Structure and Form

My senior year of college, I took a class called Honors 212: The Arts in Performance. The day we started the section on poetry, the professor started out by asking the class if someone could give a definition of poetry (I think he was expecting that we wouldn't be able to come up with one easily), so I said "Words arranged in a structure for an aesthetic effect." Even the professor accepted that definition without challenge.

The first poems I ever wrote rhymed, but had no fixed meter. They were, not uncoincidentally, rather terrible. In my defense, I was in elementary school at the time, and didn't even know what meter was. A lot of people don't, even though meter is a more important component of poetry in the English tradition than rhyme. One of my classmates that day in Arts in Performance admitted that she didn't understand meter at all; people could tell her what it means but she just couldn't pick up on it. Meter, in poetry, is the emphasis placed on syllables, the distinctness and loudness with which a syllable is enunciated, also known as syllabic stress. And even if English speakers don't know what the term means, we can all hear it, because in English stress is phonemic, which means it can change the meaning of the word.

Linguists determine if a sound in a language is phonemic by finding minimal pairs, two words that native speakers can distinguish as separate words which differ only in one sound. Think of the word "defect" when it's a noun meaning a flaw, and when it's used as verb meaning to leave your country or team for another. The difference between the pronunciation of these words is that the noun has emphasis on the first syllable and the verb has emphasis on the second syllable. The noun form is a trochee: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The verb is an iamb: an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable.

The units of syllables that make up a poem's meter are called feet. The other disyllabic metrical feet are the spondee, with two stressed syllables, and the pyrrhus, with two unstressed syllables. Trisyllabic feet include the stressed-unstressed-unstressed dactyl, the unstressed-stressed-unstressed amphibrach, and the unstressed-unstressed-stressed anapest. There are also tetrasyllabic feet, but they're not used much in English poetry, as it's difficult for us anglophones to put three syllables in a row without stressing one syllable more or less than the others.

Incidentally, the most common vowel sound in the English language is one we don't have a letter for: the schwa. It's the vowel in the second syllable of "cactus", "dactyl", "second", "vowel", "syllable", and most other unstressed syllables. In the International Phonetic Alphabet it's represented by the letter ə.  

Getting back to poetry, the most common foot in traditional English metrical poetry (or at least the most famous one) is the iamb, especially familiar in the iambic pentameter, lines consisting of five iambs each. Shakespeare's plays, most sonnets, and heroic couplets employed iambic pentameter.

Many traditional poetic forms have a fixed meter, though of course most have exceptions and substitutions somewhere in their rhythm. I used to believe great poetry was pure inspiration, pouring from the poet's mind without any deliberate attention given to form. But the truth is, writing poetry with no understanding of the language you're using is like trying to paint in the dark. It's a lot easier to come up with euphonious lines when you can see what you're doing.

Writing poetry in a fixed form, such as a tanka or a sonnet, at first seems like it would constrict creativity, limit what the poet can express. I've found that's not the case. Usually a poem begins as an image, or one or two lines that just come to you. The rest of the poem takes work. Having a fixed form makes that work easier. As your mind searches for rhymes to fit the pattern or the right arrangement of words to fit the meter, ideas and images arise that would not otherwise occur to you. A fixed form doesn't limit creativity; creativity expands to fill it.

The following is a Spenserian sonnet, a poem consisting of three quatrains (stanzas of four lines) and a concluding couplet (two rhymed lines) in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of abab bcbc cdcd ee. I wrote it as a gift for my professor. I chose the title later, when I realized that I hadn't even had the story of the flood in mind when I wrote it, which just goes to show that even the poet herself can read more into a poem than she originally intended it to mean.

No Relation to Noah

Look outside; it’s raining once again.
No shadow moves against the silver tide.
On days like this, one must wonder when
Life will manifest again outside.

When will the weeping sky’s blue eye be dried?
And does the sun, unseen, still send its kiss?
A disconcerting secret seems to glide
Through rain and life’s disrupted synthesis.

And there have been storms lonelier than this--
Uncaught, unheard. What color was the world
Unseen by eyes? I think the rains might miss
The time before Earth’s strange surprise unfurled.

And what does this resentful rain portend?
All life began, so must it also end?

The Tanka

In ancient Japan, the language itself was thought to have mystical powers (as the great poet Kakinomoto Hitomaro wrote in Manyoshu 3254, "The Land of Yamato is a land/Where the word-soul gives us aid"). Perhaps as a consequence, the art of poetry achieved a reverential, almost religious status. Japanese is not the only language regarded as uniquely suitable for poetic expression (I've read the same claim applied to English and Farsi, and I'm willing to bet the poets of many other languages have held the same belief), but in my opinion the history and refinement of Japanese poetry and poetic theory are such that modern poets the world over should look to Japanese poetry for the essence of poeticness, and the Japanese language for the vocabulary to describe it.

The most significant ancient Japanese poetic form is the tanka, a short poem consisting of 31 syllables (or, more accurately, morae. A mora is a length of sound corresponding to a syllable of one consonant and one short vowel. A syllable with a long vowel or one ending in a voiced consonant is two morae long.) The first part of the poem, the hokku (from which haiku is descended), is seventeen syllables arranged in lines of 5-7-5. The second part, the ageku, is two lines of 7 syllables each. The tanka in ancient Japan was quite strict, not only in length but in the words and subject matter allowed. Puns and other forms of wordplay were commonly employed. As with poetry the world over, the most common topics were love and nature. Influence by Buddhism, a melancholy appreciation of the transience of the world is a thread that runs through Japanese poetry from early times to now, giving many poems a lonely, bittersweet flavor.

Due to the large number of homonyms in Japanese, the common wordplay in Japanese poetry, and the brevity of the poems, the meaning of a poem can be largely impressionistic. Poetry in every language is more subjective than prose: poetic symbolism depends on an individual's own unique combination of knowledge, thoughts, viewpoints, and past experience. What a poem means to a reader can even change based on that reader's mood. While this is a strength of poetry, it adds to the difficulty to translate it, as do different requirements of poetic structure in different languages. For example, in Modern English much poetry is rhymed, but finding rhyming vocabulary when translating it into a different language may require completely changing the meaning of the poem. People who translate tanka into English need to choose between staying true to the form of the poem (syllable arrangements of 5-7-5-7-7) or trying their best to preserve its meaning (which often requires choosing one meaning for a word when more than one meaning is visible in the original Japanese). Take for instance Kokinshu 325 by Sakanoue no Korenori, rendered with the original syllable count in the Rodd and Henkenius translation of the Kokinshu:

the white snows must be

piling thickly on lovely

Yoshino Mountain

for in the old capital

a bitter cold penetrates

And the same poem translated by Thomas McAuley, which does not strictly adhere to the syllable count:

 On fair Yoshino
Mountain white snow fall
Drifts high, it seems,
For in this ancient place the chill
Grows ever stronger.

Both translations capture the poem's basic meaning. Which translation method creates the superior poem in English depends on the specific poem.

The platitude that something is always lost in translation may be true, but something else is always gained in translation, even if it's just a wider audience for a treasure of world literature. The tanka is a poetic jewel that I believe can sparkle as brightly in English as it does in Japanese, with of course different facets bestowed on it by our language and traditions.

Which do you prefer:

the blazing sky at sunset

--waves of orange burn--

or that same sky, at sunset,

in a pool of melting snow?

The Cento

I discovered Japanese literature from reading the Seidensticker translation of The Tale of Genji in high school. I had read a few haiku before then, of course, but never really appreciated them. The Tale of Genji was written by a lady-in-waiting a thousand years ago. It is considered by many to be the world's earliest novel, and one of its greatest. At the time, composing poetry was a common pastime for the upper class. The novel is replete with poetry contests and love poems, as well as frequent allusions to older poems, including many that are no longer extant. These caught my fascination: over a millennium ago, poems were composed that are now lost in the mists of time, save for a single line or phrase preserved in this book. The people who wrote them have been entirely forgotten, in many cases even their meanings are only hinted at by the contexts in which they are quoted. The thought of them made me sad, so I wrote a poem for each one. I called the project "Adopting Orphaned Poetic Allusions." None of them were particularly distinguished, but the idea stayed with me.

There is a kind of poem called the cento that is composed entirely of lines from other poets. When I learned about this form, I thought of course of those misty lost lines from the Genji. I ended up making four centos from them. This one is my favorite; I call it "Parenthesis":

Sadly, sadly we have journeyed this distance
(Might I have it back again?)
Past Karadomari we row, past Kawajiri,
Hid behind eightfold mountain mists
(Mists are as unkind as people),
The pines of Ota,
The Silent Waterfall
(It falls from above),
The cypress pillar on which she had leaned,
And an angler might have wanted to have a try at the waters by her pillow
(But the strings are broken.)
It was worse than if the jewels upon the silken sleeve had been shattered to bits.
The grass first greens on the general’s grave
(The seed that falls upon good ground)
If he does not come,
And I am afraid that it would only be cause to remember
(But so to think was, after all, to think.)
When I think of her,
I am almost sorry that we were so close.
(But not even that was permitted her.)
Is she the rain, is she the clouds? Alas, I cannot say.
The wild goose in the clouds--as sad as I am?
(In a village where it does not sing.)
A person even longs for the pain,
Like the pain, perhaps, of awaiting a visitor who does not come,
(Where would you have me turn?)
Meeting and not meeting.
It was only yesterday, you think, and already thirty years and more have gone by.
(And whose is the more sorrowfully injured name?)
And in more recent times?
The rains are as the rains of other years
(Each year brings rains of autumn.)
One becomes fond, after a time, of sea and strand,
The wrong trees, the wrong fence
(A bridge that floats across dreams?)
We love while we live.
Even as I spoke,
(Were I to join them…)
The cherries coming into bloom and already shedding their blossoms,
A blossom of the deepest hue, and yet--
(How well one knows)
They bloom for the morning.
And the cherry, among them all, seems right for the bird of spring
(The cuckoo of the grove of Iwase).
So you really are going to send me off into the dawn? It is new to me, and I am sure to lose my way.