Introduction: Every fall the English department offers a course in Poetry and Poetics, designed to be an introduction to poetry. It is part of our 200-level series of classes, of which two are required for the major. This fall, I am offering this course and Laura Arnold is offering an equivalent introduction to poetry focusing on Ethnic American poetry. Together the two classes serve almost 80 students, a number we have routinely seen in this class for the last several years.
One of the central units of this course is a section on prosody which Ezra Pound once defined as: "the articulation of the total sound of a poem (not bits of certain shapes gummed together)." Prosody focuses primarily on rhythm and meter, especially the way rhythm organizes our experience of temporality in language. While prosody is, arguably, one of the most valuable tools we can give students to understand the nature of language in particular and of temporal experience more broadly defined, it is also a discipline that has been beset historically by approaches which reduce these experiences to various technical apparatuses rather than an understanding of the meaning of rhythm.
For many years, I have introduced students to the relationship between rhythm and meaning by teaching them two analytical methods, generative metrics and the beat-offbeat system of Derek Attridge. These approaches both involve a specific set of rules for understanding such rhythmic features as stress, syntax, phrasing, intonation and meter, as well as the way the relationships among these elements allow us to see the operations of language from the micro level of the syllable all the way up to the macro level of the poem as a whole. Both approaches look especially closely at the way the line, as the middle unit in this hierarchy, is key to understanding the fundamentals of poetic form.
The difficulty with teaching this material is that students simply must understand the way language works; they have to learn the linguistic rules and the prosodic systems before they can move on to interpretive issues. Put more strongly, the issues of meaning rise out of the student's engagement with the specificity of language so that the better and more quickly they can become familiar with the operations of language, the sooner and better able they are to hear and see how the poem organizes their experience. I regularly find that many students, when first introduced to this process, react as if they were suddenly taking a physics class. Only slowly and often reluctantly do they come to see the relevance of this kind of analysis to the passionate feelings a given lyric poem may give rise to when not under the scrutiny of this analysis.
Regular classroom teaching of this material has the drawback that, though I can explain in class how to understand such principles as the Nuclear Stress rule or the Compound rule, or how to mark syntactical units or what happens when a strong syllable falls in a weak metrical position, I cannot be there when I send them out to do the exercises that give them competence in prosodic analysis. Many times, students think they understand in class, only to discover that, as they work through the poems, they have many questions and misunderstandings. It is laborious and counterproductive for students to unlearn mistakes and re-learn a more correct or more fruitful approach.
Description: What I propose to do is to make an Interactive Tutorial on Rhythmic Analysis (note 1) that would allow students to learn prosodic rules followed by sets of carefully ordered exercises that would gradually move them from syllables to words, phrases, lines, stanzas and whole poems. The advantage of doing these exercises as an interactive tutorial is that students can immediately check and correct their work and, using links, find further information, explanations and examples to clarify their understanding. There are several further benefits to this approach: 1) it would allow students to move through the material at their own speed; 2) it would require less class time working through nitty-gritty rules and thus allow more time for discussions of the results and meaning of the students' analysis; 3) this would be a resource for other students on campus, either in English, the foreign languages or linguistics, who want to begin to learn rhythmic analysis on their own; 4) other faculty, both those teaching other sections of the course or others interested in the subject, could use the tutorial (currently other members of the department who teach the course use my handouts and some version of the methods I describe here).
I envision this project beginning in the spring with a student worker, in consultation with CUS, finding appropriate software for the graphic notations these analytic systems require (note 2). The summer would be used for the most time-consuming part of this process, technical implementation. I would produce, using Word and hand-drawn analyses, a prototype of the entire program, including explanatory materials, examples, exercises, analyses of whole poems, supplementary materials and a bibliography. Much of this I have already in hand (or head) and it would simply need to be revised or expanded. I would show the student exactly what would be needed at every step and then work with him or her to build and correct the program. In the fall, after using this program for the first time in the classroom, I would like to have the student make any necessary alterations or adjustments that the first full use might reveal as necessary. I would be in a position to make a report on the successes and limitations of the project by the end of fall semester.
Cost-effectiveness: In terms of cost-effectiveness, there is no doubt that this tutorial would help students and interested faculty learn better and more quickly. It would also help me in that correcting these exercises is extremely time consuming; with a class of 39 students, the necessary speed is impossible. This tutorial could easily be sustained over several years. Once I have learned the technology it should be easy to update materials, examples, and exercises. It is also possible that this program would be of interest to faculty teaching poetry and/or prosody at other institutions (note 3).
Notes
1. I say "rhythmic analysis" rather than something like "metrical analysis" because it is a conceptually broader term. I would begin at the conceptual level (e.g., what is rhythm? How does it organize time?) and then move to analyze both metrical and free verse.
2. The Attridge beat-offbeat system uses approximately a dozen symbols that are marked below a line of poetry. The scansion of a line provides a graphic representation of the relationship between the metrical pattern and the stress pattern; that is, it shows which metrical rules are employed at particular points to realize beats and offbeats. It therefore directly reflects the way in which the line is perceived as rhythmically regular as well as how deviations produce degrees of rhythmic complexity. The generative approach uses w to mark weak (or unstressed syllables) and s to mark strong (or stressed syllables). It then uses trees attached to each syllable or node to indicate the relative and hierarchical levels of stress. In addition, this approach marks syntactic units with brackets in order to show the relationship between stress and syntax. If desired, I can provide further information about these methods as well as visual examples of the analysis. I use both methods of analysis because they offer different but useful perspectives on rhythm and both are beneficial to students.
3. A further benefit to me as an individual faculty member is that I use these methods of analysis in my research and I have up to this point had to drawn in all of my notations by hand. It would be immensely valuable to learn a way to use the computer for these analyses, both for myself and for potential publishers. For instance, I have a forthcoming article that uses these notations that has required numerous corrections of the page proofs because of the technical limitations of the publisher. They have finally managed some on the computer and have hand-drawn others.