did want to cover a few more of those. The reason is that they are pretty easy to understand, and to get a feeling for how they can improve the rhythm and music of your poetry.
So far, we’ve covered these:
Epistrophe is repeating a word or words at the end of a succession of phrases: “of the people, by the people, for the people” Abraham Lincoln. Continue reading
SunWinks! June 1, 2014: At The Risk Of Repeating Myself…
Dear SunWinkers!
Last week, we looked at figures of speech, or rhetorical figures. They included anaphora (beginning a series of sentences or clauses with the same word or phrase), enallage (being effectively ungrammatical), and periphrasis (using more words than you have to).
In previous columns, I’ve talked about the music of poetry. The music of poetry goes back to a day when there was no such thing as music. St. Augustine’s De Musica (“On Music”), written around 390 A.D., actually treated the subject of what we now call poetic meter. Musical melody as we know it today came centuries later, and harmony years after that. So, meter is part of the music of poetry, not strict meter necessarily these days, but the feeling of rhythmic pulses, and meter implied, manipulated, and thwarted.
Diction and alliteration exemplify another aspect of music in poetry. The poet manipulates and takes advantage of the sound of language to make it grating, mellifluous, or narcotic, just as a composer uses harmony to make her music harsh or euphonious.
SunWinks! May 25, 2014: The Greeks Have A Word For It
Dear SunWinkers!
I happened on an utterly fascinating book the other day: it’s Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn [Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982]. It turns out there are at least 60 ways to turn a phrase, and every one of them has a Greek name.
Quinn begins with the example: “We was robbed!” That’s the rhetorical device of enallage, which just means being effectively ungrammatical. (As the saying goes, “The Greeks have a word for it.”) Now, if Joe Jacobs, professional fight manager, had said in 1932, “We were robbed!” would anybody remember that? I doubt it.
By the same token, if Abraham Lincoln had said, “Eighty-seven years ago…” do you think anybody would be saying that today? There isn’t an American alive who hasn’t said at one time or another, “Four-score and seven years ago…” even if they’ve forgotten the rest of the Gettysburg Address. That’s the figure of periphrasis: using more words than you have to.
The Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech are full of powerful rhetorical flourishes. In Lincoln’s era and before, classes in rhetoric would be part of the curriculum. Those of course have gone the way of Latin classes, which a dwindling number of people would say is a shame. And at any rate, King doubtless learned his rhetorical skills in church, and Lincoln mostly learned from self-directed reading of whatever great literature fortuitously came his way. Which only goes to show there’s more than one way to separate a cat from its fur coat (another periphrasis).
“…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish…” There are two devices in play here. Epistrophe is repeating a word or words (“the people”) at the end of a succession of phrases. Asyndeton is omitting an expected conjunction, in this case, an “and” before “for the people.” (The opposite device, Polysyndeton, adds conjunctions, as in Yeats’ “When you are old and gray and full of sleep.”)
Continue reading
SunWinks! May 18, 2014
SunWinks! May 18, 2014
It’s impossible to overstate the inspiration Gather has been to my writing. The kind comments, the eager responses, the enthusiasm for writing in general, makes me want to write more and more, and better and better. When Gather crashed, so did I. I didn’t have another writer community and haven’t found one. And the writing just stopped happening.
I wrote this in July, in one of my last columns for Gather. The following month, I buried my father after a long decline. A couple months later, my mother broke her shoulder. Since hanging out my shingle as a freelance writer, I’ve participated in a variety of projects, a lot of them involving churning out scads of Internet content. So without an active community, an actual audience waiting for it on a regular basis, you can see it was all too easy for SunWinks! to go by the boards.
Then Greg Schiller launched the Writing Essential Group the other day, and already, many old friends are coming together. I jumped at the chance to participate, and here I am, amusingly, a “Sunday Editor” again. And SunWinks! looks poised to emerge from its medically induced coma.
Now there’s an odd image.
SunWinks! 