A New Day
A new book and a new method! Change is good, right?
But
I'm not going to change my contract with you, dear readers. It's just
that, from now on, we're going to be learning together (sings: "...
wherever we go-oooo!" *ends with old-school-Vegas-floor-show flourish*).
We'll be exploring language, rhythm, rhyme and all sorts of related things, as we have all along.
But we're going to be leaving behind the classic stuff, and we'll be moving more toward the experimental.
So hang on ... !
Throw me the ball! Ouch! Not that hard!
It
was years ago I was reading something about Juvenal (I not only did not
flunk Latin, I never took it *holds head in shame*). And this writer
went on and on about how the word "satire" (the form for which ol'
Juvvie was famouser than famous) may have come from a Latin word with
two possible meanings: a word that meant either "a bowl of mixed fruit"
or (by association) "a medley."
I
have no idea whether any of that is accurate: you'd need to ask a true
Latin scholar. But the notion stuck with me because of this: "satire" is
a literary form where you throw out
all the structured rhetorical categories, all the neatly clipped logic
and the carefully considered ambiguities or ironies of the other classic
forms.
And when you do that, you start making jokes. It's natural.
So, when we turn our thoughts to roguery (in the sense of "playful mischief"), it's only natural that we experiment.
But even then, we still have to think things through first.
And the mome raths outgrabe
I
remember my old Poetry 101 professor reading us "Jabberwocky" in class
one day and pronouncing the last word with a long "e" at the end: "out-grah-bee."
I
felt violated. I was sure, just so sure, that the poem I first read in
my aunt's old college English Lit textbook (found old and moldy in my
granny's basement when I was but 14) had as its last word "out-grabe" -- rhyming with ... . Huh?
And
that was the point. Other than Lewis Carroll's "portmanteau" rhyme in
the poem ("wabe"), there isn't much that rhymes with "outgrabe," no
matter how you pronounce it.
Carroll
once explained, humorously, his concept of the famous "portmanteau"
words used in his poem. But, like the piece of furniture they're named
for, they can serve a variety of uses.
Last
year, when I started this blog, I wrote about how George Boole
discovered a flaw in classic Aristotelian logic -- called (I think) the
"existential fallacy." In short, the terms of a syllogism do not need to
exist for the syllogism to function. They can be abstract symbols,
hence the name "symbolic logic."
Carroll
(as math professor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a researcher in
Boolean algebra, nonlinear geometry and similar topics. He made
significant contributions to the academic literature on symbolic logic.
And "Jabberwocky" is his (I think, successful) attempt to put some of
those basic concepts into language.
The
"portmanteau" words in "Jabberwocky" don't mean anything. (I believe
Carroll's own definitions of the words are knowingly tongue-in-cheek.)
They are true "nonsense" words, in the sense that they have no sense at
all. Nor do they need to have any for the poem to make sense. In a
sense.
If
we are to examine those "interstices" of language I spoke of back then
in the post on Boole, I think we need to more fully understand Carroll's
accomplishment in "Jabberwocky."
BTW, the poem is satire. Just what it ridicules is what's important.
-----
AFTERNOTE
: A few years after college, I came across a library book by the great
Martin Gardner about Lewis Carroll's math jokes in Alice.
I found it tough sledding and put it down. However, his book might be a
good place to start for those interested in more detail about Carroll's
satires on the math of his day. It's called The Annotated Alice. Have fun!
A Work in Progress
MY MANDOLIN SINGS
Like a thrush on the heather,
My mandolin sings.
Dancing as a tiny feather,
The joy that it brings!
If times be weighed by weather,
I'm lonely or sad --
Whatever my heart's tether,
My mandolin sings.
Her strings fly 'neath my fingers,
How happy our days.
Her high note chirping lingers
In air as she plays!
Deeply as a kitten purrs,
Her low notes uncurl.
Whichever part she prefers,
How happy our days.
Brooks babblin', pine limbs swirlin',
The mandolin sings.
Tails twitchin', wings unfurlin',
As nature it springs.
Whenever mercy's fallin',
By day or by night,
I grant my heart its callin' --
The mandolin sings.
by William Mark Gabriel
"Now, how many was that ... ?"
I said we will all be learning together.
I
may wish I'd never said that (because when you learn together, you have
to submit your mistakes to open inspection), but -- there you go.
The
previous poem is an experiment in what some poets call "songform." What
I think they mean by that is writing a (more or less) serious poem in a
verse form reserved for music.
What
I tried to do with "My Mandolin Sings" is not write strict pentameter
or tetrameter lines, but try to parallel my syllable count, verse to
verse, like a hymn.
Also
like a hymn, I tried to suggest a tune with the action of the lines
(while writing the first draft, I had a kind of hornpipe-y version of
"Slane" -- an Irish tune churchgoers may know from the hymn "Be Thou My
Vision" -- running in my head).
But you can see, I'm sure, that, while the first verse works OK, the second and third ones have weak spots.
I
tried to correct a glaring error in rhyming, when I had all the lines
in the third verse rhyme with some form of an "-ing" word, by going
dialectical. That may turn out to be a "good" mistake. We'll see.
Dancing Around It
One
of the really dumb, but "good," mistakes I've made deals with a
misconception that went on for years before I re-read the original and
felt totally stupid.
Back
in college, I pored again and again over a book of Ezra Pound's essays,
trying to mine them for a metrical poet's secrets. In one essay, he
rhapsodizes over the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, especially one
classically themed poem (forgotten which) in which (as I now recall -- I
may still have it wrong) "cross-rhymes abound."
My
overheated youthful brain kept misreading it "cross-rhythms" -- a
nonexistent term, AFAIK. And I spent years searching for such things in
poems and music.
When
I went back to my old school and went into the library and found my old
Ez book in the stacks, I went to my favorite essay on Swinburne and --
turned crimson in the face.
Cross-rhymes
are used when writing hexameters in English to break up the monotonous
sounding lines (probably not at all monotonous in the languages they
were meant for, in English hexameters just drone on and on).
"Cross-rhythms" don't exist. Or do they?
See
if you can read (aloud) the following verbal masterpiece by an American
master about a pictoral masterpiece from a Dutch master in two ways.
The Dance
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.
-- by William Carlos Williams
See?
Sometimes it pays to make embarrassing mistakes.
Normally, I'd cite my source for the text. But I found lots of pages on the Internet with both the painting and the poem reproduced.
That's Embarrassing!
OK, here goes -- a set of revisions for "My Mandolin Sings."
As I mentioned, the second verse is a little wobbly in places, but not in so many that I can't live with it the way it is.
The
third verse has issues that bother me, some of which I've mentioned.
So, here is the first full try (after many cross-outs) of the third
verse:
Brooks babbling and firs swirling
The mandolin cries
Tails twitching, wings unfurling
Their natures arise
The woodland spirits calling
By day or by night
Whenever mercy's falling
The mandolin cries.
I
post this one with a red face -- because this is actually worse in many
ways. Oh, "woodland spirits" and "natures arise" ... ecchh. They don't
really mean anything, and they don't connect to anything else in the
poem specifically that might suggest what these "natures" and "spirits"
are or may refer to.
While
it does correct the "-ing" issue with the first try at a third verse
and puts the "-ever" word in the penultimate line as the other verses
have it, the second try makes so many other mistakes, including even
more artificial phrasing, that it "cries" for more work.
I'll save that for Part 2.
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