The sounds of poetry A brief guide

Poet laureate Pinsky's mission in this guide is to enhance poetry readers' pleasure. Poems spring from our intuitive response to sound patterns, the instinctive grasp, for instance, of how an accented syllable alters the meaning of a word, and Pinsky hopes to elucidate the vocal aspect of the poet's art without diminishing its magic. To that end, he avoids theoretical explanations and ushers his readers directly into the heart of poems by a broad spectrum of masters, ranging from Ben Johnson to William Carlos Williams, using their work as prime examples of the workings of pitch and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, and blank, or iambic, and free verse, poetic techniques that "achieve meaning and feeling." By bringing his passion for the sound of language--so evident in his own poems--to his expert interpretations of the work of others, Pinsky cracks open the glass case that seems to separate poetry from everyday language, allowing the song of each poem to ring bright and clear. --Donna Seaman

Though this book is written by a celebrated poet (the poet laureate of the Untied States), there is little to be gleaned from it. The work is organized in five chapters about the mechanics of poetry: accent, syntax, terms, chimes, and some notes on blank and free verse. This title, oddly written in a humorless, academic first person for the novice, tells us more about what Pinsky thinks than about the subtle merging of the oral and written craft of English verse. Perhaps straining to make the mysteries of poetry accessible, the passages define, advise, and recommend like a set of cobbled lecture notes. Better to stick with Alfred Corn's quality guide, The Poem's Heartbeat (LJ 4/1/97). Pinsky's endeavor is a disappointing enterprise. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/98.]‘Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Chapter One ACCENT AND DURATION What determines the stress or accent in English words and sentences? What precisely does it mean to say, for example, that we stress the first syllable in the word "rabbit" and the second syllable in the word "omit"? What exactly does the voice do to create that audible, distinct accent? (A term that for now I will use interchangeably with "stress.")     This is a more interesting question than might appear at first. Just considering the question can, in itself, help one to hear more about the sounds of the words we speak.     For instance, the answer that stress is produced by increased loudness or volume is not completely satisfactory, as a little experimentation will suggest. Consider what a speaker does to distinguish between, say, the first word and the last word of the following sentence:     Permit me to give you a permit. Turning the volume down or up has some relation to what our voice does, but fails to explain the delicate but quite distinct difference that virtually all speakers can indicate and virtually all listeners can detect.     I'll focus more minutely for a moment. Here is an English sound: it     In the nature of the English language, the sound, which happens also to be a one-syllable word, is neither stressed nor unstressed, by itself. It is neither short nor long, by itself.     The sound is conventionally stressed, relative to the syllables near it, when one says "bitter" or "reiterate" or "she had wit." It is conventionally unstressed when one says "italicize" or "rabbit" or " Pat had it."     These examples demonstrate a useful principle: the stress on a syllable in English is not inherent in the sound, but relative. A syllable is stressed or unstressed only in relation to the syllables around it. As a corollary, accent is a matter of degree. This knowledge is useful because if accent or stress is a matter of degree, we can hear interesting rhythms even in a line where the basic structure is the simple pattern of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. For example: It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be. Each of these two lines is made of four pairs of syllables. Each pair of syllables is arranged so that the second one has more accent than the first: "is" sticks out just a bit more than "It" in the very light first pair; and "grow" sticks out more than "not" in the rather heavy second pair; and "like" sticks out quite a lot more than "-ing"; and "tree" definitely sticks out more than "a." In the final pair of the line ("a tree"), the difference between the unstressed first syllable and the stressed second syllable is greater than in the earlier pairs. We could analyze the second line similarly, noting that the considerable pause early in the line also varies the rhythm.     What is interesting is that within the simple system of four pairs, each pair ascending in accent from first syllable to second, the actual rhythm of the words is not singsong or repetitious, because so much varies. Unless you make the mistake of pronouncing the words in some special, chanting or "poetic" manner, you can hear both the pattern and the constant variation. The degree of accent varies and the degree of difference between the unstressed and stressed syllable also varies, from one pair to the next. [CONTINUES...] Copyright © 1998 Robert Pinsky. All rights reserved.