Hi Scott,
Many poets, such as Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Robert
Creeley, and others, have written impressionistically about the pausal
factors involved in line endings and gradations of punctuation marks.
Levertov, in several essays on organic form and the poetic line, tries
to develop a specific system by which a comma gets about a half-pause
whereas a full stop gets a full pause or breath; however, one might say
such exact correspondences are more theoretical than practical (e.g.,
what about a comma at the end of a line as opposed to line-medially?
etc.).
Unfortunately, versification texts don't tackle this territory in any
organized way since the underlying phenomena-intonation-is not well
understood by traditional prosodists. You can gain some purchase by
looking to basic books for nonlinguists on intonational phonology; a
particularly good introduction is Paul Tench's The Intonation Systems of
English.
This happens to be my research interest, so I would be glad to help you
in any way I can off-list. I have not written broadly on the topic, but
some of my work on William Carlos Williams explains the idea of
intonation relevant to poetry and you might find it helpful for thinking
about how tone functions within single statements (and thus why your
students are dropping the tone on a line-final word) as well as between
punctuated word groups.
And here's a fun quote for your students in the meanwhile (it is from
memory and so perhaps not exact): "What else is verse made of, but
words, words, words? Quite literally, the spaces between the words which
take an equal part in the measure" -W. C. Williams
Best wishes,
Natalie Gerber
SUNY Fredonia
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Woods
Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2007 6:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Teaching students how to read poetry
Listmates,
In the process of teaching my 7th graders how to read poetry out loud, I
noticed that, for many of them, they paused at the end of each line,
regardless of its punctuation, and lowered the tone of the last word as
though it were followed by a period. I found this problem diminished
when I worked with my students to distinguish the sound of a word
followed by a period from that word followed by a comma, semicolon, or
colon. For instance, "The boy went to the store. He bought a loaf of
bread. Then he went home." is pronounced differently from "The boy went
to the store; he bought a loaf of bread; then he went home." Or in "Buy
several items at the store." store is pronounced differently from store
in "Buy several items at the store: bread, soap, and milk."
Does anyone know of any research relating to this phenomenon and its
relationship to instruction? Have others noticed this?
Scott Woods
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