When I was in high school, my English teacher Kathy Puhr demonstrated that most Emily Dickinson poems could be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” — the formal strangeness of which was lost on me (for one, I had never heard of the song before), but which I never forgot (have you ever seen a Ph. D. from Illinois drawl a song from 1830?). Structures like that are increasingly rare in the age of free verse, and in an age of music that is itself monkeying with its hand-me-down rhythmic structures — but I think all poets still feel tempted by the music of lyric. Erin Belieu’s described her book Black Box as “channeled through Aimee Mann’s ‘Bachelor #2’ and the remastered reissue of AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black'” — she’s talking more, perhaps, about attitude and voice than she is about rhythm, but there’s no doubt that “channeling through” a song has an impact on the way a person writes and reads words.
Unfortunately, the main structure we’ve got to visualize and share the rhythm of poems is scansion. Scansion’s great, if you’re into that sort of thing, but there’s a lot it doesn’t do. For example, in addition to being accentual (my MIStress’ EYES are NOthing LIKE the SUN), and divided into countable syllables (which is why ancient English poems have quantitative prosody), English syllables have variable duration — it takes you longer to say “moon” then it does to say “fit”. Our prosodic system doesn’t take this into account, which means there’s no way to write down or otherwise record rhythmic patterns in music: we speak like one-note tubas (well, at least I do) but we have a notation system essentially designed for the cowbell.
Which is to say that traditional scansion is pass??. What’s hot is Indie Scansion, i.e. making up your own system of scansion to fit the needs of the moment. This is your chance to get into it before it gets popular and sells out.
So let’s say you have a line from a song stuck in your head, which I do — “What could he do / should have been a rock star / but he didn’t have the money for a guitar.” This scans as something like XOOX / XOXOXX / XOXOXOXOXOXO — but what I like about it isn’t that it has a complete line of standard trochaic hexameter, I like the way that the song hangs on the “ghee” of “GII-tar”, and there’s a kind of dramatic hush between “what” and “could.” A rest, one might say. I want that in my poem — and even if I can’t ensure that what readers see on the page is the same thing that I’m hearing in my head, I want to be able to remember to do it when I’m reading. I also want to be able to compose lines to that rhythm without having to listen to the song a million times, which is undesirable because it encourages me to put in the “chook-chook” sound of the gun cocking when I read any resulting poem. So maybe I find an online utility that lets you make your own musical notation:
This is educational — that bit I like, the “GII-tar,” is actually simultaneous with the beginning of the soldiers saying “what” for the second time, which opens some interesting possibilities with words that are visually parallel on the page — we can’t have simultaneous words in print (or at a reading), but we can line up words so that they look like one is beginning where the other ends. Also, the reason that the question-and-answer of the song seems so automatic is that it happens in midmeasure, which runs the call together with the response. Plus, with notation like this, we can forget the song while we write, which will prevent poems called “Smarmy Beamers,” “Barmy Gleamers” etc. etc.
The other reason to experiment with indie scansion is that it helps with songs whose lyrics aren’t necessarily tied hard into their rhythm. In some lines, the rhythm of the language has been totally reworked to fit the rhythm of the music, like this one: “They got us basking in a storm. / I watch it as it loses form. / Wiped out, / They could see me; that’s what I want. / A casualty but I am upfront.” If you were going to scan this, it wouldn’t look anything like it sounds — you’d lose the weird emphasis on “it as it” and the end of “casualty” — the scansion rhythm is different from the song rhythm.
In this particular case, the duration of individual syllables doesn’t seem to change very much — at least it’s not what seems interesting right now with regards to this particular song (indie scansion is all about instant gratification). We want to measure the stress placed on a syllable, but we want stress as we hear it in the song, not the sentence stress. One thing that may help is thinking of stress as relative — some unstressed syllables, for example, have more stress than others. Alfred Corn argues that you can represent stress by numbering it, instead of using an on/off binary — so let’s do that.
2 1 1 3 2 1 1 2 / 2 1 1 3 2 1 1 2 / 2 2 / 2 1 3 2 2 1 1 3 / 2 1 1 3 2 2 1 1 3
Written out like this, it looks like the section works a lot like certain kinds of strong rhythms in free verse — it sets up a cadence by repeating the same rhythm twice, then varies it. I’m not sure what the effect of tossing in a syllable like the song does in the fifth chunk is called, but I would call it something like “cool” — it slows the whole thing down with a little, intentional monkey wrench. This wouldn’t show up clearly if we used the musical notation system above (I think the extra syllable replaces silence, or crowds in with the other notes in the same measure), but it’s certainly audible. I’d also point out that not using traditional metrical feet shows us the 4/4 time that’s the bones of this passage — there’s a way to describe that XOOX structure in English prosody (the choriamb), but if you were scanning in the traditional way you might be tempted to see the section as an alternation of trochees and iambs instead (actually, if you were scanning in the traditional way, you’d be unable to put a stress on the “-ty” in “casualty” and the result would be some kind of mess).
Hopefully these kinds of techniques can help liberate song rhythms from songs, and provide some new structures for rhythmic verse. The best thing is that, unlike the rest of the materials I’ve been sharing with you, rhythms grow more useful the more they’re used: with some luck, by 2140 there’ll be anthologies full of Army Dreamer stanzas and Santogold stanzas. Stranger things have happened: we come from the culture that invented plaid sunglasses.
Let me know, of course, if you end up fitting words to all the above nerdery — or if there’s a particular song that you find yourself writing words to. Nobody will be allowed to make fun of you for it here without sitting through a lecture about the Chinese tradition of Ci poetry and the English ballad stanza.
Materials Wednesday is slowly drawing to a close, so next week will try to look back over the series in its penultimate post, called: Seeing Moses / Being Moses. No, not that Moses.