Out for the Count: Syllabics
This workshop with tutor Michael Schmidt will work on ‘syllabicising’ poems of your own, to feel the consequences of this discipline on diction, lineation and much else.
For a poem to work, it has to work against something. In the twentieth century, in almost the same year, ‘syllabic verse’ was – if not invented (it has existed for centuries) – defined in England and in the United States, here by the neglected Elizabeth Daryush, in the States by Marianne Moore. Syllabics have been crucial in the development of many poets’ work. Yvor Winters learned from Daryush and in turn showed Gunn how he might escape the trammels of metrical verse and edge his way towards a genuinely free verse. Auden and Bishop and Fuller and Langley, to name a very few, have found syllabics enabling.
Syllabics are a wonderful way to give full authority to the poetic line: they are not a sausage slicer, they impose quite a different discipline, a different squeeze, on a poet’s language, and they work against the merely subjective emission of sound and sense. They are hostile to sentimentality and they are not entirely congenial to the first person singular. In this workshop you will work on ‘syllabicising’ poems of your own, to feel the consequences of this discipline on diction, lineation and much else. The avoidance of metre may be the thing; or the avoidance of self-expression, the gifting to the poem itself of its poetic ‘voice’.
