Playing by Ear: the sounds of poetry

Have you or someone you know ever heard a song for the first time then played the melody on a piano or other instrument without any sheet music. That ability to “play by ear” usually denotes musical giftedness, which occurs among poets too. 

Often, musically inclined poets play with melodies they’ve heard in school, which leads them to a head-start in poetry as they skillfully write rhythmic, rhyming verses to the amazement of teachers, friends, and family. Unfortunately, those “gifted” ones might never try to develop their “poetic ear,” while those who lack that natural ability think they can’t write poetry at all. Wrong and wrong!

If you’re a “natural” at writing poems, these links to prior posts can help you expand your options as you write and revise:

Unlocking clockwork rhyme

Enjambment and rhyme placement tone down jangling rhymes  

Using alliteration for sound echoes and for fun

Revising for Sound and Sense

For the “naturally gifted” poet and also those who don’t think they are (or ever will be!) a poet, learn to play by ear as you read aloud poems by other poets or listen to recordings such as these favorites:

Caedmon Poetry Collection: A Century of Poets Reading Their Work, CD

Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath (Book and 3Audio CDs)

Poetry On Record: 98 Poets ReadTheir Work (1888-2006)
 

You can find recordings by contemporary poets too, such as this one by Mary Oliver, whose words coaxed me back to writing poetry after a gap of many years:

At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver

If you prefer listening to poems read on the Internet, check out these sites:

Poetry Archive

poets.org | Academy of American Poets

Children's Poetry Archive - Listen to the world's best children's poetry read out loud.

Listen | Poetry Foundation

And, for a variety of poetry forms and techniques to play with, listen to, experiment with, and enjoy, the user-friendly paperback (and former course) A Poet's Guide to Writing Poetry can help you to develop an ear for poetry and/or fine-tune your natural ability to play by ear.

                                                                                                           

©2021, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer, all genres

 

Every poem doesn’t have to rhyme!

When I first began writing poems, they inevitably rhymed and bounced to their own rhythm. Most poets can probably say the same, and that’s fine! Rhythmic and rhyming lines work wonderfully well for humorous verse, nursery rhymes, and greeting card verse.

If, however, you want your poems to have a literary tone or quality, you and your rhymes may need to break up for a while! You won’t be saying goodbye forever, but when you return to rhyming, you’ll have a purpose and appropriate form.

Since haiku has been perennially popular for centuries, it makes a good place to start weaning yourself from rhymes. The brevity of its three lines and picturesque scenes from nature provide an excellent exercise in areas far more important to poetry than rhyme, for example:

• Being concise (aka “writing tight.”)

• Being highly observant (i.e., noticing – really noticing what you see and sense.)

• Using fresh comparisons of This with That (to SHOW, rather than TELL.)

To make a clean break with rhyme, consider writing prose poems, which focus on insights, thoughts, feelings, or even a mini-story, rather than rhyme.

Also, consider writing free verse, which relies heavily on the way in which you arrange and rearrange your line breaks.

As long as your free verse stays FREE of any pattern, including a rhyme scheme), the poems might scatter rhymes internally, rather than end-line, but they’re more apt to use sound echoes – word pairs that echo off of one another, creating audial interest.

Once you’ve spent some time with these alternatives to rhyme, learn how to scan a poem, which is much easier than it sounded in high school! (You can do it!)

Then, you have the tools you need to write rhyming poetry in such traditional patterns as the sonnet and villanelle. Writing in these classical forms not only gives you a strong sense of satisfaction in your work, it can elevate your level of poetry-writing into literary realms. There, you’ll be more apt to find poetry journals and anthologies waiting for your poems to fill their hungry pages.


Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-author of Living in the Nature Poem, Outside Eden, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes (for children), Faces in a Crowd, PRAISE! and Kindle e-books on poetry

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Using alliteration for sound echoes and for fun

In case you haven’t had a chance to experiment with alliteration, here are two types to practice in poems or when you want to turn up the audio for emphasis or humor in other genres of writing.

Assonance – This type of alliteration with vowels is more subtle than consonance, which is more subtle than rhyme. If words end in a vowel, they might rhyme too, but assonance typically comes in the sound of vowels at the beginning of the words or inside them.

For example, read the following question aloud and listen for the repetition of the uuuu (ew,ew,ew) sound in every word but “as.”

Would you choose Hugh as true?

Consonance – The alliteration most people notice when they’re reading is consonance where two or more words in close proximity begin with the same consonant.

Generally, the repetition of two or three consonants on one line lend musicality to a poem. As you read the following, listen especially for the echoing m, r, and g.

…the murmuring sounds of morning

Like end-line and internal rhymes, consonance emphasizes word, but much more subtly. A big exception is if you use multiple words with alliteration. Then you have a tongue twister, such as Suzy sells seashells by the seashore. Try saying that aloud a few times to see how long your tongue lasts without twisting!

Now, go back, reread that last sentence above and notice the alliterative use of l’s and t’s. You can slip that type of consonance into descriptive scenes in novels or other forms of fiction to add a touch of musicality. And, you can even use light alliteration in your nonfiction to lighten a mood.

As you increase sound echoes with consonance, you can increase the humor to a certain point before getting just plain silly:

Susie’s sale of seashells
makes no sense to me!
Why does she sell seashells
when, on the beach,
they’re free? 

poem and article by Mary Harwell Sayler, © 2016, 2019

The ABC's of Poetry: A Dictionary for Children and for Fun gives you A to Z definitions of poetry terminology, forms, and techniques with lines from the author, other contemporary poets, and classical works to illustrate each entry.  Use this hardback for lively learning in classrooms or with creative kids and poets of any age.


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Seeing metaphors all around

Sitting on our deck with my coffee this morning, I saw the thick, broken branch of an oak suddenly stir then fly away into a bark-colored hawk. Each wing unfolded like a fan, bordered by a thin white stripe visible only in flight.

Back at my desk again, I wrote down what I saw before that picture could fade. Then I read the above lines aloud, noticing how anapests (u u S or _ _ / ) changed up the rhythm and how the sentence got a little alliterative with its succession of K’s and W’s.

Despite the distractions of those sounds, the sight of a metaphor in flight stayed in my mind’s eye. You’ll see those visual comparisons more and more, too, each time you look for a way to compare this with that as you revise your poems.

If your comparison shows the hawk as a branch, that’s a metaphor.

If your comparison says the hawk is like a branch or similar to one, that’s a simile.

Poetry in the Bible abounds with figurative language that religiously trains the eye to see metaphors almost everywhere. For an excellent example, read the first chapter of Ezekiel and count the times you spy the words “like,” “likeness,” or “something like a __.”

You’ll find a bunch of metaphoric examples in Revelation, too, or almost any visionary place a poet tries to describe something that’s unknown in terms people know, relate to, and readily envision.

© 2012, Mary Harwell Sayler
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