Hi--
Thanks all for many quite enjoyable moments of poetry so far. It's rare for me
to be on a listserve where the base level is this high.
The text below is interesting and funny and free in different ways, I
enjoyed it, especially for its breaks into prose, but I have small gripe about
the subject line, for it is not, to my ear, blank verse. "Blank verse" is
quite distinct from "free verse" in that it has a definite and clear metre,
usually iambic in the English tradition, although it is unrhymed. Of course
Anand, if you did have a metre in mind, do excuse me, and I'd be curious to
know which one it was.
The names that come often to mind when one thinks of blank verse are
Marlowe, Shakespeare from the plays, and Wordsworth; Coleridge pushes it a bit
farther; there are are also looser examples of it, but the main thing is that
one should hear the metre clearly. To take a couple of blank verse lines from
Billy Wordsworth above Tintern Abbey:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime;
In English, metre works largely through ups and downs in volume. If you read
the lines above in a normal speaking voice (more or less regardless of regional
accent) and listen to yourself as you do, you should find that the following
syllables come out a bit louder: less, trust, them, may, owed, -noth-, gift,
as-, more, -lime. These syllables are where the primary beat falls. The other
syllables are softer, so if we represent the line in terms of the graph of
volume (with "x" for soft syllable and "/" for loud syllable), we have:
x /, x /,
x / x / x / x/x /,
x /x / x/;
ie. an iambic line, te-tum te-tum. In the second, full, line, we have
five beats-- thus, iambic pentameter. Note that the volume one gives to a few
syllables like "have" is in-between, but the syllables on either side of it
still come out louder and preserve the up-down-up-down of poetic percussion in
the metre. Note also that we are talking about syllable *volume* and not
syllable *length* (ie, the amount of time it takes to say a syllable, whether
it is long or short, which is the basis of metre in many Indian languages and
also in Greek, but not systematised in the English language)
Once one has set this metre clearly in the first couple of lines of a
poem, one can then have variations, inversions, etc.
So this is blank verse-- more details and examples on this page:
http://www.answers.com/topic/blank-verse
I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound pedantic, but it's just that I get very
irritated because even reviewers of poetry in major Indian newspapers get
confused about things like this, such as most recently, I think, if I'm reading
a rather garbled review right, Susan Viswanathan reviewing Rukmini Nair's
Yellow Hibiscus in The Hindu!
( http://www.hindu.com/lr/2005/03/06/stories/2005030600110100.htm ):
"There may be a language of poetry, of craft, of metre or blankness.."
(Isn't she opposing "metre" to "blankness", and isn't "blankness" a
half-remembered echo of the blank verse someone misinformed her about in
school? Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Sorry to go on about this,
Vivek
needawriter wrote:
Subject: Blank verse
>
>
> The Vizag Coast
>
> I
>
> History
>
> I was born
> at American General Hospital
> it is in / at Vizag,
> a port city with pebbly beaches
> (where most landlubbers who swim are already drunk)
> lovely sea-side roads
> and beached-whale like hills
> from the pinnacles of which
> you would bless yourself, cross yourself
> that Vizag isn't yet skyscrapered enough to be called,
> India's windiest city.
>
> II
>
> Agelessness
>
> To be frank,
> and poetic, not bothering much about
> what my assorted cousins now in the States will say,
> Vizag has always been a city where afternoon siestas
> and elevenses that kind of rhyme
> masquerade for progress and poetry,
> and for which every other year,
> I am in mortal fear,
> for either cyclone or tsunami
> hides below the surface
> of that sea I hold so dear!
>
> III
>
> Nostalgia
>
> Digressions just end up ensuring one wanders
> but digressions also give one context,
> ramblings and rants apart,
> I have managed to pass through Vizag,
> and somehow not managed data about American General Hospital,
> a.) its location
> b.) the Doctor who operated me out of my mother
> c.) the Nurse who gave life to / burped me
> d.) the rich guy now owning the hills of my adolescent days
> e.) the number of drunk engineering students who drown every year
> and eff.) how many kms of that coast's beaches can be ridden on.
>
> IV
>
> The Present
>
> I am told rates for land
> are shooting up at Vizag, at locations far from the "beach"
> where the water table starts at 180 feet
> and most of the hills are already sold
> and will have resorts on them, pretty soon
> and also that there are no takers for sea-facing apartments,
> because the beach is now "too" close
> but then, this is the way a city grows
> from masquerading about poetry and "beaches"
> to the prosaic truth called progress
> and anyway, I have always been just passing through.
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