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
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
Pinpoint
customers who are looking for what you sell. To join or leave this LISTSERV
list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave
the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/