And only the last line of the poem has eight syllables the two other short lines have nine. The class would agree that “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is written in quatrains, and, perhaps with some mild hectoring, that each quatrain begins with three long lines of loosely iambic hexameter, and ends with a shorter line of iambic tetrameter-though only one of the long lines has fourteen syllables most have thirteen, one has fifteen. (Three of these marks, it’s worth noting, are not featured on most keyboards, nor in ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange). For a while, the class would discuss the poem’s speaker (a disaffected urbanite), the natural imagery and lilting word choice (the cozy cabin, the bees and the beans, the lapping Lake, the sounds of crickets and linnets), the syntax (some reinforcing parallelism and repetition), and the tone-resolute, yet wistful.Īnd then, the class would take on the poem’s form together, applying terms developed for ancient Greek verse to Yeats’s poem in English, with this binary symbolic system that vastly oversimplifies the prosody of spoken English. With the goal of teaching close reading skills, our instructor might write a formal poem on the board, such as William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Then she, or a brave student or two, would read it aloud. But what does scansion try to capture? What is it good for? Let’s recall the classroom scenario in a little more detail. Maybe chewing on a pencil in uncertainty, muttering the odd line out loud. Many readers probably remember the exercise in a literature course-reading a poem in silence, counting syllables and poetic feet, marking stresses or accents. Readers may also want to see our article with linguist Georgia Zellou, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non)-Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” published in The Journal of Cultural Analytics in April 2018, in which we analyze recordings of 100 modern and contemporary American poets and compare them with 20 conversational speakers. We hope that poets and students of poetry at all levels will explore these recordings and, in listening to the original and deformed versions, and considering our visualizations and preliminary analysis of the data, attain a deeper understanding of prosody-in-performance and appreciate its centrality to the study of poetry. These tools will, we hope, be useful in sound studies and literature courses, and in novel research on the vast and growing archive of recorded poetry and other performative speech.įinally, in a spirit of serious play, we offer a casual history and some counterfactual examples of prosody-in-performance through brief samples from sixteen modern and contemporary poets and pitch and timing data about those recordings (SAMPLING THE PROSODY OF SIXTEEN POETS). These include a pitch-tracker (for tracing intonation patterns, to create pitch contours) that works especially well on noisy recordings often found in the poetry audio archive, a forced aligner (for tracking speaking rate and tempo by word and pause duration, and aligning lines of poetry with pitch contours), and a speech synthesis tool that we use for vocal deformance. Then we sketch some relevant history of the study of prosody across disciplines (A LITTLE HISTORY OF PROSODY ACROSS DISCIPLINES) and explain our methods (EXPLORING POETIC PROSODY: VISUALIZING INTONATION AND TIMING AND PRACTICING VOCAL DEFORMANCE), and introduce some simple open-source tools that support alternative heuristics for the teaching and study of prosody in poetry (THREE SIMPLE OPEN-SOURCE TOOLS FOR EXPLORING POETIC PROSODY: DRIFT, GENTLE AND TANDEM-STRAIGHT). Next, we discuss the goals and limitations of scansion as typically practiced in the literature classroom in more detail (SCANSION IN THE CLASSROOM). Vocal deformance is a playful strategy of defamiliarization that involves manipulating vocal qualities of a recording, such as pitch values, vocal tract size, and speaking rate, to draw attention to the subjective nature of speech perception and thus of vocal performance styles, and to imagine alternative histories of and futures for poetic performance. First, we encourage readers to listen to the 12-minute podcast, AFTER SCANSION, which explores the goals and limits of scansion in the classroom and introduces vocal deformance. These are some questions we want to explore. How and why did this happen? What if scansion had never become dominant? What alternative methods for understanding poetic prosody have been passed over? How might reliance on scansion of the text on the page-at the expense of other approaches to listening to and analyzing the prosody of recorded poems-have helped oversimplify the history of poetry performance, and of the evolution of poetic forms? Scansion, for generations of American students, has been the dominant method of studying prosody in poetry.
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