created 2025-04-15, & modified, =this.modified
Why I’m reading
I’m thinking about the sounds of words and emotion of words, even divorced from meaning.
Do certain people talk more musically than others? Or rather can patterns of this musicality be drawn out? If I think of my voice, or the voice of someone else as purely a song, what are the consequences of that?
Do certain technologies or context produce different types of music? Like how a text message might produce shorter sounds? Do the inner sounds of you and someone you are close to cohere or complement (same wavelength?)
Can you make your speech, artificially musical in a subtle way? Like, those near you get earworms or your lingering voice. They come near you, to hear you speak, since you’ve practiced your Expression so.
Can a language be constructed that is meant to be musical? (In the sense that in English, I can select words, but am constrained by choices because of the sense has to have meaning. What I might want to say, might not be musical? Another word preferred, and thus nonsense is maximally musical at the cost of meaning? - in the manner of a loose ad-libbed construction that is later replaced with words)
This is all random, but really I just want to know more about what is meant by the music or rhythm of a voice.
Introduction
Prosody → prosodia, derived from Greek prosoide, or “a song with accompaniment.” Greek poems were set to music, the same as ballads in Western literature.
Rhythm → rhythmos, “measured motion” from to flow.
you can’t hear a sonata or read a poem instantaneously
Poetry uses the regular recurrence of a accent or stress, like an equivalent musical beat. The relative strength of stresses in a line varies according to a number of factors, some having to do with the sound of individual words, others with the line’s conceptual and emotional content.
The difference in music though, outweigh the similarity.
The absolutely regular insistence of a metronome or textile loom is not a pleasurable experience if it goes on for more than, say, fifteen seconds. For an artist, rhythm arises from the tension between regularity and irregularity, monotony and variety.
Line and Stress
The term used to describe poetry written in meter is verse, from Latin versus meaning turned around or turned back.
Poetry, whether metered or not, is written in a series of lines whose words move from left to right, continue until the poet decides the line is complete, and then return to the left-hand margin to begin anew. This is the “turning” signified in the word “verse.”
Thought
This is covering a certain style of poetry. In prior exploration, I’ve characteristically, started in extreme unconventional areas like Found Poetry, circular or nonobvious parse pattern poems, concrete poetry, dada poetry, minimalist poetry, asemic writing.
These challenge broad statements presented that are applicable only mostly - like lines (concrete) etc.
I do understand the challenge of saying something about anything however.
When a poem is parceled out in a series of units we tend to read it more slowly.
Proposes a litmus test for prose or poetry adoption:
- Poetry – I am interested in a series of intuitive and technical lightning flashes
- Prose – I am interested in conveying a truth that is broad and seamless as a mural or tapestry
One compositional issue that must be decided by the poet is the question of whether a given line is to be end-stopped—that is, concluded with strong punctuation like the period, question mark, exclamation point, colon, semicolon, dash, or comma.
Thought
End-stopping and text messaging. Avoidance of the period to not appear definitive, concluding or combative. Fine Fine.
Each syllable we speak receives some stress.
There are four sources of stress in English.
- Etymological stress - based on word accents as found in a dictionary. i.e. re-‘make (as verb), versus ‘re-make (as noun).
- Syntactic stress - based on importance of a word in a given sentence.
- Rhetorical or Emphatic stress - vocal stress is used to underline the importance of certain words in a sentence, i.e. “Oh, yes you are.”
- Literary stress - provided by the meter in lines of poems.
- I heard the reason for the shape it too - conversationally heard/rea-/shape/took but in meter the for might be highlighted.
The quantitative pattern of Sappho. In the early classical tradition of Greek, with musical reinforcement.
Oooom pa 0000m pa 0o00m pa pa COOOM pa COOM pa.
Teutonic languages with strong stress differentials developed metrical systems based on the aspects of stress apart of syllable length, which is not quantified in them.
Shakespeare - Sonnet 83 (five strong stresses, and five weaker)
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes Than both your poets can praise devise.
Teutonic System - each line cut in two by caesura rel:Echo Poem
Walking west I longed for a wellspring. As high as the hawk flies the heavens were hazy. In that wild kingdom nowhere was comfort Yet all the apples I ate were awesome.
In the early medieval period, only a few people could read at all, let alone puzzle out a meter.
Accented-Syllabic Verse
Thought
In thinking of this, I keep in mind Flamenco Thoughts Scattered with the different compas rhythms and the beat structures with stressed beats.
The most common foot in English is the iamb which comes from the Greek iambos meaning “to assail.” The iambic foot is two syllables in sequence, the second receiving more stress than the first.
The stresses in the word indebt (weak to strong) correspond to those in iambic foot. The stresses debt free also constitute an iambic foot.
Why?
In the phrase “debt free,” both syllables have roughly the same duration or length, but “free” is spoken slightly louder and at a slightly higher pitch; this vocal differential is enough to be perceived as a stronger stress, one adequate for the formation of an iambic foot.
/ for strong stress,
\ for intermediate stress
U for weaker stresses
Intermediate stress is one of the markers of the relationship between conscious art and pure spontaneity.
Anapestic meter 
Dactylic meter - triple meter (meaning finger, because fingers have three joints) – corresponding with ¾ waltz meter.
Pyrrhic meter - duple meter, from Greek word of war dance.
Meter is a guide, not a straitjacket.
Metrical Variation
Why have poets allowed for and even sought out variations in their meters? Partly to avoid the kind of boredom that inevitably arises when a stimulus is repeated over and over again.
Dactylic substitution occurs often enough in trochaic lines since it only adds one weak syllable to the prevailing trochaic duples, but it is rare in iambic. Why? A simple reason: a dactyl coming before an iamb produces a run of three consecutive weak stresses, a linguistic incident that accentual habits in English shy away from.
Sequence of three weak stresses:
A weaker ending syllable is called a feminine ending or final hypercatalexis. A falling rhythm or dying fall.
Anacrusis or initial hypercatalexis where one or more unstressed syllables are added to the beginning of the line.
Phonic Echo
rel: Echo Poem
If a few vowels and consonants reoccur with more than average frequency, we become more conscious of them as an auditory experience.
Alliteration in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The fair brew flew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free.
Normative rhymes are based on sound, not spelling – it is a duplication, and the ends of two or more lines of a given poem, of some of the sounds in the last strongly stressed syllable of that line, plus the duplication of all weakly stressed syllables that might follow the strongly stressed one.
abound and round = normative. relate and late = not normative. lotion and motion are normative.
Shakespeare rhymed love with prove. When he wrote they were pronounced alike but now writers, perhaps influenced by Shakespeare continue to rhyme them. This is historical rhyme.
Assonance is rhyming with vowels alone.
Those-dying then, Knew where they went – They went to God’s Right Hand – That Hand is amputated now And God cannot be found –
Stanza
Blocking of poems akin to paragraphs. Stanzaic divisions normally contain the same number of lines.
Strophe is nonuniform division.
Isometric stanza means all lines have the same number of metrical feet, in contrast to heterometric.
The ballad is heterometric with a rhyme scheme abcb. The spenserian stanza is a nine line stanza with the form ababbcbcc. Nonce forms, are nonstandard forms invented by the poet for one poem only.
Refrain
Poetry exhibits patterning to a much higher degree than prose.
Words, lines or stanzas repeated verbatim at regular intervals are called refrains, Latin from refractus or “a thing broken again” (i.e. a returning fragment.) Refrains in folk songs, are the chorus.
Refrains will often repeat (incantation, or loss of consciousness) till some kind of resolution is met.
Thomas Wyatt - “Forget Not Yet”
Forget not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant; My great travail so gladly spent Forget not yet.
Forget not yet when first began The weary life yet know, since when The suit, the service none can tell; Forget not yet.
Forget not yet the great assays, The cruel wrong, the scornful ways, The painful patience in denays, Forget not yet.
Forget not yet, forget not this, How long ago hath been and is, The mind that never meant amiss; Forget not yet.
Forget not then thine own approved, That which so long hath thee so loved, Whose steadfast faith yet never moved; Forget not this.
Thought
Oulipo similaries with the strict form with some of these stanzas. Some sense that Oulipo can be poetry form and play applied to prose.
Unmetered Poetry
Poetry without a regularly recurring numerical principle in its rhythmic construction is usually called free verse, a translation of the French phrase vers libre, though a more exact translation would be free line.
Early French Free Verse on why?:
Kahn asserted that vers libre allowed for a closer fit between consciousness and expression; dispensing with traditional restraints allowed poets to find a more flexible verbal counterpart for elusive feelings—and to discover subtle rhythms that standard metrical practice would rule out.
Even with metered poetry we cannot always know where stresses fall. The language of poetry conforms to English as it is actually spoken.
Some value meter as a framing device, setting poetry apart from everyday speech.