“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, January 26, 2012

Some Thoughts on Rhythm

I hope you get a chance to listen to the podcast below, class 6. Even I thought it was good, and I've been teaching poetry analysis for 25 years.

In particular I now know how to convey the fact that atmosphere is a function of rhythm. It's not a vague term at all.



1 comment:

Ruth Solomon said...

Thanks for these podcasts which are so clear and practical.

The way you say the poems with diff stress-marks is similiar to how some autistic people speak- or are forced to be verbal before they feel the thing coming through their body. But at the level of touch and the movements coming out of these propulsions and absorbtions there is very finely tuned rhythm. I know this is the more honest way to bring one another into utterance even before it is locked down into symbols/concepts. One non-verbal boy I know has begun drumming on his diaphragm and by altering the pattern creates interferance in the stream of sounds coming from his throat. He breaks them up when in full flow and this increasingly becomes something interesting and amusing to him. He is now bending this in combination with other voices/sounds. The raw atmosphere of the meter and how it is played out places every meaning that follows.

I think Simonden is useful in his examination of technical objects and the way they form. He says some interesting things about interuption whether or not you go with the individuation thing.