Poetry Postscript

kw: continuation reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

Speak of a mental block! In yesterday's review I utterly forgot to mention a most valuable bit of the author's advice. First among several points he makes is one I was taught when a child: Read a poem the first time, aloud, as if it were not a poem. Do not sing-song the rhythm, but read it sentence by sentence. Indeed, the author of How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (Thomas C. Foster) says in a few places that the unit of thought and feeling in a poem is not the line, but the sentence. For some poems, it can be hard to determine where a sentence ends, but it is usually no problem. Try it out with this, presented not in poetic lines, but as though it were prose:

If you must love me, let it be for nought except for love's sake only. Do not say, "I love her for her smile—her look—her way of speaking gently; for a trick of thought that falls in well with mine, and doubtless brought a sense of pleasant ease on such a day." For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may be changed, or change for you; and love, so wrought, may be unwrought so. Neither love me for your own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry; a creature might forget to weep, who bore your comfort long, and lose your love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore you may love on, through love's eternity.

There you go, five sentences, though if you replace the semicolons with full stops it comes to seven. I took slight liberties with this, to update certain grammar elements and punctuation marks, for the poet preferred a comma-dash (,—) to a semicolon, for example. Doing so, I did not disturb the meter.

Perhaps you know enough of poetry to recognize the meter when read aloud, that it is iambic pentameter, the rhythm de rigueur for sonnets. Can you then tease out the fourteen lines? Yet there are not fourteen thoughts here, just five. The discipline of putting such emotions into sonnet form induce the poet to compress the expression. Here is a scan of the page I 'translated':

A very few people might recognize this as one of the Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is the 1902 edition. The 44 sonnets therein are among the great classics of English-language literature. I daresay, if you've never read them before, that reading this sonnet first in the sentence-by-sentence way, you will enjoy it more than you might have had you first read the scan, and you may find it enjoyable to get a copy of the book (it is still reprinted). Or, if you like lighter fare, perhaps you could instead get When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne, who is best known for Winnie-The-Pooh. Milne wrote some of the most recitable poems I know (also still in print; my copy is the 1945 edition, my very first book).

Making poetry accessible

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

While we lived in Oklahoma, from 1986 to 1995, we were members of the Stillwater Gem and Mineral Society. For part of 1994 I edited their monthly journal, The Rockhound Gazette. In the July 1994 issue I placed a little ditty I had written, shown here. About the end of the year, much to my surprise, the regular editor, Ruby Lingelbach, presented me with a plaque and award letter! She had entered the "poem" in some sort of contest at a conference of the Rocky Mountain Federation of Mineralogical Societies. It won first place.

So, can I call myself a "prize winning poet"? Just maybe!

For the aficionado, the meter is Trochaic Heptameter followed by an unaccented syllable, a 15-syllable line. That is rare for "ordinary" poetry, but is a meter useful in song. In fact, were I to add an appropriate chorus after the second and fourth verses, it could be sung to "O! Susanna".

You're not an aficionado? No worries. You can get a bit of grounding in such matters in How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse, by Thomas C. Foster.

Now, maybe you don't want to read poetry "like a professor". After all, when I read a poem, I don't really want it to be hanged, drawn and quartered and dragged to the four winds. I just want to enjoy it. I suspect most folks are the same.

Frequently, knowing a bit can help us enjoy a poem more. In this book, should it interest you, you can indeed learn a few things about drawing out more of the meaning the poet put in there. The author covers a lot of ground, from the way a poem strikes both eye and ear (much poetry is intended to be heard), to the various structures the poem or the lines might have – including whether there are rhymes; and the matters of symbols and symbolism. Although, on that latter point, it is well to remember what Sigmund Freud said about symbols in psychology, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

I am glad I had a few years of classical education before starting public school, even though the level of poetical understanding I got was rather basic. So I know that the word "iamb" is a trochee, and "trochee" is an iamb; that is, both are two-syllable "feet", but an iamb trips along with the emphasis on the second syllable while the trochee resembles a heartbeat, "LUB dub". The other two sorts of common poetic feet actually sound their meaning: "dactylic" is emphasized like "pówdery", while "anapest" is emphasized like "underfóot".

I have often said that a poem needs structure, and if it has "neither rhyme nor reason [rhythm]", it isn't poetry. The author shows how some "free verse" isn't as free as we might think, having structure just as rigid as a sonnet (with its 14 lines of 10 syllables in primarily iambic meter, in 8- and 6-line sections). However, he concedes that there is a huge amount of "bad" verse of any kind we might imagine, and for free verse in particular, it frequently differs from plain prose only in having the lines broken off short. So I continue in my belief that, if it can't be chanted or sung, it is probably not a poem.

However, read the book and judge for yourself. Perhaps if you tend to avoid poetry, you'll find it more enjoyable in the future. A fun read, this book!

Bricks, turned

kw: reminiscences, reading

When I was quite little and learning to sound out words, one day I came across a brick sidewalk. A few of the bricks had a word on them. One looked like this:

I sounded it out: "Simons". Great!

I knew a kid whose family was named Simons. Were they in the brick business?

Before long, I came across the next brick with a word on it. It looked different:

I sounded it out: "Snowis". I knew "snow" but this was new.

I wondered if the brick company was named "Simons and Snowis", and decided to look up "Snowis" in the phone book at home.

I turned around to go home, and saw the second brick, and was astonished to see that now it read "Simons"! Feeling a bit odd, I went to the other brick, the one I saw first. Now it said "Snowis".

Finally I realized that they all said just "Simons". It was just which way you came at them.

Some years later I learned about symmetry, and how some words and other objects look the same when rotated. In 1961 I figured out that it was a year with a rotational number, and that the next one would be 6009. That was also the year that I saw a sign that can be rotated half a turn, and reads the same:

NOW NO
SWIMS
ON MON

(Seen at a swimming pool near my home.) These are related to palindromes (Such as "Able was I ere I saw Elba"), but I don't know a term for them.

Will the fog win?

kw: observations, reading, clarity of expression

I know I am in trouble when the opening pages of a book contain one to two paragraphs each. When a quick scan shows about one period per four lines, my unease deepens.

I am reading a book that the author clearly wishes to influence a wide and general audience. It is not to be. I did a Gunning Fog analysis, with scary results. For those who haven't heard of it, the Gunning Fog index is a rough measure of the level of education required to read a text without undue difficulty. Popular novels and popularizations of nonfiction subjects typically have a Fog Index around nine, making them accessible to high school freshmen, and easily readable by any high school graduate. Among popular magazines and periodicals, only Scientific American, with a Fog Index near twelve, aims at a better-educated audience. Here is how it is measured:

• Pick a paragraph or two that take up half a page, more or less. This will be 100-300 words.
• Count the words in each sentence, or each clause if they are separated by semicolons.
• Calculate the average words per sentence (WpS) and hold the total words (W) for the moment.
• Tally up the number of "hard" words (HW), which means words with three or more syllables, except those whose third syllable is -ing or -ed or a similar suffix, and except proper names.
• Calculate the percent "hard" words (%HW) as 100(HW/W).
• Add these two (WpS and %HW) and multiply by 0.4.

In one line, the formula is 0.4(WpS + 100HW/W).

I did so for four paragraphs of various sizes, ranging from 163 to 373 words. They produced Fog Indices of 20.0, 19.4, 16.0, and 19.0, with an overall average of 18.2. That means the easier portions of the book require a college degree, while only readers with a PhD-level education can readily comprehend most of the text. I have fourteen years of college education, and 14+12 = 26, so one would think a book like this would be easy for me to follow, but it is not. It takes work. Just by the way, the sentences range in length from twelve to 69 words, with an average of 33. Newspaper writing usually has average sentence length near twenty.

I may finish reading the book, and I may not. Either way, I'll post a review in another couple of days. In the meantime, I'll do my best to extract meaning from the author's text. I owe that much at least.

Fogged in

kw: musings, reading, measurements

In the former post I closed with the statement that Minders of Make-Believe is well written, just rather dense with facts. I am not satisfied with that statement. Reading other books goes smoother. I remembered noticing that the pages looked "more packed." So I did some measurements, including a Fog Index.

The Gunning Fog Index is a statistical measure of how hard it is to read a piece of text. One gathers three numbers and calculates from them a number that estimates the level of education needed to read the text. The three things are

• W = The number of words in the selection; this should be at least 100.
• S = The number of sentences.
• C = The number of "complex words", meaning words of three syllables other than those formed by adding -er or -ing to two-syllable words.

These are combined according to this formula:

F = 0.4*((W/S)+100*(C/W))

This means, the average words per sentence plus the percent of complex words, all multiplied by 0.4. If the result is 12, one needs to graduate from high school to easily read the text. Few commercial publications have Fog Indices greater than 10. "Reader's Digest" scores a 9.

I tested Minders and a book I am currently reading which I'll here call simply Future, by analyzing a full page of each.

For Minders, W = 423, S = 14, and C = 48. W/S = 31.4 and 100*C/W = 11.4. This yields F = 17. Seventeen! That implies at least a Master's Degree!! The market for such a book is restricted indeed.

For Future, W = 349, S = 16, and C = 39. W/S = 22.8 and 100*C/W = 11.1. This yields F = 13.5. That implies a college sophomore. The market is much larger, but is still a small fraction of the U.S. populace.

The type face of the two books is the same, but Minders has tighter leading ("ledding"), the spacing between lines, so it has 37 lines per page, while Future has 31 lines per similarly-sized page. Both the word count and the line count indicate that the former book has 1.2 times as many words per page. They have nearly identical words per line of type. Since they both have about 350 pages, the one book is equivalent to a 420-page book, compared to the other.

Now, I have a 17-year or greater education (two years beyond my MS), but I found Minders hard to read for extended periods. It is interesting, but it simply requires a lot of work. So I revise my statement: Minders is well-written...for an ordinary soul with a PhD in history.

P.S. The Fog Index of this post is 9.6.