Feel the Beat!

I want to talk to you about the beat, babies, the BEAT! Even poems with no specific form have to have some kind of a beat, if it's only a heartbeat.

Not all beats are verbal. Just as in music, the rests get a beat, and in your reading of your poetry, you may not account for the "rest" in your pattern (just as we don't always put a comma in the "rest" in our prose).

It's where the beat falls that counts, not how many syllables are in the pattern. You all know how it feels to sing a second verse of a hymn where the musical accent falls on the wrong syllable of a word. The first verse may have been elegant, but if you have to sing, "Oh SaVIOR of THE world" on the second, it goes against the grain. You feel it should be, "Oh, SAvior of the WORLD!" Right?

In High School, Sam Bullen and I used to sit and write limericks, trading off lines. Lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme and have three beats. Lines 3 and 4 are short, rhyme, and have 2 beats. Some people consider limericks a very low kind of verse, and condemn the perpetrators, but Sam and I knew better. Limericks must be precise, they have to follow the beat, the beat has to fall on the right syllable, and it has to be funny, to boot. We used to roll us in the aisles.

I'm going to try to write one out for you (with the rests). I wrote it for a contest a long time ago. The accent beats are all caps.
3/4 time with two pickup beats
OverCOME by the HEAT in her ALley (rest, rest),
Said a FAINTing young WOman named SALly (rest, rest),
Since the STREET signs don't TELL (no rest)
If it's HEAVen or HELL,
Then I MUST be in PARadise VALley (rest, rest).

This week, have a fun time with your family or some friends, writing limericks. Give them examples from a book of limericks from the library, maybe write some sample first lines, and then work on that beat--tell them to keep their inner metronomes going. When you write a poem, if it's a rhyming poem, make sure the accent is where it should be, and don't wrest the rests.

I don't want to discourage us at all, but there is an awful lot of awful poetry in the world. Prose, even put into short lines, never sounds poetic. Real poetry overcomes all kinds of errors in style, and can be in prose form, and still sounds like poetry. Don't give up. Avoid "love" and "above," if you can; stay away from "moon" and "June."

Not all of us can be great poets. We may be only mediocre poets. We may be truly terrible poets (and pray that we will know the difference, because our friends will). If we express the feelings we have in words that speak to our souls, avoiding the trite, reaching for new meanings, and new connotations, the Lord will help us to write something worthy for our own Books of Remembrance.

Please send email to anwa_lds@yahoo.com if you have any questions.