Poetry in Performance:

Rhythm

Reading and performing poems in public.

Daniel Nester, The College of Saint Rose, 2006-2015

No word is out of place in a poem.

No sound is out of place, either.

The same goes for sound, rhythm, accent,

syllable, or place on the page.

None of this is random or left to chance.

A poem involves time and rhythm, like music.

Even in the freest of free verse, no sound,

rhythm, accent, syllable, or place on the page is

random or is not thought-out in a poem.

This is what is called prosody, or verse theory,

which is the theory of organizing principles of

the structure of poetry—its rhythm, sound

patterns, meter, rhymes.

Prepare to be taken into the realm of prosody.

Prosody: the study of all the elements of language that contribute toward acoustic and rhythmic effects, chiefly in poetry but also in prose. The term derived from an ancient Greek word that originally meant a song accompanied by music or the particular tone or accent given to an individual syllable. Greek and Latin literary critics generally regarded prosody as part of grammar; it concerned itself with the rules determining the length or shortness of a syllable, with syllabic quantity, and with how the various combinations of short and long syllables formed the metres (i.e., the rhythmic patterns) of Greek and Latin poetry. Prosody was the study of meter and its uses in lyric, epic, and dramatic verse. In sophisticated modern criticism, however, the scope of prosodic study has been expanded until it now concerns itself with what the 20th-century poet Ezra Pound called “the articulation of the total sound of a poem.”

—Encyclopedia Britannica

Iamb any two syllables, usually a single

word but not always, whose accent is on

the second syllable. Ta-TUM

Example: upon, arise

Trochee any two syllables, usually a single

word but not always, word whose accent is

on the first syllable. TUM-Ta

Example: virtue, further

Anapest any three syllables, usually a

single word but not always, word whose

accent is on the third syllable. Ta-Ta-TUM

Example: intervene

Dactyl any three syllables, usually a single

word but not always, word whose accent is

on the first syllable. TUM-Ta-Ta

Example: tenderly

Spondee any two syllables, sometimes a single

word but not always, with strong accent on the

first and second syllable. TUM-TUM

Example (in this case no one word, but a series

of words in this line):

The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs.

(The words “day wanes” form a spondee.)

RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD (double spondee!)

Hey you!

To name the kind of foot, use the adjective form of these words.

A line of iambs = iambic

A line of trochees = trochaic

A line of anapests = anapestic

A line of dactyls = dactylic

A line of spondees = spondaic

To name the kind of foot, use the adjective form of these words.

A line of iambs = iambic

A line of trochees = trochaic

A line of anapests = anapestic

A line of dactyls = dactylic

A line of spondees = spondaic

Iambic pentameter

Five units of iambics

Da DUM Da DUM Da DUM Da DUM Da DUM

i AM i AM i AM i AM i AM

I AM a PI rate WITH a WOOD en LEG

But soft: what light through yonder window breaks?

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Iambic pentameter in everyday speech:

A deep depression moving from the west.

Diana dyes her hair I’m sure she does.

Would anybody like a cup of tea?

The number of feet in a given line is combined with

the suffix -meter.

dimeter a 2-foot line

trimeter a 3-foot line

tetrameter a 4-foot line

pentameter a 5-foot line

hexameter a 6-foot line

Any group of lines forming a unit is a stanza.

Stanza of 2 lines is a couplet

Stanza of 3 lines is a tercet

Stanza of 4 lines is a quatrain

Stanza of 6 lines is a sestet

Stanza of 7 lines is a septet

Stanza of 8 lines is an octave

Any group of lines forming a unit is a stanza.

Stanza of 2 lines is a couplet

Stanza of 3 lines is a tercet

Stanza of 4 lines is a quatrain

Stanza of 6 lines is a sestet

Stanza of 7 lines is a septet

Stanza of 8 lines is an octave

No rhythm is random in a poem.

Not even a random rhythm.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

the lost baby poem

the time i dropped your almost body down

down to meet the waters under the city

and run one with the sewage into the sea

what did i know about waters rushing back

what did i know about drowning

or being drowned

you would have been born into winter

in the year of the disconnected gas

and no car we would have made the thin

walk over genesee hill into the canada wind

to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands

you would have fallen naked as snow into winter

if you were here i could tell you these

and some other things

if i am ever less than a mountain

for your definite brothers and sisters

let the rivers pour over my head

let the sea take me for a spiller

of seas let black men call me stranger

always for your never named sake

—Lucille Clifton

Here is Clifton’s poem, scanned and marked

up for sounds by poet Sharon Olds.

A beautiful, sad poem, one that is not a

received form (sonnet, terza rima, ballade,

etc.).

But there are several things working

inside this poem that affect how one reads it

silently, and how one might perform it: the line breaks, the white space between words, the use of all lower-cased letters.

This sets us up quite nicely for our next set of slides on the page, or typographical level.