Scott,
M.A.K. Halliday's "Intonation in the Grammar of English" is due out any 
day from Equinox. You can preorder it from amazon. From what I 
understand, it's written in a reader friendly (don't have to be a 
linguist) way.
Natalie is right on target with her comments, and I'll just expand on 
that a bit even though it has been a few years since I looked back at 
any of this stuff.
I think the two major lines of thought of twentieth century poetics have 
to do with the theory of the line (once broken free from set metrical 
patterns) and the theory of the image (once the poem became free from 
too great a dependence on theme.)
It’s interesting to look back at the century and find such wonderful 
practitioners of the poetic “line” and see them struggle to find words 
for it. You would have to include Pound: “Compose in sequence of the 
musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.” He tends to see the 
push of the line as sensitive to quantity for the first time in 
centuries (think of Sandburg or Whitman), and he also had a very strict 
sense of what a poem should aspire to, with much of “free verse” not 
meeting those high standards. I like to think of it as similar to jazz, 
which may free itself from a strict melody, but still requires a very 
sophisticated listening. (Of course, it is not just intuition, but 
something that can be understood in formal terms, but the poets lack 
that formal understanding, however well they might hear it.) For 
Williams, I think much of it was an attempt to let poetry reflect much 
more of an American speech, free from the “iambic” hold on poetry, which 
he thought was truer to British patterns. Williams is the first I know 
of to successfully lay out spaces on the page, so that all the lines 
didn’t have to go back to the left hand margin. I'm still not sure what 
he means by "variable foot" except that it frees us up from too much 
regularity. One very influential theoretician was Charles Olson, 
especially his “Essay on Projective Verse” in the early fifties, which 
advocates a connection between the line and the breathing of the poet. 
Levertov, I think, was heavily influenced by Olson and Robert Duncan, 
whose essays on prosody I find almost unreadable, but who did 
orchestrate very formal pauses into his poems. From what I understand, 
you could actually see him count off beats during pauses between lines 
and parts of lines. Ginsberg used to credit Olson and say he himself had 
a “bardic breath”, heavily influenced by the Old Testament. If you look 
at Howl, something you probably can’t do in seventh grade, you can see 
how long he expected to carry a “breath line” before pausing; the 
regular typed line isn’t long enough, so he had to tuck lines in. To 
hear Creeley read was to hear almost the opposite, a very clipped and 
anxious voice. Both poets are available in recorded form, so it might be 
fun to hear how they read their own "open form" poems, using the line as 
an orchestration tool. You can make the case that a very wonderful 
poetry was written out of this confusion, but very little theory that 
makes much sense outside the history of the poems. In other words, the 
theories may give us insight into how to read the work of particular 
poets, but they don't shed much light on intonation and how it works.
As Natalie points out very well, there is no conscious sense of 
intonation as a meaning-making system. They tend to believe that the 
meaning connection is there, but expect it to be intuitive. The 
traditional understanding is all centered on the syllable, on the 
alternation of stressed and unstressed, and the repetition of these 
patterns, called “feet.” Modern poetry has freed us up from this, but 
does not explain itself very well.
The question of how we should read a free verse (or open form) poem is 
not easy to answer. Certainly a line break means something, though it 
may mean more for some poets than it does for others.
A good deal of poetry nowadays is performance poetry, written to be 
"performed" rather than read on the page. I sometimes have good luck 
with a beginning poetry class (admittedly college) by asking for 
alternative readings of a poem. Instead of "interpreting" the poem 
(which I think is problematic in so many ways), I ask them to come up 
with different ways of saying it, and then I ask which is the best and 
why. I don't know how much comes out of that, but it is always a fun 
class, with lots of participation.

Craig


Natalie Gerber wrote:
>
> 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
>
> [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
> *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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