A Convergence of the Two Cultures

Just discovered an interesting site: the web pages of LUPAS, the Liverpool University Centre for Poetry and Science. I haven't explored the site in depth yet, but it looks interesting, especially the diaries section, a communal blog of sorts involving poets and scientists. I've had a brief scan of the essays section, but the text size is ridiculously small and uncomfortable to read.

Whatever, it's a bold and necessary venture. There's an enormous gulf between poetry and science, something that was touched upon on Wednesday in the question and answer session that followed the reading, which I intend to write a wee bit about. I sometimes wish I was more able to bridge it and I admire those who manage to do so.

Reasoning Rhyme: More Complex Phenomena

Last time, I introduced the basics of my new terminology for rhyme. This post applies that terminology to the examination of more complex phenomena in rhyme.

Remember that you can find a key to the symbols I use to indicate individual sounds here. You should be familiar with the use of slashes round a symbol (e.g. /I/) from the previous post. In this one, I use square brackets in some examples (e.g., ta[ks]i) to emphasise the point that I'm talking about the pronunciation of the sound(s) concerned. I also use a slash in examples to indicate where a word is being broken and use # to show a word boundary(e.g., at all is shown as a/t#all).

There's a bit more linguistic terminology in this post. I hope it doesn't bamboozle too much. I'm still working on the supplement (it might become two!) that should help to make it clear, but I'll post this bit of the discussion meantime nonetheless.

Compound Rhymes
It is possible for a feminine rhyme to be a compound of two of the types discussed in the previous post. One such example from Simon Armitage’s poem “You May Turn Over and Begin ...” is the rhyme cocktails:pigtails, which is a remote:identical compound. Interestingly, the remote element (/k/ and /p/ are both voiceless stops; /Q/ and /I/are both mid vowels; /k/ and /g/ are both velar stops) is the syllable with primary stress. It is also important to note that, although both fellows in the above example are compound nouns, compound rhymes need not be confined to such forms. For instance, waggle:fickle could also be thought of as a remote:identical compound.

Intrusion and Protrusion
Astrid Holtman uses the term “subsequence rhyme” to refer to any rhyme in which a segment present in one fellow is absent from the other. She places it under the heading of “imperfect rhyme”, but it is preferable separate it from twin and relative rhyme. Twin and relative rhyme are clearly concerned with different degrees of relationship between corresponding segments in two rhyme fellows. “Subsequence rhyme” is orthogonal to this relationship and can appear in twin and relative rhyme. For concision and clarity, the term intrusion is to be preferred to “internal subsequence rhyme”, in which a segment is inserted word-internally, and protrusion, to “subsequence rhyme”, in which a segment is added at the end or beginning of a word (e.g. fleet'st:sweets in Shakespeare's Sonnet 19 ll.5, 7).

Swapping
In swapping, two segments or features, usually but not necessarily contiguous, swap places between the fellows. Segmental swapping can be seen in ll.9,10 of Louis MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music”, which rhyme Blavat[sk]y:ta[ks]i.

As classification of rhyme is based on degree of segmental correspondence, it seems reasonable that individual features as well as entire segments should be able to swap. Featural swapping can be seen in ll.1, 3 of Seamus Heaney’s “The Diviner”, which rhyme stick:pluck. In the initial consonant clusters /st/ and /pl/, one segment is a voiceless stop (/t/ and /p/) and the other is a continuant (/s/ and /l/). The stops have different places of articulation (alveolar and labial), but the continuants share their place of articulation.

Featural swapping can also be seen in the initial consonant clusters in the example above from Shakespeare's Sonnet 19. Here, the labiality of the segments swaps, but the manner of articulation and voicing stay in place.

Borrowing
In borrowing, one fellow “borrows” a consonant from the preceding word to account for its correspondent in the other fellow. The borrowed segment may be identical, as in toil:a/t#all (Wilfred Owen, “Futility”, ll.13,14), or related, as in foil:o/[v]#oil (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”, ll.2,3).

The second fellow in the example from “Futility” could also arguably be identical twin rhyme, in that a/t#all may be rhyming with tall in l.12, rather than toil. An argument for this is the presence of an extended correspondence in between l.12 and l.14: ...cl[eI] grew tall:...sl[i:]/p#a/t#all.

“Futility” and “God’s Grandeur” provide strong arguments for the reality of borrowing: in “Futility”, this pair is otherwise the only one in the poem lacking a relationship between the onsets; in “God’s Grandeur”, the borrowing of the /v/ reduces the number of pairs lacking a solid onset relationship to one, namely God:rod. Borrowing is obviously related to mosaic rhyme in that both cross word boundaries.

Breaking
Breaking occurs when two or more features of a single segment in one fellow are reproduced in two contiguous segments in the other fellow, e.g., [w]once:[fr]ance (Wilfred Owen, “Futility”, ll.2,4) in which the labiality and sonority of the /w/ are broken into the labiality of the /f/ and the sonority of the /r/. Most instances of breaking appear to involve the place of articulation and either sonority or continuancy.

In the next posts, I'll consider the role of the syllable onset in more detail, examining how it plays a role in rhyme schemes from poems by Wilfred Owen and Simon Armitage.

A Window on Wednesday

Wednesday night's reading went well. I irritated myself by stumbling uncharacteristically over a couple of lines at the beginning, but I settled into the groove fairly soon.

Both Gerrie Fellows and I had 40 minutes (two 20-minute sets), which is double the length of time I've ever had before! I had plenty work to fill my minutes, but I was a bit uncertain of what to read, partly because of having so much fairly fresh work, so the sets ended up being a lot more improvised than usual. I think they worked reasonably well, but I'd be interested in any comments from anyone who was there, whether positive or negative.

Gerrie read from the manuscript of her next collection, Window for a Small Blue Baby, in the first half. The book draws on her experience of IVF, exploring the process from both the technological and the emotional point of view, which gives it a distinctive texture. It's due out with Carcanet in November and will certainly be worth looking out for.

Reasoning Rhyme: Making It New

In the previous post in this series, I briefly explored why rhyme terminology was ripe for revision. In this post, I set out the basics of a revised terminology. At one point, this entails using a wee bit more involved terminology from linguistics, which I'll explain in a supplementary post so that this one doesn't get too unwieldy. However, I'll post this one before the supplement is ready, because I think you'll get most of what I have to say without the background stuff.

In the new terminology, rich and perfect rhyme are brought together under the heading twin rhyme and termed identical and fraternal rhyme respectively. “Imperfect rhyme” is replaced with relative rhyme, which is subdivided into close and distant rhyme.

Two types of close rhyme are identified: nuclear and peripheral. In nuclear rhyme, the vowels are identical, while the onsets and codas are related, e.g., made:face. This would traditionally be termed assonance, although the definition of assonance includes no reference to the correspondences in the onsets and codas. In peripheral rhyme, which would traditionally be called consonance, the onsets and codas are identical but the vowels are not, e.g., brutes:brats.

Distant relative rhyme subdivides into removed and remote. In removed rhyme, which is traditionally labelled pararhyme, either the onset or the coda is identical, but other constituents of the syllable are related, e.g., stick:pluck. In remote rhymes, there is no identity, but all segments in the syllable exhibit some relationship to their partners in the other fellow.

All these classes apply to masculine and feminine rhymes, although the only nuclear rhymes I've found so far are masculine. Some feminine rhymes may be compounds of more than one class, and I'll talk about that in the next post.

The new terms have a number of advantages:

• they unify the terms for segmental correspondence in rhyme, as it bases them all based on kinship terms, which furnish an obvious metaphor for such correspondence;
• although the terms are still not fully transparent, they are clearer than their traditional counterparts;
• they classify rhyme in terms of a clear continuum of segmental correspondence, from the greatest (in identical twin rhyme) to the weakest (in remote rhyme), as opposed to the rather haphazard fashion of the old terms;
• they contain no implicit value judgements, thus allowing for a better characterisation of the rhyming practice of poets who favour relative rhyme; and
• they conceive rhyme as including the onset, which, as shall be demonstrated in subsequent posts, is necessary for a full understanding of rhyme phenomena.

I've found few instances of remote rhyme, but sang:work is a clear one. It occurs in the fourth stanza of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”, which uses an ababccdd rhyme scheme in each stanza. The remote a-rhyme sang:work, appears in ll.25, 27. Apart from the a-rhyme in the first stanza, which is removed (field:self, ll.1,3), the rest of the rhyme scheme is fraternal. Thus, by the time the reader reaches the fourth stanza, it is well established that this position rhymes, but whilst a fraternal rhyme is expected, some sort of relative is possible.

Given the concept of rhyme Wordsworth was probably working with, it is likely that he didn't perceive these words as rhyming, but the segments share features nonetheless: the /s/and /w/ are both continuants and articulated forward of the hard palate; the /a/ and /@:/ are both low, unrounded vowels; the /N/and the /k/ are both velar stops. (For an explanation of these symbols, see this page.) If Wordsworth didn't perceive sang:work as a rhyme, the featural similarity of the fellows is all the more striking.

In the next post, I'll discuss some slightly more complex phenomena.

Dark Light

I've mentioned the painter Alison Watt before. There's an interview with her in today's Sunday Herald, which is worth reading. I've been entranced by her work since I saw her solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000, and her new piece at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh certainly sounds interesting. Watt is currently associate artist at the National Gallery in London.

Reasoning Rhyme: The Intolerable Wrestle With Words

This post concerns itself with brief definitions of the basic rhyme phenomena and a quick critque of the traditional terminology. Throughout this series, it'll be necessary to use some technical terms from linguistics and literary studies, but I'll explain them as I go along.

Rhyme involves a correspondence between two or more elements, usually, but not necessarily, in different lines of a poem. Each word or group of words involved in a given rhyme relationship is termed a fellow and the relationship is accordingly referred to as fellowship. Three correspondences are used to define the basic forms of rhyme: syllabic, morphological, and segmental. Traditional rhyme terminology covers each of these, which I will explain.

Syllabic correspondence is pretty self-explanatory. Monosyllabic rhymes (e.g., fame:name; begin:sin), which are almost all stressed, are referred to as masculine rhymes. Disyllabic rhymes (e.g., pleasure:treasure; rolling:controlling), in which the stress usually falls on the initial syllable, are referred to as feminine rhymes.

Morphological correspondence refers to the grammatical form of the rhyme fellows. Most rhymes are morphologically identical. That is, both fellows are normally one word or, less frequently, more than one word. Rhymes that are morphologically non-identical (e.g., jealous:tell us; intellectual: peck’d you all) are called mosaic rhymes. For obvious reasons, the vast majority of mosaic rhymes are feminine, although a masculine mosaic rhyme in English is not beyond possibility (e.g., cheese:she’s).

In linguistics, individual speech sounds are referred to as segments. Thus the term segmental correspondence covers the degree of similarity between the consonants and vowels in the rhyme fellows. Linguists divide syllables into the onset (the initial consonant(s), if the syllable has any) and the rime (the vowel and any following consonants). The rime is further divided into the nucleus (the vowel) and coda (the following consonants). Traditionally, rhyme is considered to begin at the nucleus of a stressed syllable and to require the nucleus and any coda consonants to be identical. For feminine rhymes, any syllables that follow the stressed syllable should also be identical. This discounting of the onset is a crucial point, which we'll return to. The one exception to the skipping of syllable onsets is so-called rich rhyme, which involves homophones (e.g., felt [past tense of feel] and felt [material]) or the repetition of the same word.

Normal masculine and feminine rhymes such as those quoted above are referred to as perfect or full rhyme. Other forms of rhyme, which will be explored properly later, are variously called half rhyme, near rhyme, slant rhyme and imperfect rhyme. These phenomena include assonance, consonance and pararhyme. Those terms and the reasons for labelling the phenomena that they describe as rhyme will be explored in a subsequent post.

The traditional terms for the segmental correspondences are inadequate for various reasons. Firstly, none of them are at all transparent. Secondly, because they exclude the onset, they fail to take account of various subdivisions of “imperfect” rhyme or the relationship between “perfect” and “rich” rhyme. Thirdly, they are misleading as to poetic practice: the term “rich” rhyme implies a highly developed form of rhyme, but such rhymes are considered poor practice; the terms “half-rhyme” or “imperfect” rhyme have been used to imply that such rhymes are shoddy, when in point of fact they are linguistically--and, in the opinion of some poets and readers, aesthetically--more subtle and interesting than their “perfect” cousins.

In the next post in this series, I'll explain my suggestions for a revised terminology.

Reasoning Rhyme: Prologue

Back in the dim and distant past, as a Linguistics student, I wrote an Honours dissertation on rhyme. It grew out of my reflection on rhyme practice as a reader and nascent writer of poetry and developed into a critque of a PhD thesis on rhyme by a Dutch linguist, Astrid Holtman.

It struck me that this blog would be a good place to revisit some of the material, leaving aside the more linguistic theoretical aspects of the dissertation and focussing on the stylistics. It's therefore my intention to create a thread of posts exploring this and reflecting further on rhyme. Don't know how long it'll take, but I hope it will generate some comment and discussion that will feed into the exploration as it develops. I'll start soon with a critque of traditional rhyme terminology.

PAS Reading Next Week

Just over a week until my reading with Gerrie Fellows for the Poetry Association of Scotland! Having been a member of the Association for a good few years, I know I can expect not only a warm welcome but an acute audience. It's the best combination a writer can have.

Here are the details: Wednesday 7th February 2007, 7.30pm, at the Scottish Poetry Library. Entry: £3 (£2 concessions)

Perhaps I'll see you there.

Poems on Pillows: the Renga

After the horror of the photoshoot, we settled down to writing, with Ken first recording an introduction to the renga for the BBC Radio Scotland arts show Radio Cafe. Elspeth had to shuffle off for a live studio interview with them at lunchtime, but Richard and I were left voiceless on the airwaves.

Participating in a renga seems to attune the writing mind well to the sharp focus of the haiku style. It probably helped that the morning was glorious and there was plenty fodder for imagery in the view from the hotel room (I think it's the one at the top of this page) and even in the room itself. The four of us generally took quite different approaches to the strictures of the schema, which made for a stimulating day. Several stanzas that didn't make it into the renga were the equal of any that did.

Word is that, aside from the excerpts on the postcard, the whole renga will be published on the websites of the Scottish Poetry Library and Ten Hill Place. I'll post a link when that happens. It also might be displayed somewhere in the hotel, but you'll have to stay there to be able to see that!

O Wert Thou in the Quirky Shot

I am beginning to think that the necessary qualifications for working in PR and media relations must include a degree of--perhaps that should be "degree in"--Schadenfreude. It seems to me a truth universally ignored, at least by PR people, that the unfortunates who have to appear in quirky publicity shots are never the folk who dream them up.

Picture the scene: hotel bed, three poets, account director from a PR agency, someone from Radio Scotland and four photographers. This is what greeted me, Elspeth and Richard on Thursday when we arrived for the publicity photoshoot that preceeded the renga at Ten Hill Place [new readers start here, then go here]. Laid out on the bed were white dressing gowns and slippers for the three of us and Ken Cockburn, who was leading the renga. This despite the fact that, the previous day, Ken had expressed to the PR woman our unease with the idea of us being photographed together on the bed in white bathrobes and she had responded along the lines of "they won't have to do anything they don't want to."

Ken had suggested he bring his Japanese tea set for shots with an improvised tea ceremony as an alternative to the bathrobes, but he was late in arriving. Elspeth and Richard, seeing how little hope there was in resistance, put aside their inhibitions and donned the gear. I stood on my dignity somewhat longer, but it was clearly futile. Eventually, under the application of a little pressure, including reassurance that "the photographers will know if it's not working", and without Ken's tea set to provide a get-out, I had little option but to girn and bear it.

We were all still fully clothed underneath the dressing gowns of course. With, eventually, 11 people in the room, that made things a little on the warm side for us. By the time Ken made it, the photographers had been absorbed for several minutes in snapping us in various purportedly pensive poses on the bed and were not interested in a tea ceremony. Unfortunately, they seemed to think it was working.

Really, none of us writers particularly enjoyed the experience. Ken managed to avoid being snapped altogether. Elspeth, to remain sane, took to writing the photographers' commands in her notebook ("Richard, could you--I don't know how to say this--move closer to Elspeth's bum?" is one memorable example) and scribbling unbroadcastable comments on the situation. I'm not sure what kind of expression I wore, but the photographers wrongly concluded that I didn't like having my photo taken and called me "the serious one". It was (you may say) unsatisfactory.

Needless to say, I was less than heartbroken when the PR account director phoned on Friday about further publicity and mentioned that they'd had "a disappointing response from the papers". I was simply glad no incriminating evidence was to be found in the public domain. Still, the renga was great fun.

The Scotsman gets it not quite right again

Imagine my surprise when I clicked on the headline "Poets' work to form basis of city literature collection" in my daily e-mail from The Scotsman and found it was a report of the poems on pillows commission! As you'll see if you read the piece, they've got rather confused about what is being written when and by whom. As I said in the previous post on the subject, there will be seven or eight postcards. Three of them are the poems that Elspeth, Richard and I are writing inpidually, one will be an excerpt from the renga and three are previously published poems by three other poets they've paid for the permission to use. I'm not sure whether the eighth is definite, but it will be a further commissioned poem.

The Scotsman also says that Elspeth, Richard and I are all "city-based". Well, Lithgae's a royal burgh but, in spite of West Lothian Council's plans for expansion, it ain't no city.

Still, good publicity!

Stanza 2007

The programme for StAnza 2007 is now available. It's the 10th StAnza, and the line-up is a good 'un. I'm particularly interested in hearing Jorie Graham, but I'm disappointed that the Eric Gregory Award showcase reading is at a time utterly inaccessible for me. However, I'm appearing in The Gathering: 100 poets reading a poem each to celebrate the anniversary.

Poetry Association of Scotland: Spring 2007

The Spring programme for the Poetry Association of Scotland came through the door this morning. The blurb for my reading with Gerrie Fellows on 7 February proclaims us:

"Two poets who describe the modern world with an ironic yet lyrical voice."

Other events in the season include a reading by Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn lecturing on Edwin Muir and a photographic exploration of the Poetry Path near Kirkby Stephen.

Oh Do Desist, Dear Boy

Not that I'm given to watching Sunday morning TV, but I happened to see the art historian Brian Sewell pontificating disdainfully about modern art in churches on BBC 1 this morning. I assume the item, which was part of the Heaven & Earth show, was a brief televisual extension of his BBC Radio 3 show for Christmas week, the rather pompously entitled "Divine Art", which I missed, at least partly by design.

Sewell maintained that "we must insist" on a "spiritual" quality to religious art. The latter term seemed to mean visual art associated directly with Christian worship, which seems a remarkably narrow conception in today's society. However, although the rallying cry might not seem particularly controversial at first sight, it is hopelessly vague. Sewell did not define the "spiritual quality", but as far as I could gather, it is something to do with a sense of mysticism (a term Sewell used), transendence or the ethereal. From his reaction to the Henry Moore piece he lambasted, it certainly seemed to rule out any strong physiciality.

This is one of the most irritating things about Sewell's approach. Christianity in its orthodox forms--and remember, all the pieces he considered were for Christian places of worship--is founded on the belief that God became human in Christ or, to express it slightly differently, that Christ was fully human as well as fully pine. Therefore, the physical is as essential to the faith as the spiritual and ought be as strong an element in Christian art as the spiritual. God's transendence and immanence must be held in tension, if not necessarily in any single artwork then at least across the totality of Christian art.

The other irritatant was that Sewell didn't have anything positive at all to say about the modern and contemporary art he examined, except the grudging acceptance that Moore had at least considered the architectural setting of his altar, unlike another artist he critiqued. Granted, some of his criticisms were justified, but if he had lifted his head above his prejudices and ventured north, he might have found something to shake his disdain in Alison Watt's wonderful, award-winning painting Still in Old St Pauls Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. In this piece, presence and absence, the physical and the spiritual, death and resurrection meet naturally and powerfully. Surely even Brian Sewell could not fail to be moved.

Poems on Pillows

Just before Christmas, the Scottish Poetry Library asked whether I'd be willing to take on a commission for a new three-star metro hotel in Edinburgh, Ten Hill Place. The library and the hotel have put together a project to produce poetry postcards that will be left on the pillows at Ten Hill Place when guests arrive. There will be eight in total, I think, and the commission is not only to write one but to take part in a renga on 25 January at the hotel with two other poets who'll be writing pillow postcard poems--Elspeth Murray and Richard Medrington--and, as renga master, erstwhile Shore Poet Ken Cockburn.

This morning, Richard, Elspeth and I met our contact at the hotel, Adrian Hanger, for a look round the establishment and a chat about the project. Ten Hill Place consists of a swish new building and part of a Georgian terrace. Most of the accommodation is in the Georgian section, but the interior design of the hotel is wholly and beautifully contemporary. It's owned by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, but guests need no connection with the college or surgery.

The commission and the renga are new departures for me, although I've written poems specifically for certain occasions before. I'm looking forward to the work. I know Richard, Elspeth and Ken reasonably well; we're quite different writers in several ways, but that should make the renga more interesting.

Oh, and the poem has to be written by 19 January!

Padel on Difficulty

I like what Ruth Padel has to say about the so-called difficulty of poetry in her comment article last Saturday's Guardian:

Poetry, in other words, is not only good for you, and protects us against meaninglessness: by the pleasure it gives in its artifice, images and imagination, and in the little nudgy sensual relationships between words and sounds that hint at new ideas, poetry augments and reflects our delight in the world.

Isn't it difficult? Not more than we are. Our complicated lives (not to speak of the LCD display on the gym treadmill) are much more difficult than most poems. We are difficult to ourselves, difficult to each other. But OK, yes, some poetic artefacts can be slightly labour-intensive. Wallace Stevens said a poem should "resist the intelligence, almost successfully" and good poems are rarely explicit. They want you to discover what you feel for yourself and don't do simplification. If you simplify, says the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, you "misrepresent what's human at the moment of pretending to celebrate it". Taking "the accessible and the easy" out of the human condition, you "blur that condition instead of defining it".

New Links Added

I've added a couple of new links to the "Faith" section:

• Foundation is an emerging church group in Bristol in which a friend of mine is heavily involved. The site has some basic information about the group and links to blogs by Foundation members, but consists mainly of intimations of events.

• Perhaps Virtual Theology is of wider interest. It's an online repository for pdfs and mp3s of theological talks that, I think, are run by Foundation. I confess I haven't yet investigated them, just discovered they're there, so I can't comment on the quality of the material.

Season's Greetings

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Draft Culture (Scotland) Bill

The Scottish Executive has published its draft Culture (Scotland) Bill for consultation. This marks an important juncture for arts and culture policy in Scotland, but The Scotsman reports that James Boyle, the head of the Cultural Commission, which the Executive set up to draw up a vision for Scotland's cultural policy, is not at all happy with the draft bill. Likewise, The Herald's report and editorial will not make happy reading for those at Victoria Quay. Something of a contrast with the warm words on the Executive's own site.

Best Scottish Poems 2006

The Scottish Poetry Library's third annual online choice of Scottish poems published in the past 12 months or so--Best Scottish Poems 2006--went live on St Andrew's Day. As ever, it's a highly inpidual choice by this year's editor, Janice Galloway, as you can see if you compare it with the 2005 choice by Richard Price or the 2004 one by Hamish Whyte, who is represented in the 2006 gathering.

Galloway's gleanings include a poem a piece by Shore Poets Diana Hendry and Christine De Luca. Christine's poem is a moving but light elegy for Gael Turnbull, capturing so much of a very fine and sorely missed poet.

There's also a piece by Chloe Morrish, whom I met at the Responding to Rilke reading. It's a moving poem about her father and her younger brother, who died of a neurological disease aged 11. Poems about loss and grief are hard to do well, but this one quitely captures the mix of love, sadness, regret and happiness that such remembering entails.