just recently started to experiment with more metered poetry, following your advice to try imitation as a writing exercise. I've taken to, what I call, "re-skinning'" poems -- imitating the formal structure but writing about something else. And, golly, the difference it made!!! I just now understand what you said in one of your previous videos -- poetry truly is an extremely efficient way of communicating! By re-skinning some of my favorite poems, I almost see the brushstrokes the original artist made. For example, a famous poem is Serbian (my native language) is just a simple description of a tall tree, but the poem leaves you with a deep sense of fear, as if the tree represents something big which is angry with you. When I re-skinned the poem I found what it was -- the poem has a regular rhythm of stressed OO and OH sounds, which are the deepest vowels, so the sensory effect is as if war drums are drumming along to this description of a tall tree. Holy moly! You should've seen my face when I was reading it! 100% attributing my better understanding of poetry to you! Thanks teach! 😊
Whoa, that's awesome! I also really like the idea of "re-skinning." I teach a similar process in some of my classes, and that metaphor is an intuitive one (I may just borrow it and pretend I invented it 😉)
@@WritingwithAndrew Nice! Please be mindful that you'll owe at least partial thanks to the video gaming community -- in video games, skin is a graphical representation for the formal structure that is the playable character. You can reskin a chacter (say, give them a nice feather boa!) and the "feel" of playing the game will only slightly change, since it's the same computer code 😊 Re-skinning is from that context, your students might pick up on that
This video is so great that it compelled me to leave TWO comments! Super interesting learning about English accentual alliterative verse. It's such a concise way of expressing culture and make whatever is being said in the poem feel authentically English! Also, transliterating this deeply English verse to my language (again, Serbian), could communicate something super specific. As a recovering writer of self-indulgent free verse, I am glad to say: I'm smitten by meter!
I'm so excited that you're doing a poetry series! This video reminds me of some of the lessons in Robert Pinskey's "Sounds of Poetry," which I've been reading and enjoying, but it's a little dry and dense. I really like your simple approach to breaking down and explaining these concepts. I've been experimenting with writing in iambs, but it's pretty difficult to write a line with 5 iambs that actually sounds good. I can write a satisfactory line with 3 or 4 but each time you try to add on another it seems to become harder and harder to find the right words that fit both the sounds and the meaning you're going for. So I'm excited to try accental verse and it seems like it might be a better starting point for developing an ear and playing with sound than some of the stricter meter forms. As always, thank you for sharing and simplifying all this for us. We really appreciate your lessons!
Thanks--and you're welcome! I enjoyed Pinskey's book when I read it...also not sure I retained much of it 🤷 We'll get to iambs soon, but, as a little preview: I like tetrameter much more than pentameter for what it's worth, so no shame in stopping after 4 iambs 😁
@@WritingwithAndrew I'm really looking forward to it! I forgot to mention that I also really appreciate the sprinkles of humor in your videos. It can be really refreshing as there are many people in the world of literature and writing that might take things a little too seriously sometimes.
I had a British Literature class in high school that my private school taught so I got to read Beowulf and a lot of Shakespearean plays and iambic pentameter, and I knew how important syllable count was in poetry, but I never once considered accented syllabels at all. This opened up more ideas for me for future poems I write.
Thank you so much for this poetry series idea. "Linguistic features that make English unique" is one of the aspects that make English so fabulous. Working on accentual verses will be a fun challenge.
I love brother what can I say. Your students in real life are so lucky to have a teacher as charismatic and intelligent as you are articulate and inspirational. My God, my God my English classes were never like this...I hope you go on to teach us Shakespeare....
Dear Mr. Andrew thank you for making these videos! You are a genius in disguise, and a lot of fun, thank you for your great work and sense of humor. Please keep it up!!!
Sometimes I can get "poetic dyslexia" (my phony coinage) which can cause a loss of the intended rhythm by a writer. Some people may read and say "DA-dom" in stressing syllables, but I may read and say it DOM-da. For example, "The cement block fell off the boat into the Caribbean Sea," might be read as the "CEment...into the CAR-ib-be-an," or it could be read as "ceMENT...into the car-IB-be-an." Perhaps it is a section of the country thing in the US, but it seems someone's iambic pentameter could be someone else's trochaic meter. I JUST LOOKED UP that last term (trochaic) meter a minute ago, I never heard of it before then so I'm not pretending to nothing anything about poetry and its construction. I do remember my English teacher talking on iambic pentameter many, many years ago only because she said it would be on the test, so I do remember vaguely a little about it. I wish I had paid more attention to these things way back in the day, but I didn't. However, I still enjoy watching these videos even at this late hour. I don't think I could read anyone's poetry before a group for fear of screwing up the whole "which syllable should be stressed" thing! Ha, ha! I'm not sure William Faulkner (a Southerner) could read out a Robert Frost (a Northerner) poem without some harm! Again, enjoy your videos-keep em coming.
There are some words with variable stress, but most are pretty stable (in those confusing cases, a dictionary is the place to go). And regional variations are always a possibility (it can actually be fascinating to notice where in time or space a poet is from based on how they work with sound). Either way, I'm glad you're enjoying them--I surely will keep them coming!
My goodness, this explanation about rhythmic tension added an enormous level of clarity to something that mystified me for my entire life. I always had a strong preference for reading certain types of longer sentences and certain types of longer words. Yet I couldn't distinguish precisely what separated the types I found easier to read. I wanted to crudely and instinctively describe it in terms of "smoothness" and "harmony" along with "legato notes" vs. "staccato notes" in music. Revisiting some of my favorite prose that I found so easy to read (a lot of Nicholson Baker's writing, e.g.), the insertion of unstressed syllables between stressed syllables explains so much! There's such a harshness to jamming many stressed syllables right next to each other which I find creating a dissonant effect (useful to slow me down and draw attention, but more difficult for me to read). This is one of my favorite passages (and one which I found curiously so easy to read despite being somewhat ornate and having monstrously long sentences) from Baker's Room Temperature: >> But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings - for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family - the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had - as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma. And such hybrids - of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too - might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms - and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence. Meanwhile, when I contrast that to lines like this from The Fifth Season: "It’s safe to love you. You won’t fail me. You won’t die. And I know the price up front,” I find that so difficult to read! I often had to backtrack reading the book and deliberately slow myself down and re-read what I just read. It's very dramatic but also so tense. I couldn't explain why I found the book so difficult to read since the sentences are absurdly simple in comparison to Baker's writing. Rhythmic tension seems to be a big factor.
@@WritingwithAndrew Something I'm confused about now -- as a speed reader who learned how to read English in silence (long before I learned how to speak English or even pronounce the words I read) -- is whether speed reading alters the flow and the type of prose that's easiest to comprehend. I've been trying to read out loud more ever since I discovered your channel. When I do that, I suddenly find reading Baker's writing not only considerably more difficult, but the rhythm now seems so different and substantially less smooth and I'm also losing sight of comprehending what I just read with his monstrously long sentences.. It's like listening to a song at a quarter of its tempo; it changes the characteristic of the song dramatically and makes it more difficult to parse its intended emotional effect.
Speed reading is different kind of reading. A scholar I like said that the best way to read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson is out loud and slowly--I think it applies to more than Emerson. Speed reading will get you the information, but it seems, in many ways, to be designed to avoid the experience of the language itself. But, like speed reading, slow reading is a skill that you can improve with practice
@@WritingwithAndrewI will have to practice more. Thanks very much! Something I'm perplexed about is the intended rhythm and relative stress of monosyllabic words. They seem rather ambiguous to me. For example, I saw a video where a line like, "The dog ran over the log," was considered to be obviously iambic. That is mostly how I would be naturally-inclined to read it: "The DOG ran Over the LOG," yet it doesn't seem entirely incorrect to me to read it in other ways unless I'm missing something. Are words like "the" generally considered to lack stress? I see it defined lacking an accented syllable, but I sometimes see people place rhythmic emphasis on it, drawing it out and amplifying it, and I'm confused why the second "the" lacks emphasis if the sentence is strictly iambic. I also don't understand why "ran" isn't stressed if we read the above as iambic, given how the CMU pronouncing dictionary at least defines it as having the stressed vowel.
Yeah, this is where we get into the art (rather than science) of poetry. It's usually safe to assume little grammatical words are unstressed, but it ends up being more about relative levels of stress and patterns across lines. Dog and over have relatively more stress than ran--and the pattern of the line helps to reinforce it. In another context, ran could be the stressed syllable in a line: it's a balance between the "dictionary stress" and the "contextual stress" (if I can call them that)
I hope you know what a great teacher you are because you are the greatest writing teacher for-ever...OK on to Stockholm and the Noble for you and the nucleus of vowels...man...does learning get better and the double call out TO USE A GOOD DICTIONARY....JAW DROPPINGLY BRILLIANCE. .
Great video! Identifying stress correctly is a common challenge for my songwriting students and I've struggled to explain/demonstrate how to find it-going to try the 'calling across the street' exercise next time it comes up!
As a phonetician, thanks for the excellent discussion on syllables and airflow. BTW, I got my MA in linguistics at BYU; I wonder if we would have crossed paths back then.
Hey, thanks! Maybe we did--I did study linguistics there (three cheers for phonetics!), but only as an undergrad. At the very least, we must know a lot of the same faculty
@@WritingwithAndrew I earned my MA at BYU in December of 2007, and I worked for the department as a sessional instructor until July 2008. I then started my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Calgary in the fall of that same year. While at BYU, I worked with Deryle Lonsdale, Dirk Elzinga and Royal Skousen, so if you were there around that time and in these professors' orbits we may have bumped into each other. Anyway, I really enjoy your content.
Great! With my spicy brain and its love of rhythm, i always felt [English language] haiku to be somewhat artless. Now i understand that you can be merely syllabic and not accentual, I'm able to travel to a land where accents are not important, and to enjoy syllabic meter.
This is pretty cool to learn about. I've been writing poetry with a little technique and I'm not going to stop but i also think it'd be cool to learn about other different techniques and creative formulas within the medium. A strange part of me is weirdly apprehensive about learning technical theory because I guess I have the fear it'll stop me from being creative or writing the way I do now but I know that's not true and that learning technique will just help me to articulate new things about the language of writing and to describe things I already do in my poetry. :) kinda wrote that last part for myself but I appreciate the work you're doing alot. Thank you!
Thanks a lot! Even if you don't end up writing a lot of metrical poetry, practicing it can help train your ear to rhythms and patterns of language, and that can pay off in whatever you're writing
I'm studying English Language and Literature, i was struggling with poetic rhythm/meter currently especially stressed syllables(how to identfy em). Also the fact that i have a test coming up in about a week, i was literally desperate/stressing about it UNTILLLL i found this video. Now i can just call words for dinner and find the stressed syllables (maybe cross my fingers too xD) Thank you for this lesson!
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm starting to think the relative/contextual stress of monosyllabic words is largely determined by the "phonetic complexity" of their syllable. What I'm calling "phonetic complexity" in this context is how many individual sounds the syllable decomposes into if we break it down. Examples and their associated "phonetic complexity" as I'm evaluating them: 1 "the": "da" 2 "an": "aa-nn" 2 "man": "ma-nn" 2 "go: "go-uu" 3 "ant": "aa-nn-tt" 3 "gong": "go-nn-gg" 3 "wand": "wa-nn-dd" 4 "wild": "wa-ii-ll-dd" More "complex-sounding" syllables require more time and physical effort to enunciate. For example, "go" requires more time to pronounce than "the" [*], because if we shorten the sound of "go" too much, it begins to sound like "ɡɔ" (as in "gong") and not "ɡoʊ" (as in "going"). [*] This is assuming "the" is pronounced as "da". If it's pronounced as "di-ii", that requires more complexity/time for the prolonged "ee" sound and so this alternative pronunciation has more relative stress than "da". Yet "wild" has an extremely complex syllable cramming 4 sounds into one syllable. So "go wild" is always naturally iambic ("go-uu WA-II-LL-DD"), because "wild" has twice the sound complexity of "go". The only way to pronounce "go wild" as a spondee (or a trochee) is to unnaturally prolong the "go": "GO-UU-UU-UU WA-II-LL-DD," or to insert a very unnatural pause after "go" to forcefully match the sound complexity/time of the two words. I've heard it said that the function of a word factors into contextual stress (ex: that a determiner has less stress than a noun), but that doesn't seem so much the case to me. For example, "these fish" seems to lend itself strongly to a trochee: "THESE fish" ["DI-II-ZZ fi-sh"]. Of course, "the fish" lends itself to an iamb: "da FI-SH", and "that fish" ["da-tt fi-sh"] seems rhythmically ambiguous and might require a larger context to resolve the ambiguity or otherwise be interpreted as a pyrrhus or spondee: "da-tt fi-sh SU-WI-MM-ZZ in da-tt PO-NN-DD": this seems to pull anapestic as "swims" and "pond" have the most complex syllables. "da-tt FI-SH wa-zz WA-II-LL-DD": this seems to pull iambic because of the complexity of "wild". "DA-TT fi-sh SU-WA-MM in FI-LL-TH": this seems to pull trochaic because of the complexity of "swam" and "filth". "DI-II-ZZ fi-sh AA-RR de-dd": this seems to pull trochaic because of the complexity of "these". If this is remotely correct, then decomposing words into syllables seems insufficient to analyze rhythm. It seems like we need to further decompose the resulting syllables themselves into their phonetic complexity to understand their relative stress.
I think there's something to it, but I'd suspect the approach is simpler in practice (syllable structure tends not to be as significant in English as other languages--but it's not totally irrelevant either). Naturally, content words will attract more stress than grammatical words (e.g., "the fish" will almost always scan as iambic), but emphatic stress can change that (e.g., "that" as a determiner will often pick up stress in the sentence because it means to differentiate one fish from another--not this fish but *that* fish). So you're dealing with syllable stress but also sentence stress more than syllable structure when it comes to English metrics. So, for your examples, I'd probably scan them like this: 1. THAT fish SWIMS in THAT POND (depending on what comes after, "pond" could be unstressed, but it attracts emphasis in a line-final position) 2. THAT fish was WILD (contrast with the FISH was WILD, where "the" doesn't convey the emphasis that "that" may tend to) 3. THAT fish SWAM in FILTH (we agree, but for different reasons) 4. THESE fish are DEAD ("are" is just a little linking verb, so it would almost never be stressed here unless taking emphatic stress--those fish aren't dead, but these fish *are* dead) On "wild," it's a word that could scan as one or two syllables, so you'll see different writers handle it differently, just a fun aside
@@WritingwithAndrew Thank you very much! I might also be focusing too much on rhythm in a purely temporal way over other factors like pitch, and looking too much at the timing of enunciating syllables as a constant rather than a variable which varies contextually as well. There appears to be something of a naturally-allotted time for the enunciation of syllables in a similar way you highlighted for words to me, where "big", "bigger", and "biggest" want to each take roughly the same amount of time in the context of the sentence, evening out the time between many shorter words to pronounce with longer pauses between them (or extending their duration) -- as though the length and/or position of the sounds of words are being discretely quantized (as in the case of music quantization to keep notes timed to a beat) -- such seems the case as well with syllables to some extent. I'm not sure if that qualifies in terms of rhythm in its own right in the classical Greek style of feet and meters and I'm still having difficulty placing my finger on it, but often what I find most pleasant to read seems to have an elegant timing to it, flowing without the feeling to pause or extend the duration of words or syllables. For example, "go as wild as you like," seems to flow more smoothly than "go wild as you like", as though "go as wild" wants to be bundled into a time unit of the same allotted time as "go wild", and with a symmetrical "as you like" as a second temporal bundle. "Go wild" wants to stretch more unnaturally to me than "go as wild", so to speak, in ways I find slightly jarring to read. That time-related bundling factor seems to be what helps me find smoothly-flowing sentences and entire passages in my favorite prose, perhaps even more so than intonation. "He regretted the loss of his wife and [his] kids." That sentence flows so much more smoothly to me with the insertion of the additional "his": "he re-grett | ed the loss | of his wife | and his kids". Without the additional "his", my compulsion is to want to pause longer after the period to stretch out the timing of the final temporal bundle, and that pause tends to slow me down more than the extra word, like a car driver that has to hit the breaks and then accelerate again. In Japanese, we tend to have these types of timed bundles in our speech. "ko-re wa [ha] su-shi desu." "De-su" is two syllables technically but many Japanese pronounce it like "dess" as one syllable. So "ko-re wa" and "su-shi dess" break into evenly-timed trisyllabic bundles, and Japanese speakers trying to enunciate as clearly as possible will tend to turn it into an anapest: "ko-re WA, su-shi DESS".
@@WritingwithAndrewI think I want to distinguish a quality I'm tempted to describe as "temporal dissonance" over "rhythmic dissonance" as what's particularly jarring for me as a reader. "Rhythmic dissonance" as I'm calling it is like a snare drum which is hit at a regular pattern -- every second beat and fourth beat, e.g. -- only to suddenly change and hit on the first and third. It's jarring as with any disruption to a pattern, but it doesn't necessarily break the entire timing of the song. "Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York." "Temporal dissonance" to me is like altering tempo or even time signature mid-song. It's especially dissonant to the listener, and often requires a long pause in the song or a very smooth and gradual change to prepare them for it. That's usually what slows me down when I read prose more than anything, as though the speed of sentences, or parts of them, are wildly variable -- again making me feel like a driver that has to slam the brakes here and there and then accelerate again. "She stepped quietly under the cover of shadows. _It was dark._ Only the pale light of the moon illuminated the darkness. _So dark._ " So many of the most contemporary genre fiction books (even ones celebrated for their prose) that I've encountered contain too much "temporal dissonance" in their prose for my tastes, making me feel like I'm driving on a road with speed bumps everywhere.
Interesting--prose rhythm is a fairly under-studied thing, but it's also really interesting. You'll see it mentioned here and there, but, as you describe, it can have a significant effect on the reading experience
@@WritingwithAndrew Given the way I learned ESL, I think I subconsciously found patterns for the timing of words even if I didn't understand how to pronounce them, so timing seems to affect me more than usual. Although I frequently guessed the way words were pronounced incorrectly in ways I had to correct later, I could still venture the guess, and the guess often didn't vary much in timing (only stress). For example, I used to think for the longest time that "parameter" was pronounced like "pɛrəˈmidər" rather than "pəˈræmədər", yet the timing doesn't vary too much between those two. A general piece of advice I've encountered for prose rhythm that makes intuitive sense to me is that abrupt changes in sentence length tend to slow things down and draw a lot of attention (a powerful effect if used intentionally, jarring otherwise). So to smooth the transition, some authors will gradually wind down or dial up the sentence length, like 100-word sentence down to 80, then 60, then 40, then 20, then maybe a profound 5-word sentence at the end. That seems way smoother to me than going from 100 down to 5 in an instant. Although prose seems to focus on different rules and literary devices than poetry, I've found your channel among the most insightful in helping me figure out why I favor certain prose over others. I also find longer prose easier to understand in terms of relationships between clauses. For example: 1. "While Joe's luggage was heavy, he carried it with ease as he walked through the airport." [one longer sentence] 2. "Joe walked through the airport. His luggage was heavy, but he carried it with ease." [two shorter sentences] 3. "Joe walked through the airport. His luggage was heavy. He carried it with ease." [three very short sentences] I find #1 the easiest to read and comprehend. #2 and #3 require me to recall from the previous sentence that Joe is carrying the luggage while walking in the airport. #3 requires me to recall the previous sentence to realize that the baggage is "heavy" relative to narrator, but not to Joe because he carries it with ease and I now have to correct that assumption I made that the luggage felt heavy to Joe. So while shorter sentences are easier to read in isolation, I find them more difficult to comprehend in terms of how their ideas are connected to their surrounding sentences. The difference is very subtle but when entire novels are written predominantly in the shorter style, the differences begin to add up and I really start to notice how taxing they are for me to read. These days the shortest sentences seem popular and encouraged to such a degree, at least in genre fiction, to the point where I'm finding authors deliberately writing sentence fragments and comma splices left and right. Somehow online tools like Grammarly judge such writing as the easiest to read, while my favorite prose is always ranked as "extremely difficult" and college graduate level, yet I find the opposite of such scoring systems to be the case for me. The "extremely difficult" prose is the easiest for me to read, and the "extremely easy" prose is the most difficult.
Can you create a link to where we can see your recommended lists for books on composition or just general recommendations? I couldn't find one on your website. Maybe you are coming up with an idea for future? I look forward to
I tried it with the poets_island prompt "painting of despair." I don't think my result is good, but it's an interesting exercise. A window of a windmill. A kiss to her twin. Memories weeping like a tremulous melody. Happy days, lost replays in a maze. Before the wind of rage changed the page. Before the wind of rage whipped the window And drew, with gloomy blue glue, On its pane, the painting of despair and pain.
This was the fox series I started watching your channel for. I wanted to better understand poetic meter. On the matter of Accentual verse, when dealing with a long multisyllabic word, how much attention should e pay to the lesser stresses? Like in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, would 'antidisestablishmentarianism' take up two counts or three? And how do we figure it out?
It's tough to find examples of pieces that have words with secondary stresses, but the few I've seen seem to recognize primary stresses only. (Of course, a lot of our multisyllabic, multi-stress words come to us courtesy of Latin, so that adds a wrinkle 😉)
Is part of what makes stressed words so hard the regional dialects and accents ? Honestly that concept is part of the reason I stopped poetry awhile back. Everyone seems to pronounce and emphasize different words and it made it difficult to have a more or less universal quality to the writing
Generally, regional variations don't affect word stress as much as other aspects of language. Shakespeare's iambic pentameter still reads as iambic pentameter in my 21st-century American English. Not all of his rhymes still sound like rhymes, though
@@WritingwithAndrewthat’s oddly comforting actually! I suppose Shakespeare has been pretty well understood despite time wildly falling forward! I’ve been watching a lot of your videos and I am beginning to deeply miss poetry.
Actually Japanese Haiku is based on morae, not on syllables, but we do not much care about that since we have no morae in our languages. All that is fine, but alas, the French don't understand anything about stressed syllables, and it's even fashionable to stress normally unstressed syllables (the rap is mainly guilty, but not only it, just listen to a song of Francis Cabrel for instance). They are just unable to understand what the stress means, and just chuckle when they hear somebody trying to prounounce correctly a foreign stressed language, like English, German or Russian. So what could they possibly understand in such poems as "The Raven", from Edgar Poe ? They just focus on the meaning and discard the rest. True, French poetry is syllabic, but even this is not understood any more, especially concerning the "e muets" (mute e's) - and the caesura. Today, out of 100 so-called 'poets', at least 90 would be unable to write a correct 'alexandrin'. I guess I'm too old for that world, and anyway this is the end of Western civilization...
@@6515cg Oh no alas, it's much more complicated. For ex Tôkyô counts for 2 syllables (among us), but the Japanese say that both ô are long, thus To-o-kyo-o, 4 morae if I'm not mistaken. And even worse, "Nihon" (2 syllables = "Japan") is sometimes spelled like 'Ni-ho-n" (3 morae), and sometimes like "Ni-p-po-n" (4 morae). Any normal citizen would get mad of it after only a few minutes. I'm so happy we don't use morae, but you can look at the article "Mora" on Wikipedia if you need further explanations...
Yeah, this is the interesting world of poetry in different languages--and why I hasten to say the version of the haiku that we imported into English (since morae don't mean much in that context). Thanks for the extra context
Well as a Translator of K'iche Maya I must say this juxtaposition is just what I need to bring forth the alliteration Maya are so fond and the pun that the exceed at in descent ways...
Interesting is, how much does the English metric notation can be applied to other languages (Latin languages for instance)? Any information about this possible adaptability?
Most of our language and notation for meter is imported from Greek and through Latin languages. In Greek, meter was tied to syllable length rather than stress, but you'll see this kind of things in other languages too (I used this notation in a Portuguese literature class in college, for example)
@@WritingwithAndrew ohhh that is great! I van speak Portuguese! And I have been reading and trying to understand until what extent meter in english language can be applied to Portuguese too... I have never seen metric being worked out in Portuguese based on stresses per "foot", but it seems to me that its possible to apply the same principle efficiently
@@WritingwithAndrew what modern / contemporary poets would you suggest? I have been reading a few authors lately that o greatly enjoy (mostly free verse)
5 6 7 8 a night so dismal my heart beats as if scared it's the season right? I leave the realm of safe and sane prose destined as a beatnik, searching, adding tempo to words seems absurd yet the nerd within begins...1 2 3 4
Pretty much. However, in a line of poetry, some single-syllable words are more likely to be read as stressed (like verbs and nouns) while others are more likely to be read as unstressed (like prepositions and articles). Stress doesn't mean much for a syllable all by itself, so how it compares to other syllables around it is what really matters.
You don't know what stress is. You and seemingly everyone who parrots this already suspect theory of what's happening with English poetry. In your example 'encyclopedia' you use qualitatively different vowels in two syllables which is actually what is distinguishing it. Record and record are not examples of stress distinction either although the stress is arguably different, so are the vowels, which everyone can already distinguish without being taught anything, unlike ill-defined 'stress' evidently. Stress is not a difference in vowel phoneme nor is it a centralised, reduced vowel. Though that can occur in unstressed syllables, it's not the same thing and not necessary (or possible in some cases as it will make basic words ambiguous).
Saying that the verb /rɪˈkɔrd/ and the noun /ˈrɛk ərd/ aren't examples of different stress placements is something you'll have to take up with the dictionaries. Stress placement is a straightforward linguistic phenomenon and not a weird literary theory. Multiple things can happen at the same time, and it wouldn't be surprising to see vowel reduction in unstressed syllables in English.
just recently started to experiment with more metered poetry, following your advice to try imitation as a writing exercise.
I've taken to, what I call, "re-skinning'" poems -- imitating the formal structure but writing about something else. And, golly, the difference it made!!! I just now understand what you said in one of your previous videos -- poetry truly is an extremely efficient way of communicating!
By re-skinning some of my favorite poems, I almost see the brushstrokes the original artist made. For example, a famous poem is Serbian (my native language) is just a simple description of a tall tree, but the poem leaves you with a deep sense of fear, as if the tree represents something big which is angry with you. When I re-skinned the poem I found what it was -- the poem has a regular rhythm of stressed OO and OH sounds, which are the deepest vowels, so the sensory effect is as if war drums are drumming along to this description of a tall tree. Holy moly! You should've seen my face when I was reading it!
100% attributing my better understanding of poetry to you! Thanks teach! 😊
Whoa, that's awesome! I also really like the idea of "re-skinning." I teach a similar process in some of my classes, and that metaphor is an intuitive one (I may just borrow it and pretend I invented it 😉)
@@WritingwithAndrew Nice! Please be mindful that you'll owe at least partial thanks to the video gaming community -- in video games, skin is a graphical representation for the formal structure that is the playable character. You can reskin a chacter (say, give them a nice feather boa!) and the "feel" of playing the game will only slightly change, since it's the same computer code 😊
Re-skinning is from that context, your students might pick up on that
This video is so great that it compelled me to leave TWO comments!
Super interesting learning about English accentual alliterative verse. It's such a concise way of expressing culture and make whatever is being said in the poem feel authentically English! Also, transliterating this deeply English verse to my language (again, Serbian), could communicate something super specific. As a recovering writer of self-indulgent free verse, I am glad to say: I'm smitten by meter!
That's great to hear! Meter is a lot of fun (and sorely underrated in many contemporary circles)--glad you're enjoying it!
I like how this guy has an occult familiar just teaching normal stuff
I'm so excited that you're doing a poetry series!
This video reminds me of some of the lessons in Robert Pinskey's "Sounds of Poetry," which I've been reading and enjoying, but it's a little dry and dense. I really like your simple approach to breaking down and explaining these concepts.
I've been experimenting with writing in iambs, but it's pretty difficult to write a line with 5 iambs that actually sounds good. I can write a satisfactory line with 3 or 4 but each time you try to add on another it seems to become harder and harder to find the right words that fit both the sounds and the meaning you're going for.
So I'm excited to try accental verse and it seems like it might be a better starting point for developing an ear and playing with sound than some of the stricter meter forms.
As always, thank you for sharing and simplifying all this for us. We really appreciate your lessons!
Thanks--and you're welcome! I enjoyed Pinskey's book when I read it...also not sure I retained much of it 🤷
We'll get to iambs soon, but, as a little preview: I like tetrameter much more than pentameter for what it's worth, so no shame in stopping after 4 iambs 😁
@@WritingwithAndrew I'm really looking forward to it!
I forgot to mention that I also really appreciate the sprinkles of humor in your videos. It can be really refreshing as there are many people in the world of literature and writing that might take things a little too seriously sometimes.
Hey, thanks! I feel the same way--why not have some fun with it 😉
I had a British Literature class in high school that my private school taught so I got to read Beowulf and a lot of Shakespearean plays and iambic pentameter, and I knew how important syllable count was in poetry, but I never once considered accented syllabels at all. This opened up more ideas for me for future poems I write.
How could they teach about iambic pentameter without discussing the stress pattern (in English) of the iamb?
"The Enormous Cerulean Chickadee" is art. 10/10
I personally was a big fan of Kaput's poem. Pretty revolutionary!
Edit: Sorry, Kaput. I mis-typed your name. Fixed now.
@@AsuraSantosha Truly excellent taste--that is the correct assessment...
Thank you so much for this poetry series idea. "Linguistic features that make English unique" is one of the aspects that make English so fabulous. Working on accentual verses will be a fun challenge.
Definitely!
I love brother what can I say. Your students in real life are so lucky to have a teacher as charismatic and intelligent as you are articulate and inspirational. My God, my God my English classes were never like this...I hope you go on to teach us Shakespeare....
You're too kind--thank you!
Dear Mr. Andrew thank you for making these videos! You are a genius in disguise, and a lot of fun, thank you for your great work and sense of humor. Please keep it up!!!
Thanks for the kind words--I appreciate it!
Sometimes I can get "poetic dyslexia" (my phony coinage) which can cause a loss of the intended rhythm by a writer. Some people may read and say "DA-dom" in stressing syllables, but I may read and say it DOM-da. For example, "The cement block fell off the boat into the Caribbean Sea," might be read as the "CEment...into the CAR-ib-be-an," or it could be read as "ceMENT...into the car-IB-be-an." Perhaps it is a section of the country thing in the US, but it seems someone's iambic pentameter could be someone else's trochaic meter. I JUST LOOKED UP that last term (trochaic) meter a minute ago, I never heard of it before then so I'm not pretending to nothing anything about poetry and its construction. I do remember my English teacher talking on iambic pentameter many, many years ago only because she said it would be on the test, so I do remember vaguely a little about it.
I wish I had paid more attention to these things way back in the day, but I didn't. However, I still enjoy watching these videos even at this late hour. I don't think I could read anyone's poetry before a group for fear of screwing up the whole "which syllable should be stressed" thing! Ha, ha! I'm not sure William Faulkner (a Southerner) could read out a Robert Frost (a Northerner) poem without some harm!
Again, enjoy your videos-keep em coming.
There are some words with variable stress, but most are pretty stable (in those confusing cases, a dictionary is the place to go). And regional variations are always a possibility (it can actually be fascinating to notice where in time or space a poet is from based on how they work with sound).
Either way, I'm glad you're enjoying them--I surely will keep them coming!
My goodness, this explanation about rhythmic tension added an enormous level of clarity to something that mystified me for my entire life.
I always had a strong preference for reading certain types of longer sentences and certain types of longer words. Yet I couldn't distinguish precisely what separated the types I found easier to read. I wanted to crudely and instinctively describe it in terms of "smoothness" and "harmony" along with "legato notes" vs. "staccato notes" in music.
Revisiting some of my favorite prose that I found so easy to read (a lot of Nicholson Baker's writing, e.g.), the insertion of unstressed syllables between stressed syllables explains so much! There's such a harshness to jamming many stressed syllables right next to each other which I find creating a dissonant effect (useful to slow me down and draw attention, but more difficult for me to read).
This is one of my favorite passages (and one which I found curiously so easy to read despite being somewhat ornate and having monstrously long sentences) from Baker's Room Temperature:
>> But my mother’s informal punctuation in the op-ed letter came as a complete surprise; and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept (the only time, as far as I remember, that I ever hurt her feelings - for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together, she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me, so that people wouldn’t know we were related; and she even played along in her compliance, whistling, walking with a theatrical solitariness, checking her pocketbook, pausing abruptly to glance at a window display), as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family - the fact that I had been instinctively so cruel, made me double up with misery when, after I was married, I came across some sentences in Boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been. Boswell (and De Quincey, Edward Young, and others) had treated the sunken garden of a parenthetical phrase just as my mother had - as something to be prepared for and followed by the transitional rounding and softening of a comma. And such hybrids - of comma and parenthesis, or of semicolon and parenthesis, too - might at least in some cases allow for finer calibrations between phrases, subtler subordinations, irregular varieties of exuberance and magisteriality and fragile conjunction. In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms - and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighting was the principal reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.
Meanwhile, when I contrast that to lines like this from The Fifth Season: "It’s safe to love you. You won’t fail me. You won’t die. And I know the price up front,” I find that so difficult to read! I often had to backtrack reading the book and deliberately slow myself down and re-read what I just read. It's very dramatic but also so tense. I couldn't explain why I found the book so difficult to read since the sentences are absurdly simple in comparison to Baker's writing. Rhythmic tension seems to be a big factor.
Very cool--glad it helped!
@@WritingwithAndrew Something I'm confused about now -- as a speed reader who learned how to read English in silence (long before I learned how to speak English or even pronounce the words I read) -- is whether speed reading alters the flow and the type of prose that's easiest to comprehend.
I've been trying to read out loud more ever since I discovered your channel. When I do that, I suddenly find reading Baker's writing not only considerably more difficult, but the rhythm now seems so different and substantially less smooth and I'm also losing sight of comprehending what I just read with his monstrously long sentences.. It's like listening to a song at a quarter of its tempo; it changes the characteristic of the song dramatically and makes it more difficult to parse its intended emotional effect.
Speed reading is different kind of reading. A scholar I like said that the best way to read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson is out loud and slowly--I think it applies to more than Emerson. Speed reading will get you the information, but it seems, in many ways, to be designed to avoid the experience of the language itself. But, like speed reading, slow reading is a skill that you can improve with practice
@@WritingwithAndrewI will have to practice more. Thanks very much!
Something I'm perplexed about is the intended rhythm and relative stress of monosyllabic words. They seem rather ambiguous to me.
For example, I saw a video where a line like, "The dog ran over the log," was considered to be obviously iambic. That is mostly how I would be naturally-inclined to read it: "The DOG ran Over the LOG," yet it doesn't seem entirely incorrect to me to read it in other ways unless I'm missing something.
Are words like "the" generally considered to lack stress? I see it defined lacking an accented syllable, but I sometimes see people place rhythmic emphasis on it, drawing it out and amplifying it, and I'm confused why the second "the" lacks emphasis if the sentence is strictly iambic. I also don't understand why "ran" isn't stressed if we read the above as iambic, given how the CMU pronouncing dictionary at least defines it as having the stressed vowel.
Yeah, this is where we get into the art (rather than science) of poetry. It's usually safe to assume little grammatical words are unstressed, but it ends up being more about relative levels of stress and patterns across lines. Dog and over have relatively more stress than ran--and the pattern of the line helps to reinforce it. In another context, ran could be the stressed syllable in a line: it's a balance between the "dictionary stress" and the "contextual stress" (if I can call them that)
I hope you know what a great teacher you are because you are the greatest writing teacher for-ever...OK on to Stockholm and the Noble for you and the nucleus of vowels...man...does learning get better and the double call out TO USE A GOOD DICTIONARY....JAW DROPPINGLY BRILLIANCE.
.
lol thanks!
Great video! Identifying stress correctly is a common challenge for my songwriting students and I've struggled to explain/demonstrate how to find it-going to try the 'calling across the street' exercise next time it comes up!
Thanks! It's a trick I picked up from a phonetician; it's a great way to make it a little more intuitive
The shout across the street tip is perfect
Thanks--it's a great little trick!
Fun, friendly, and so informative.
Thanks!
I can't like this video enough. No one has ever cracked stress for me before
Hooray! Glad to hear it!
This is great. I like writing poems
As a phonetician, thanks for the excellent discussion on syllables and airflow.
BTW, I got my MA in linguistics at BYU; I wonder if we would have crossed paths back then.
Hey, thanks! Maybe we did--I did study linguistics there (three cheers for phonetics!), but only as an undergrad. At the very least, we must know a lot of the same faculty
@@WritingwithAndrew I earned my MA at BYU in December of 2007, and I worked for the department as a sessional instructor until July 2008. I then started my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Calgary in the fall of that same year. While at BYU, I worked with Deryle Lonsdale, Dirk Elzinga and Royal Skousen, so if you were there around that time and in these professors' orbits we may have bumped into each other.
Anyway, I really enjoy your content.
Nice, I was there a little later--but I took classes from the latter two. Good times!
And thanks!
Great! With my spicy brain and its love of rhythm, i always felt [English language] haiku to be somewhat artless. Now i understand that you can be merely syllabic and not accentual, I'm able to travel to a land where accents are not important, and to enjoy syllabic meter.
Thank you. You are a wonderful teacher.
Thanks for the kind words!
This is pretty cool to learn about. I've been writing poetry with a little technique and I'm not going to stop but i also think it'd be cool to learn about other different techniques and creative formulas within the medium. A strange part of me is weirdly apprehensive about learning technical theory because I guess I have the fear it'll stop me from being creative or writing the way I do now but I know that's not true and that learning technique will just help me to articulate new things about the language of writing and to describe things I already do in my poetry. :) kinda wrote that last part for myself but I appreciate the work you're doing alot. Thank you!
Thanks a lot! Even if you don't end up writing a lot of metrical poetry, practicing it can help train your ear to rhythms and patterns of language, and that can pay off in whatever you're writing
I'm studying English Language and Literature, i was struggling with poetic rhythm/meter currently especially stressed syllables(how to identfy em). Also the fact that i have a test coming up in about a week, i was literally desperate/stressing about it UNTILLLL i found this video. Now i can just call words for dinner and find the stressed syllables (maybe cross my fingers too xD)
Thank you for this lesson!
You bet--good luck with the test!
@@WritingwithAndrew i passed the test 🥳 🥳 🥳
Calling words for dinner worked perfectly xd
-100% recommend
Thank you. I'm excited to train my ear.
You're welcome!
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm starting to think the relative/contextual stress of monosyllabic words is largely determined by the "phonetic complexity" of their syllable. What I'm calling "phonetic complexity" in this context is how many individual sounds the syllable decomposes into if we break it down. Examples and their associated "phonetic complexity" as I'm evaluating them:
1 "the": "da"
2 "an": "aa-nn"
2 "man": "ma-nn"
2 "go: "go-uu"
3 "ant": "aa-nn-tt"
3 "gong": "go-nn-gg"
3 "wand": "wa-nn-dd"
4 "wild": "wa-ii-ll-dd"
More "complex-sounding" syllables require more time and physical effort to enunciate. For example, "go" requires more time to pronounce than "the" [*], because if we shorten the sound of "go" too much, it begins to sound like "ɡɔ" (as in "gong") and not "ɡoʊ" (as in "going").
[*] This is assuming "the" is pronounced as "da". If it's pronounced as "di-ii", that requires more complexity/time for the prolonged "ee" sound and so this alternative pronunciation has more relative stress than "da".
Yet "wild" has an extremely complex syllable cramming 4 sounds into one syllable. So "go wild" is always naturally iambic ("go-uu WA-II-LL-DD"), because "wild" has twice the sound complexity of "go". The only way to pronounce "go wild" as a spondee (or a trochee) is to unnaturally prolong the "go": "GO-UU-UU-UU WA-II-LL-DD," or to insert a very unnatural pause after "go" to forcefully match the sound complexity/time of the two words.
I've heard it said that the function of a word factors into contextual stress (ex: that a determiner has less stress than a noun), but that doesn't seem so much the case to me. For example, "these fish" seems to lend itself strongly to a trochee: "THESE fish" ["DI-II-ZZ fi-sh"]. Of course, "the fish" lends itself to an iamb: "da FI-SH", and "that fish" ["da-tt fi-sh"] seems rhythmically ambiguous and might require a larger context to resolve the ambiguity or otherwise be interpreted as a pyrrhus or spondee:
"da-tt fi-sh SU-WI-MM-ZZ in da-tt PO-NN-DD": this seems to pull anapestic as "swims" and "pond" have the most complex syllables.
"da-tt FI-SH wa-zz WA-II-LL-DD": this seems to pull iambic because of the complexity of "wild".
"DA-TT fi-sh SU-WA-MM in FI-LL-TH": this seems to pull trochaic because of the complexity of "swam" and "filth".
"DI-II-ZZ fi-sh AA-RR de-dd": this seems to pull trochaic because of the complexity of "these".
If this is remotely correct, then decomposing words into syllables seems insufficient to analyze rhythm. It seems like we need to further decompose the resulting syllables themselves into their phonetic complexity to understand their relative stress.
I think there's something to it, but I'd suspect the approach is simpler in practice (syllable structure tends not to be as significant in English as other languages--but it's not totally irrelevant either). Naturally, content words will attract more stress than grammatical words (e.g., "the fish" will almost always scan as iambic), but emphatic stress can change that (e.g., "that" as a determiner will often pick up stress in the sentence because it means to differentiate one fish from another--not this fish but *that* fish). So you're dealing with syllable stress but also sentence stress more than syllable structure when it comes to English metrics.
So, for your examples, I'd probably scan them like this:
1. THAT fish SWIMS in THAT POND (depending on what comes after, "pond" could be unstressed, but it attracts emphasis in a line-final position)
2. THAT fish was WILD (contrast with the FISH was WILD, where "the" doesn't convey the emphasis that "that" may tend to)
3. THAT fish SWAM in FILTH (we agree, but for different reasons)
4. THESE fish are DEAD ("are" is just a little linking verb, so it would almost never be stressed here unless taking emphatic stress--those fish aren't dead, but these fish *are* dead)
On "wild," it's a word that could scan as one or two syllables, so you'll see different writers handle it differently, just a fun aside
@@WritingwithAndrew Thank you very much! I might also be focusing too much on rhythm in a purely temporal way over other factors like pitch, and looking too much at the timing of enunciating syllables as a constant rather than a variable which varies contextually as well.
There appears to be something of a naturally-allotted time for the enunciation of syllables in a similar way you highlighted for words to me, where "big", "bigger", and "biggest" want to each take roughly the same amount of time in the context of the sentence, evening out the time between many shorter words to pronounce with longer pauses between them (or extending their duration) -- as though the length and/or position of the sounds of words are being discretely quantized (as in the case of music quantization to keep notes timed to a beat) -- such seems the case as well with syllables to some extent.
I'm not sure if that qualifies in terms of rhythm in its own right in the classical Greek style of feet and meters and I'm still having difficulty placing my finger on it, but often what I find most pleasant to read seems to have an elegant timing to it, flowing without the feeling to pause or extend the duration of words or syllables.
For example, "go as wild as you like," seems to flow more smoothly than "go wild as you like", as though "go as wild" wants to be bundled into a time unit of the same allotted time as "go wild", and with a symmetrical "as you like" as a second temporal bundle. "Go wild" wants to stretch more unnaturally to me than "go as wild", so to speak, in ways I find slightly jarring to read. That time-related bundling factor seems to be what helps me find smoothly-flowing sentences and entire passages in my favorite prose, perhaps even more so than intonation.
"He regretted the loss of his wife and [his] kids." That sentence flows so much more smoothly to me with the insertion of the additional "his": "he re-grett | ed the loss | of his wife | and his kids". Without the additional "his", my compulsion is to want to pause longer after the period to stretch out the timing of the final temporal bundle, and that pause tends to slow me down more than the extra word, like a car driver that has to hit the breaks and then accelerate again.
In Japanese, we tend to have these types of timed bundles in our speech. "ko-re wa [ha] su-shi desu." "De-su" is two syllables technically but many Japanese pronounce it like "dess" as one syllable. So "ko-re wa" and "su-shi dess" break into evenly-timed trisyllabic bundles, and Japanese speakers trying to enunciate as clearly as possible will tend to turn it into an anapest: "ko-re WA, su-shi DESS".
@@WritingwithAndrewI think I want to distinguish a quality I'm tempted to describe as "temporal dissonance" over "rhythmic dissonance" as what's particularly jarring for me as a reader.
"Rhythmic dissonance" as I'm calling it is like a snare drum which is hit at a regular pattern -- every second beat and fourth beat, e.g. -- only to suddenly change and hit on the first and third. It's jarring as with any disruption to a pattern, but it doesn't necessarily break the entire timing of the song. "Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York."
"Temporal dissonance" to me is like altering tempo or even time signature mid-song. It's especially dissonant to the listener, and often requires a long pause in the song or a very smooth and gradual change to prepare them for it. That's usually what slows me down when I read prose more than anything, as though the speed of sentences, or parts of them, are wildly variable -- again making me feel like a driver that has to slam the brakes here and there and then accelerate again. "She stepped quietly under the cover of shadows. _It was dark._ Only the pale light of the moon illuminated the darkness. _So dark._ "
So many of the most contemporary genre fiction books (even ones celebrated for their prose) that I've encountered contain too much "temporal dissonance" in their prose for my tastes, making me feel like I'm driving on a road with speed bumps everywhere.
Interesting--prose rhythm is a fairly under-studied thing, but it's also really interesting. You'll see it mentioned here and there, but, as you describe, it can have a significant effect on the reading experience
@@WritingwithAndrew Given the way I learned ESL, I think I subconsciously found patterns for the timing of words even if I didn't understand how to pronounce them, so timing seems to affect me more than usual. Although I frequently guessed the way words were pronounced incorrectly in ways I had to correct later, I could still venture the guess, and the guess often didn't vary much in timing (only stress).
For example, I used to think for the longest time that "parameter" was pronounced like "pɛrəˈmidər" rather than "pəˈræmədər", yet the timing doesn't vary too much between those two.
A general piece of advice I've encountered for prose rhythm that makes intuitive sense to me is that abrupt changes in sentence length tend to slow things down and draw a lot of attention (a powerful effect if used intentionally, jarring otherwise). So to smooth the transition, some authors will gradually wind down or dial up the sentence length, like 100-word sentence down to 80, then 60, then 40, then 20, then maybe a profound 5-word sentence at the end. That seems way smoother to me than going from 100 down to 5 in an instant.
Although prose seems to focus on different rules and literary devices than poetry, I've found your channel among the most insightful in helping me figure out why I favor certain prose over others.
I also find longer prose easier to understand in terms of relationships between clauses. For example:
1. "While Joe's luggage was heavy, he carried it with ease as he walked through the airport." [one longer sentence]
2. "Joe walked through the airport. His luggage was heavy, but he carried it with ease." [two shorter sentences]
3. "Joe walked through the airport. His luggage was heavy. He carried it with ease." [three very short sentences]
I find #1 the easiest to read and comprehend. #2 and #3 require me to recall from the previous sentence that Joe is carrying the luggage while walking in the airport. #3 requires me to recall the previous sentence to realize that the baggage is "heavy" relative to narrator, but not to Joe because he carries it with ease and I now have to correct that assumption I made that the luggage felt heavy to Joe. So while shorter sentences are easier to read in isolation, I find them more difficult to comprehend in terms of how their ideas are connected to their surrounding sentences. The difference is very subtle but when entire novels are written predominantly in the shorter style, the differences begin to add up and I really start to notice how taxing they are for me to read.
These days the shortest sentences seem popular and encouraged to such a degree, at least in genre fiction, to the point where I'm finding authors deliberately writing sentence fragments and comma splices left and right. Somehow online tools like Grammarly judge such writing as the easiest to read, while my favorite prose is always ranked as "extremely difficult" and college graduate level, yet I find the opposite of such scoring systems to be the case for me. The "extremely difficult" prose is the easiest for me to read, and the "extremely easy" prose is the most difficult.
Thanks, Andrew! Great content. ❤
You bet--thanks!
Can you create a link to where we can see your recommended lists for books on composition or just general recommendations? I couldn't find one on your website. Maybe you are coming up with an idea for future? I look forward to
Not a bad idea--I'll put it on the list and see what I can pull together
Excellent
Thanks!
Love your videos...keep it up!!❤
Thanks, I will!
Thank you this video was very helpful for me
You bet!
Thank you; great information 😇
You bet!
Thank you 🙏
You're welcome!
Lovely video, I learned a lot, thank you! And also had some laughs haha
Hey, thanks--I appreciate that!
wheres part 2
I tried it with the poets_island prompt "painting of despair." I don't think my result is good, but it's an interesting exercise.
A window of a windmill. A kiss to her twin.
Memories weeping like a tremulous melody.
Happy days, lost replays in a maze.
Before the wind of rage changed the page.
Before the wind of rage whipped the window
And drew, with gloomy blue glue,
On its pane, the painting of despair and pain.
It's a lot of fun to read out loud--that counts for a lot!
@@WritingwithAndrew thank you.
This was the fox series I started watching your channel for. I wanted to better understand poetic meter.
On the matter of Accentual verse, when dealing with a long multisyllabic word, how much attention should e pay to the lesser stresses? Like in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, would 'antidisestablishmentarianism' take up two counts or three? And how do we figure it out?
It's tough to find examples of pieces that have words with secondary stresses, but the few I've seen seem to recognize primary stresses only. (Of course, a lot of our multisyllabic, multi-stress words come to us courtesy of Latin, so that adds a wrinkle 😉)
@@WritingwithAndrew fair enough
Is part of what makes stressed words so hard the regional dialects and accents ? Honestly that concept is part of the reason I stopped poetry awhile back. Everyone seems to pronounce and emphasize different words and it made it difficult to have a more or less universal quality to the writing
Generally, regional variations don't affect word stress as much as other aspects of language. Shakespeare's iambic pentameter still reads as iambic pentameter in my 21st-century American English. Not all of his rhymes still sound like rhymes, though
@@WritingwithAndrewthat’s oddly comforting actually! I suppose Shakespeare has been pretty well understood despite time wildly falling forward! I’ve been watching a lot of your videos and I am beginning to deeply miss poetry.
Thanks for the shout out
Actually Japanese Haiku is based on morae, not on syllables, but we do not much care about that since we have no morae in our languages. All that is fine, but alas, the French don't understand anything about stressed syllables, and it's even fashionable to stress normally unstressed syllables (the rap is mainly guilty, but not only it, just listen to a song of Francis Cabrel for instance). They are just unable to understand what the stress means, and just chuckle when they hear somebody trying to prounounce correctly a foreign stressed language, like English, German or Russian. So what could they possibly understand in such poems as "The Raven", from Edgar Poe ? They just focus on the meaning and discard the rest. True, French poetry is syllabic, but even this is not understood any more, especially concerning the "e muets" (mute e's) - and the caesura. Today, out of 100 so-called 'poets', at least 90 would be unable to write a correct 'alexandrin'. I guess I'm too old for that world, and anyway this is the end of Western civilization...
Isn’t the only difference between a mora and a syllable that the letter ん(n) is also counted?
@@6515cg Oh no alas, it's much more complicated. For ex Tôkyô counts for 2 syllables (among us), but the Japanese say that both ô are long, thus To-o-kyo-o, 4 morae if I'm not mistaken. And even worse, "Nihon" (2 syllables = "Japan") is sometimes spelled like 'Ni-ho-n" (3 morae), and sometimes like "Ni-p-po-n" (4 morae). Any normal citizen would get mad of it after only a few minutes. I'm so happy we don't use morae, but you can look at the article "Mora" on Wikipedia if you need further explanations...
Yeah, this is the interesting world of poetry in different languages--and why I hasten to say the version of the haiku that we imported into English (since morae don't mean much in that context). Thanks for the extra context
Well as a Translator of K'iche Maya I must say this juxtaposition is just what I need to bring forth the alliteration Maya are so fond and the pun that the exceed at in descent ways...
@@vincentstanzione8112 I guess that in a future life I will try writing haikus in K'iche Maya.
Interesting is, how much does the English metric notation can be applied to other languages (Latin languages for instance)? Any information about this possible adaptability?
Most of our language and notation for meter is imported from Greek and through Latin languages. In Greek, meter was tied to syllable length rather than stress, but you'll see this kind of things in other languages too (I used this notation in a Portuguese literature class in college, for example)
@@WritingwithAndrew ohhh that is great! I van speak Portuguese! And I have been reading and trying to understand until what extent meter in english language can be applied to Portuguese too... I have never seen metric being worked out in Portuguese based on stresses per "foot", but it seems to me that its possible to apply the same principle efficiently
Yep, it'll work! And, since it's all from Greek, most of the vocabulary is essentially the same
@@WritingwithAndrew your work on poetry here on youtube is great my friend 👍🌈
@@WritingwithAndrew what modern / contemporary poets would you suggest? I have been reading a few authors lately that o greatly enjoy (mostly free verse)
5 6 7 8 a night so dismal my heart beats as if scared it's the season right? I leave the realm of safe and sane prose destined as a beatnik, searching, adding tempo to words seems absurd yet the nerd within begins...1 2 3 4
Nice, I'm especially into "adding tempo to words seems absurd"
So i take it one syllable words cannot be stressed as its justbone syllable
Pretty much. However, in a line of poetry, some single-syllable words are more likely to be read as stressed (like verbs and nouns) while others are more likely to be read as unstressed (like prepositions and articles). Stress doesn't mean much for a syllable all by itself, so how it compares to other syllables around it is what really matters.
❤
Sounds like syllabic pitch would work well in learning new languages as well. At least Chinese anyway. 😁
Þa se ellengæst earfođlice þrage geþolode, amirite, bro?
Soþlice
@@WritingwithAndrew 😄
You don't know what stress is. You and seemingly everyone who parrots this already suspect theory of what's happening with English poetry. In your example 'encyclopedia' you use qualitatively different vowels in two syllables which is actually what is distinguishing it. Record and record are not examples of stress distinction either although the stress is arguably different, so are the vowels, which everyone can already distinguish without being taught anything, unlike ill-defined 'stress' evidently. Stress is not a difference in vowel phoneme nor is it a centralised, reduced vowel. Though that can occur in unstressed syllables, it's not the same thing and not necessary (or possible in some cases as it will make basic words ambiguous).
Saying that the verb /rɪˈkɔrd/ and the noun /ˈrɛk ərd/ aren't examples of different stress placements is something you'll have to take up with the dictionaries. Stress placement is a straightforward linguistic phenomenon and not a weird literary theory. Multiple things can happen at the same time, and it wouldn't be surprising to see vowel reduction in unstressed syllables in English.
Can we go back to the "pop" sound with Yorick's commentary? The satanic whispering is distracting.
Yes please
No - the pop sound drove me up the wall when I listened to these videos at night without the screen on.
thanks that video was helpful for my poetry class🙂
A truly contentious topic, it seems.
New word unlocked 5:20 enSoclopeDia