8.28.2007
The Magnetic Power of Prosody
[Posted 10:44 AM by Jennifer Oh]
Our own David Yezzi, Executive Editor of The New Criterion, will be leading a class “On Prosody” this fall at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. According to their online catalog, the study of prosody involves “explor[ing] the ways traditional meters and verse techniques may be used to make music in poetry.” One will read poems, both classical and contemporary, with the aim of absorbing rhyme schemes and rhythms, the structures of blank verse, sonnets, ballads, and more. It is an essential seminar for future bards and appreciators of poetry alike. First Session: Tue, Oct 9, 2007, 6:30pm-9:00pm.
Those of you who are partial to free verse and turn up their noses at purveyors of form, take note: Timothy Steele from Poets.org warns that if everyone wrote free verse, then “free verse itself will wither and die. Free verse can be truly free only if it has something to be free from.” He goes on to write:
“If we poets can recover an appreciation of prosody, we may recover as well the sense that rhythm and meter are not necessarily opposed, but can be complementary partners in the poetic enterprise. We may discover that meter, far from restricting us, can encourage us to examine ideas and images, and ways of expressing them, from different angles and perspectives, and can thus help us explore our subjects more deeply or fully than we otherwise could. We may find, too, that meter can at times valuably caution us, in the manner of a resistantly honest friend or spouse, against hasty, ill-considered, or arbitrary speech. And we may realize that meter often has a magical, magnetic power to attract to our poems words and thoughts truer and better than those that normally come to mind.”
Or perhaps one might reference “A Theory Of Prosody” by Philip Levine, who puts it in a different, slightly more humorous light.