the iambic blog @innerlea.com...

Innerlea: traditional poetics and prosody   a blog with audio database Writings, often in iambic verse About traditional old poetry And rhythm, meter, prosody and such In Shakespeare, Chaucer, Eliot and Frost, And Wallace Stevens; maybe a look at lyrics Occasionally poems by my poor hand, And on other affairs at innerlea— As well as a writer's utility page. *

PoetryFoundation.org The Writer's Almanac

How many a foamy head of beer / s'been pierced by the plop of-a salty tear / occasioned by this song?

The Little Garden of Recorded Verse, page 9

That time of year...

   Autumn is probably the best season depicted in verse. Keats' poem To Autumn shows why. After the busy summer and its heat a sudden cooling in the evening, or felt when first emerging in the morning, triggers reflection. The season is changing, and the whole cycle of the seasons is comprehended and felt on the face being brushed by a new wind.

Keats' poem is as luscious to read as the fruit it describes in its opening lines. It is a model of scenic description and thematic understatement. The burgeoning bounty, its plumpness and beauty, are depicted, as are the sounds of fall; but winter and death are never mentioned; only an emptiness is evoked by the final lines, an awareness of the ephemeral things in nature, her insects and birds, point quietly towards the inevitable winter.

---

Reciting verse while walking is not, it turns out, an arrestable offence.
Certainly there have been some strange, usually humorous encounters...
a young boy, staring, thought I was talking to him...
I recite while I walk, or used-to, verse that I have memorized, or once had memorized.
It all comes back without not too much difficulty.
File dates say that I've been recording myself since around 2006; five years! The first attempts were horrendous, and I feel sorry for the friends and relatives who were subjected to them. But now I find them not so bad; good even!
They should be, I've suffered enough making them.
Reciting is a kind of acting. One must enter a persona and speak as that persona but in an exaggerated, emotionally heightened, style.

But it's more than worth while if you can devote yourself and time to it; for it is the cultivation and expansion of the vocal, rhetorical self. The way one carries on in public and private speech changes. Speech habits can change. One's very sense of self dissolves into a larger fuzzier entity.

Last year I wrote:

This fall I'm mainly tending to household chores, I moved into a new house last May.

Sometime thereafter, wanting to put my imprimature upon the place, I planted a couple of small slugs of miscanthus grass in the front lawn; in the holes left by the foresale sign that the real estate hadn't filled-in, and in a hole left from a dead sapling I dug out.

I planted herbs around small splotches of four foot high grass. Basil & chives, dill & cilantro, scallions. Squat fluffy disks of german chamomile were planted too late for all but a few plants to flower; and, hopefully, seed.

Even at high resolution the photo fails to depict the stunning difference in color between the bright green leafs & stems before they turn a deep reddish brown, sometimes deep purple, and the pattern formed by the intersection of the florets arching from the rachides reminding of some incredibly elaborate cornice.

Gardening is its own immersive pleasure, a little like poetry, in the arranging & designing; and in following of the passage of the seasons, and being outdoors. Gardening is, of course, the quintessential watching of the seasons. Just walking to and from the car at work, shopping or at play is apt to leave us a little oblivious of our natural surroundings. (Golf, particularly, too, observes the passage of the season; but it's too hard to play!) You sweat, your hands get dirty, and you smell things.

The privacy that's generally desired for the practice of recitation is most readily found in walking outside, and is thus an outdoor activity, at least in its practice. But verse also connects to the seasons through the content of a large number of excellent pieces that are clearly located in a particular time of year. When we recite each season a small set of seasonal pieces in tempo with the season we enact a profound personal ritual of reflection, growth and renewal. We conjure.

A music player and headphones with recordings of target poems is invaluable for learning to recite this peripatic manner; although folded, printed copies of pieces are also very useful, especially at the beginning. But the mp3 player, and your own recording equipment, microphone, computer & software, more readily enable one to build an interpretation, to scuplt the soundscape.

To resprise: What are the tools useful to cultivating one's vocal/rhetorical presence or style? A list of poems, an mp3 player, a place to be alone, but usually just a long public pathway in a park, on a flood plane, or on a half busy residential street rowed with pleasant bungalows; microphone, computer & software, time & patience.

But this year I take a break from hoeing, breaking up, the dead roots of the sod that was strangled by a rich blanket of varied weeds which I had myself, in turn, just finished strangling; I take a break to listen to my old recordings of autumn verse, and feel pleasantly satisfied with what I hear.

One always hears mistakes, and thinks "OK, but I can do much better now!" Always a little chagrined about some passage. But one measure of their worth is simply that they exist, organized, and offering a convenient mode of study.

I mentioned Keats' [Ode] To Autumn. Seminal, it is; meaning everyone should memorize & recite it, or at least listen to a reading of it, my reading perhaps, at least once every fall, that day you walk out just to take in the colors. The lushness of graphic detail and its andante pace, too many things actually to list, make this one of the most recitable poems in the English Canon. Really. Listen to it. This kind of vocalization, real world rendering, is what poetry is really about: not the sense but the saying!

My reading is a model I hope of accent, pace, handling enjambment: phrasing in general.

[Pedagogically speaking,] its lack of a strong narrative probably makes it unsuitable for less sophisticated listeners. The semantic focus moves from the neatly tended cottage to the fields, granaries, cider mill & stream; images that cannot be readily garnered from a single spot. The speaker is moving around in the second verse more than the first. The third stanza directs our attention to the sounds of fall. This functions as a retreat from the world of sights, although graphic objects still are rendered, but the scene is more panoramic but vague, the blush of the sky, the plains, a river and a hill beyond, and all the sounds of fall ending with a twttering from the sky, serves to create a sense of growing remoteness and sleep.

From Wikipedia:
Millet first unveiled The Gleaners at the Salon in 1857. It immediately drew negative criticism from the middle and upper classes, who viewed the topic with suspicion: one art critic, speaking for other Parisians, perceived in it an alarming intimation of "the scaffolds of 1793." Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker. To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism.

---

Mr. Flood's Party is a poem that has grown on me over the last year or so due to my study of Pale Fire with its many(3), female, voices.

Quotation is a special effect in reciting poetry and attention needs be paid to it. Any poem of significant length risks being boring unless its heightened by kind of differentiation, contrast, change. Quotation fills that need for change in an obvious way: the speaker's voice changes to suit or differentiate the character being spoken, and the interpretation should always work to clearly affect this change. Mr. Flood's Party is a drunken, split-person, soliloquy that offers a great opportunity to work on quotation, and the interplay between the the character and the narrator's voices; as well as working on a drunken voice & character which is always fun.

In fact, Old Eben is full-sail drunk, all the hints(?) are there, and should be played, and enjoyed as such. A distant, slightly amused yet sympathetic narrator's tone serves as a foil to Eben's speech and behavior. And the quote, “For auld lang syne.”, should always be sung. It's an essential part of the piece, in fact it's climax, as the narrator gently puts Eben to sleep after that.

The Digitized Mind (June, 2010) Google, the Digital Commoditizor (01-12-10)

early summer reflections Blog ( june 25, 2011 )

late winter reflections continue Blog ( february 11, 2011; )

---

And this is the index page that I've designed for my collection of Pale Fire, the poem essays.
And this is a link to the long essay on Pale Fire currently under construction: Evaluating Pale Fire, the Poem

the holiday reflection Blog (january 3, 2011; revised feb 11)

Blog (december, 2010)

Blog (late-fall, 2010)

Blog (late-Summer, early fall, 2010)

Golding's depiction of Medea's quest
and conjurations is, I think, great fun,
the perfect piece for a young female witch,
some budding wiccam, brash enthusiast,
to learn to say upon a hollow's eve
to hear what kinds of magic words achieve.

Blog (mid-Summer, 2010)

My father died this past July,
I wrote this piece for the occasion: For My Father

A technical note:
This site has been designed to demonstrate the value in the integrated rendering of text, recording and commentary, via HTML, in the study of poetry. The design takes special efforts in displaying text, indexes, notes, and lectures, in the most convenient and [space] efficient manor so as to encourage regular use. This, though, places the design at odds with the use of browser tags, as their use generally assumes a fixed-size, single, window. So if you're using tabs and want to view these pages as they were designed to be viewed then you will most likely want to disable tabs in the browser. And closing as many navigational bars at the top of the window as is possible is also very useful. And if there's some parameter that forces the browser to always open windows to fit the whole screen, this too should be disabled.

Using inline frames to hold longish text allows the sound controller to remain available to the user. However some browsers have real issues in dealing with sound controllers, inline frames, and the resizing and positioning of windows. These considerations have led to two different page formats for displaying longer poems that need scrolling: flat and frame. The first, the flat format, is the more universally renderable. The second is more elegant for its use of an inline frame for presenting the text, and keeping the sound controller available to the user as the recording progresses.
Both pages require that Apple's Quicktime module be installed (most users have it).

If there's any technical problems let me know, maybe I can suggest something.

The second Pale Fire Blog (Mid-Spring, 2010)

Pale Fire. As if I needed more creative thoughts, direction, scope of vision, one more project; more memorizing, writing and recording, when there's so much to do just trying to get this strange site to work right, and get filled all the many notes, semantic holes — into the gin joint wanders Pale Fire. Pale Fire is a capturer and seducer; something that makes the many thoughts I have about the role of poetry these days; its use and relevance, its proper place, its power to entertain; — fully concrete. — August of 2010

Today it's May the 9th, a long time since August, and a lot of things have been done.
Firstly and finally, I memorized the thing, about three or four weeks ago. It takes about an hour. It may be getting shorter. I recite it when I take my almost daily walks. Fortunately in these day's of the ubiquitous cell-phone walking around talking loudly to yourself goes virtually unnoticed.
I've also found some Pale Fire resources on the web, some of which I've taken the time to rearrange more to my own liking.
And I've made some new friends. The members of the Vladimir Nabokov Forum (a link to the archive search function). It's a place where people go to hurl nuts at one another like cartoon squirrels.

I came across Pale Fire while reading the Wikipedia article on Heroic Couplets. I was basically trying to find a way to bring Chaucer, and his Canterbury Tales closer to modern audiences. One way would be to lightly sketch [trace] a history of good pieces written in Heroic Couplet form. ( Heroic Couplet article at Wikipedia)
A few of these noteworthy examples are:

---

Chaucer's simple style, when heard, presents to many modern listener, largely unexposure to spoken verse, a new sound, a new aesthetic experience, of artful, lyrical, storytelling. Chaucer provides a model, a fundamental set of examples for how sentences can be laid out over a five foot line. It provides models for [basic poetic] description, humor, irony, and storytelling; in almost endless supply. It thus provides the language arts teacher with the opportunity to entertain, and to model various vocal modes, acting, public speaking. Things that some may prefer not doing.
Nevertheless, practiced recitations among language arts educators may emerge as an important part of their professional skills and a goal of normal language arts development and of advanced literacy.

The chief educational value of recitation is that it engages the emotions and imagination and possesses the potential to be enjoyed. (One can always hope.) The value of memorizing significant amounts of verse rises with the number of complex sentence forms that are to be encountered. These when memorized, become potential models for the reciter's own creative rhetorical endeavors.
The strangeness of sentence structure often found in verse, is the result of the constraints of rhythm and rhyme. Once internalized, and returned-to often, such odd syntactic structures provide a cache of sense and sound, practical prosody, rhetoric and wit.
Similar considerations may apply to the autonomous composing of metaphors as a worthy rhetorical objective.

Heroic couplets, through their use of rhyme, more clearly demarcate line endings of the sometimes elusive five-foot line. Familiarizing the ear to this form ought to act as a powerful aid to the ear in recognizing the iambic pentametric rhythm, and some of its variations, and consequentially, blank verse; Shakespeare's sphere. [So] a close familiarity with heroic couplets is likely useful in understanding verse in general.

Chaucer provides something else that modern poetry generally eschew, narration. Story telling is a useful goal in verse as it is apt to be found popularly engaging. People love stories, there just haven't been that many good stories set in verse in a long time. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Frost's Hired Hand.

A Simple Paradigm for Teaching Recitation

I know a little about programming and hypertextual practice and designs (and even have a few unique opinions there too, but alas...), and one might hope that within all these new digital cognitive apparatuses might lie a power to present more remote, more difficult, educational matter in a more accessible, easier-to-learn, way. Something like Chaucer might illustrate such mind-expanding potentialities.

Probably none of this makes any sense to anybody, my clumsy prose, and so I'll offer a sample:



And so I was looking up the Heroic Couplet form at Wikipedia:

And thus was I led to Pale Fire.
It was really more than I wanted.
A large modern specimen, variation, of Chaucer's old form;
and in a narrative fashion to boot.

And that's part of the problem: that I went into the issue too much
already-wanting a useful, effective, discovery.

At any rate, as already noted I think, I memorized the thing
and here's a sample of that effort:


And so comrade reader, if you're reading this and haven't read Pale Fire...
you might want to check out: entries at Wikipedia: Vladimir Nabokov    Pale Fire (1962)

My reading depicts a Shade who's gone berserk in his bath.
This reading depends upon certain points.
That Shade's metaphors are looser or wider in Canto 4.
That his choice of subject matter, his shaving habits, is bizarre.
That there are disjointed lines and thoughts in Canto 4.
That the words, the use of plosives, and the staccato like rhythm that comes from a list of often monosyllabic, comma-demarcated, nouns, in and around Shade's rage support a robust even wild vocal rendering.
The dramatic structure of the poem itself as a whole: that the reader ought to expect some kind of memorable climax to such a long and, I think, enjoyable poem. And Shade's madscene supplies that dramatic pop.

Spring '10 Blog (April 12th '10)

Spring arrives, with its poetic allusions,
I need the system search function just to
plow through the ever growing rank confusions
of my hard drive, in order to retrieve
my own Spring poems, of robins and magnolias...

(a little schmaltzy perhaps...)

To my Magnolia  (April '09) How easy it is to write of my magnolia ensconced before my porch and unkept house the solitary thing that tries to keep up some semblance of appearances. Winter lingered on through chilly nights... [Click here, or on title, to see and hear complete poem]

It dredges up some other references
to magnolias, three sad spring poems of
Robert Lowell. Alexandrines open
To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage

and also from his Home After Three Months Away
and also from his Man And Wife
My verse, thank God, is hardly so depressing:
perhaps it would be better if it bore
a little more poetical despair.

An Exotic Robin (An Odd Bird)  (April '09) [frame version] Among the rows of pleasant bungalows where I take my almost daily walks there's one distinguished by an odd bird, a robin, marked by two long tail feathers of pure white, and on each wing also, toward their outer edges, another plume of long white. And when he flies, and spreads his wings and tail they form a nested pair of pointed V's, like some small sleek new military jet. [Click here, or on title, to see and hear complete poem]

---

even later fall '09 Blog (november 13th '09) Taking a break from Pale Fire. Had hoped to have some CD packets produced by turkeyday. Something provisional at least. See the Amway salesman at his rounds, selling verse, making mighty progress: The unusually warm November wind  gently tousles the patch of hair that's left  above his forehead as it might some sparse  brown graveside mourners huddling together.

The fall '09 Blog (begun: September 10 '09,) Toward Canterbury is a set of recordings of selections from the Canterbury Tales, performed in Middle English, accompanied by text and brief analyses, hoping to entertain as well as to instruct, When completed, which should be soon, it will consists of seven excerpts comprising 40 minutes. Enough has been accomplished to merit your attention, or so I think. [a quick introduction to this site] early june '09 To help you understand, and that full quick, some part of what this site is all about, (as if by good ensample, so to speche) may I suggest that you should listen to Chaucer's portrait of the Pauvre Persoun, (which is Middle English for poor parson,) taken from the Canterbury Tales written by Geoff Chaucer long ago; performed in Middle English by yours truly, G. S. Lipon, noted reciteur. So Jump right in! and hear in Middle English this rendering of Chaucer's good ensamble, from whom we all can take recurrent lesson, to which we will return full ofte time, in the course of my forth coming blather, that you can read then at your own sweet leisure. But first please please me, take this time to hear my sweet rendition of the pauvre persoun. The First Pale Fire blog: early fall '09 (begun: august 31 '09, pale fire) The Need for a Seasonal Anthology The Metaphysician in the Dark todo list( date? ) about billie jean july 8 '09 Another Wintry Morning For My Father

copyright ©2005,09 Innerlea.com
— All Rights Reserved. —