Re: Poetique

On Sunday, December 28, 2003, at 03:50 PM, Adam Walker wrote:

> You have, of course, presupposed a Latinate type of
> poetry.
No , for Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
[snip]
>>    []  The stressed vowel must be marked so
>>        that rythm is clearly defined for each word.
The rhythm in Classical _Latin_, as in Classical Greek, is
_not_ stressed based - it is mora based.  But, unlike
ancient Greek, spoken Latin did use stress accent, and this
is exploited in various ways by Roman writers.  But the
classical rhythms would be much easier _without_ clearly
defined stress!

To be truly Latinate, Gary should have added a rule about morae.

Stressed vowel doesn't work for French verse either.

[snip - back to Adam]
>
>  Many of these rules would be unnecessary for
> Anglo-Saxon alliterative vers, or Hebrew poetry which
> "rhymed" thoughts, or haiku which is concerned with
> brevity and syllable counts, or modern "free verse"
> which has little poetic about it by you definitions
> below.
Indeed so.  Yep - 'poetry' & 'traditional English verse' are
not synonyms.  The latter can be and, alas, often is used for
doggerel; and, as Adam has rightly pointed out, poetry has been
and is expressed in a variety of formats.

There is more to poetry than mere meter or verse, which makes it
so darn difficult (indeed, strictly impossible) to translate.
It is surely the genius of a poet to exploit the features of his/her
natlang to express poetic meaning.

There are some conlangs that offer possibilities that are not normally
found in natlangs, e.g. SolreSol, which has music built into it, and
Lin which offers a conciseness and whose ennesemy & 'cements' probably
offer some interesting possibilities of creative exploitation.  I guess
there's been no original poetry in Lin.  Has there ever been original
SolReSol poetry?

But before designing a conlang specifically for use in poetry, one
surely has to be clear what poetry actually is and is not - and
that is not a trivial matter.

Ray
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