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JAC
Volume 5 |
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Editor: Download PDF |
The Exercist: Atavistic Rhymes and Rhythms Robert Allen Papinchak Faced with teaching an introduction to poetry writing class for the first time, I knew I would also be faced with the obligatory onus of teaching rhymes and rhythms for the first time to a classroom of beginning poets who wanted only to emote on paper. I was firm in my commitment to myself to see that those emotions would have some form, some understanding of the fundamentals of poetry without sacrificing the probable primal enthusiasm on both sides of the classroom. But how to do it? I resented the ordinary guidelines proffered by most poetry textbooks, guides, and instruction manuals. Even the most inviting charts by John Frederick Nims (Western Wind), the recently devised instructive verses of John Hollander (Rhyme's Reason), or the new contrivances of Alberta Turner (to make a poem), Lawrence Jay Dessner (How To Write A Poem), or Ronald Wallace (Writing Poems) would not suffice. They left me with the blahs when I realized that I would probably have to rely upon making the student memorize the differences between a line of iambic pentameter and a line of trochaic hexameter, or the distinction between the stone bouncing rhythms of an anapest or the staccato of a dactylic. On top of all that, not only was I going to expect the student to remember the names and numbers of the various, standard, classical rhythms, I was also going to have them memorize the possible permutations that rhyme could add to a poem. I was not satisfied; I was depressed. How did I do it? How did I overcome my own antipathy towards teaching the standard ideas in a standard way? Serendipity. I had pretty much settled on the old reliables when I found myself foot-stomping to a collection of jump rope rhymes in the children's section of a local book shop. Suddenly, I realized that these were poems. Not only were these poems, but these were poems with exact rhymes and rhythms, with definite patterns that could be scanned and recognized, simply and informatively. Better than that, the jump rope rhymes gave the students a poetic form they could identify with without feeling as though they were just studying the academics of the rhymes and rhythms of poetry. I bought the book, Halloweena Hecatee, by Cynthia Mitchell with captivating illustrations by Eileen Browne, published by T. Y. Crowell, and set out to study the poems in the text. What I discovered was revealing. Of the 21 skipping rhymes in the book, each revealed something new about jump rope rhymes and the application of the traditional understanding of rhyme and rhythm as they would apply to the student learning to write poetry. Before I could test this method of instruction, before I could introduce my students to Halloweena Hecatee and its alluring rhymes, I had to be sure that the students had an understanding of rhyme and rhythm. I separated the two concepts—first rhyme, then rhythm. Asking students to supply their own definitions of rhyme ("Words that sound alike." “No. Those are homonyms."; "Words that have the same sounds.” “Well, that's part of it."), we agreed upon the definition set forth in Nims' Western Wind: "Rhyme is made up of a sameness plus a difference. The sameness...is an accented vowel sound...Any sounds coming after the accented vowel must be identical...The difference... is in what comes before." The students could test this definition with words they knew and it always came up accurate. Next came rhythm. This was harder. Some people can dance, some can't. Some can sense the basic rhythms of music, some can't. Trying to separate the poet from the poseur became as difficult as trying to separate the dancer from the dance. Scanning became an arduous process of trying to read the heartbeats of individual cardiograms. I asked the students three basic questions about rhythm: How do you know when something has rhythm? How do you know what that rhythm is? How do you duplicate that rhythm? We talked about what they thought had rhythm and what some of those rhythms sounded like. Some of the answers were walking, marching, dancing, painting and sculpture (with respect to composition), film (editing of), music, the heart (“bing-bong . . . bing-bong"), machinery (a meat slicer that went "clack-clack"; a printing press that went "chew-fump-chew . . . chew-fump-chew"; the nursery steam engine that went "chugga-chugga" or "I think I can . . . I think I can" and became an ad for Good and Plenty). We agreed that repetition was a simple form of rhythm, that there were probably three phases of rhythm—hearing it, developing it, and bringing it to a form. We also agreed that it was probably more important to feel the rhythm than to worry about naming it, labeling it with formal rhetorical tags. By now we were several weeks into the semester and the students had begun to be familiar and sometimes comfortable with a basic vocabulary of poetry. They had already been through their first assignment, an open exercise restricted only by the suggestion that the poem should be related to a subject. For those students who needed some guidance, I suggested that the poem could be about a dream, or perhaps about an obsessive subject that they had always wanted to write about, about a student experience, or about a general subject like romance, death, sex, love, flowers, food, poetry. For the most part, the results of that assignment were disastrous. Students were not happy with the formlessness of their poems, the dancing in the dark that each had to do while "trying to write a poem." Those students who began by thinking that writing poetry was easy because "it was short" and it was "about myself and my feelings" realized that writing a poem was not as easy as many of them thought. For most students, this first assignment was the least effective poem they wrote during the semester. Now we were ready to move into the next assignment, a poem that would give the student more framework for writing. I had already decided upon the jump rope rhyme as the next assignment and had been moving the class towards that assignment with our explorations of rhyme and rhythm. I had decided on the jump rope rhyme exercise for a number of reasons: 1) Its structure would demand both rhyme and rhythm. 2) The poem would be short but demand concentration of both form and idea. 3) The jump rope verse would give a student the atavistic sense of returning to a familiar form. 4) It would be fun. All these reasons proved to be accurate. After the assignment, students remarked that they had gotten a great deal out of writing what at first they thought was a silly exercise. They realized that it was more difficult than they thought to work with a form that, as a child on the school playground, they had taken for granted. For many of the students, it was the most successful poem they wrote during the semester; for others, it was a beginning towards an understanding of how to incorporate the fundamentals of poetry into more sophisticated poems. The student reaction underscores the idea expressed in the introduction
to The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie. In
studying the allure of rhyme and rhythm, the Opies recognize: In order to retrieve some of that "school-child's lore" and before the students could begin to write their own jump rope rhymes, we did a complete exploration of some of the poems in Halloweena Hecatee. One of the first skipping rhymes in the collection is "An easy-peasy
skip." The five lines that make up the short skipping rhyme are
created out of 17 one-syllable words and 1 two-syllable word ("nothing").
All the words are easy words, simple words of a common vocabulary. In
fact, of the 18 words, 4 are a repeat of "and." Together with
the other 14 words, the rhyme asks a rhetorical, mathematical question
that the reader/jumper must answer: Having read the poem to the class, the first question I ask is, "Does it?" Usually, the class responds with silence. I can hear the questions in their minds: Does what? What is he asking? What is he talking about? As simple as the rhyme/jump seems, it demands some thought. Do 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 make half a score? The reader must first know what a score is (20), then what half of that would be (10), and then be able to deduce that, yes, in fact, 1+2+3+4 make 10 or "half a score." But what else is happening in these five short lines besides a sub-textual answer to its rhetorical question? Is there rhyme here? The beginning student can easily recognize the endrhyme of AABBB. No formal pattern but at least a recognizable one. Some students want to stretch the question about rhyme and discover an internal rhyme between "do" and "true" and "two." O.K. I can accept that. What about rhythm? One of the recognizable qualities of skipping rhymes is that a certain rhythm can be established, recognized, and jumped. The verse begins with an accented syllable ("Tell"), a chance to jump. Then, an unaccented syllable followed by another accented syllable—a mean trochaic pattern except for the last accented syllable. Or, to read it another way, a mean iambic pattern except for the first accented syllable. Having looked at rhyme and rhythm in the jump rope verse, we returned to the title and observed that the title was both instructive and informative. To test this, and to rely upon some of the fun of a skipping rhyme, I borrowed my daughter's jump rope and we counted jumps and syllables while jumping the rhyme. We found 10 jumps in all ("half a score" again), two in each line, each time on the accented syllable, making a total of 19 syllables. The class was on its way to learning about accentual meter and modern accentual syllabic meter. If I were to check the notebook of an exemplary student, the notes
on this exercise might look like this: Note: trochaic or variable iambic pattern first jump on first accented syllable poem answers own question: yes, 1+2+3+4 is 10 or half a score (notice half a score of jumps)
What appeared at first to be a simple jump rope rhyme became an elucidating exercise in what can happen to ordinary language when it is set to an exact poattern. “An easy-peasy skip” is the second poem in the collection. The first, “A short skip before breakfast,” served another purpose. Having pointed out the matters of form and function in "An easy-peasy
skip," I asked the students to do the same with "A short skip
before breakfast." Like "An easy-peasy skip," "A
short skip before breakfast" had 10 jumps and 19 syllables. Those
jumps, again, were on the accented syllables. But a new rhyme scheme
was recognized. There was, indeed, the simple AAAB end-rhyme, but, there
was also a more complicated internal rhyme which was dependent upon
the end-rhyme: While "threezles," “sneezles,” and "wheezles" rhyme at the end of the lines, they also rhyme with "measles" at the beginning of the last line. The initial alliteration of the m's in "measles" and 11 mumps" (also the second I'm in "mumps"), along with the internal alliteration of the "p" sound in "mumps" and "pox" locates an internal rhyme pattern on top of the customary end-rhyme discovered in most of the other skipping rhymes. Finally, here, too, the title was an instructive one; four lines are an easy jump to start the day. Once through these two easy skips, I moved on to finding more patterns in other jump rope rhymes in order to give the students an understanding of how to write their own jump rope rhymes and the reasons for writing them. "A fast skip" points out the elementary reminder that "pepper" in a skipping rhyme meant that you had to jump faster. Remember, Mabel, Mabel set the table. Don't forget the red, hot, pepper? As your friends neared the end of the rhyme, perhaps they dragged out red . . . paused, dragged out hot . . . paused, but then, when they hit the word pepper, the rope got faster and faster and faster, trying to trip you out of the game. Like "A fast skip," "A quick skip before dinner" maintains the same sense of jump rope decorum. It is a "quick skip" because of the first line, "Peepy pipey peppercorn." We examined other of the skipping rhymes for rhyme scheme alone and found that, indeed, some had a very definite pattern. The AABBCCAA of "An autumn skip" repeats its first two lines as its last two; the rhyming couplets of "A wintertime skip" (AABB CCDD EEFF) are set in three stanzas of quatrains. There was the mono-rhyme (AAAAAAAAAA) of "A jump-for-life skip"; there was the complicated 64 jumps of "A group counting skip" which relied upon four quatrains which gave variable answers to the rhetorical question of the first two lines of each stanza (AABB AACC AADD AAEE). A few of the poems had no identifiable rhyme scheme—the lolling "skip for a hot summer day" rambles through ABCBDEFEGHIHJKLKMCNC; "A scare away skip" scared away the class with a disagreement on whether the rhyme scheme was an ABCBDEFFEGG or an ABCBDEEEFF or an ABCBDEFGG. The metaphorically clever "A skip to beat bad temper” pleased most students when they discovered the wit and whimsy of the lines in the end rhymes, internal rhymes, alliteration, similes, other figures of speech, and a feeling that they could relate to. We finished with the exhausting 112 jumps of "A long hard skip" which pointed out the function of repetition within a poem as a rhythmic refrain. Now the students' task was set. Knowing that jump rope rhymes were not just nonsensical but did indeed have a rhyme and a reason, they were expected to write their own jump rope rhymes. I added a further twist to the assignment. The beginning poet was not expected to write a jump rope rhyme of the "ice cream soda ginger ale pop" variety, but, instead, were to write an adult jump rope rhyme, one that an adult would want to jump to or exercise to. Students found that it was not an easy-peasy skip down the typewriter keyboard. They had to set their minds to carefully working out poetic responsibilities in terms of rhyme, rhythm, and other basic concepts of poetry. They had to find subjects that would interest adults. The range of subjects chosen included dieting, suicide, drugs, death, gardening, soap operas, authority figures, extramarital affairs, the stock market, bar hopping and politics. The variety and versatility of the adult jump rope rhymes rivaled those in Halloweena Hecatee. Though one student lamenting a car ditched during a traffic jam used a loose end- rhyme of AABBCACADBDBEEFFGGAA, another chose two octaves of rhyming couplets (AABBCCDD EEFFGGHH) to reveal the glamour of "A Skip To Town And Back":
One student who had not been with her previous endeavors with poetry took a subject dear to her heart but avoided the sentimentality that had marked her previous work by concentrating upon 7 rhyming couplets about "Earth's Production":
Another student produced a poem with a sophisticated sense of enjambment while wheeling round the circular nature of daytime drama:
As The Rope Turns Last week’s story went like this:
Of course, the jump rope exercise was not a total success for every student. But I learned early in the semester that those students who could not work with the basic rhymes and rhythms of the skipping verse never did manage to cope with the sophisticated permutations of rhyme and rhythm in more advanced poems. In fact, in the second semester's advanced poetry writing class, the survivors of the jump rope exercise went on to work with dramatic monologues, villanelles, rondeaus, and long sequence poems, among others. They were no longer afraid of trying to do what they could within the understanding of the basic fundamentals of poetry writing. Generally, however, the results of these exercises were encouraging for both the students and for me. I had gotten past the ordinary way of introducing rhyme and rhythm. The students learned that writing poetry was not going to be simply putting emotions down on paper. Together, we learned a new and energetic way to approach a basic understanding of poetic principles. Boise State University |
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