Lipo-what?!

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From the course by California Institute of the Arts

Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop

692 ratings

California Institute of the Arts

Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop

692 ratings

Why just write poems when you can write better ones? This course is built on the notion that the most exciting writing begins after the first draft. It is specifically for folks who believe that writing poems just to express oneself is like using the Internet just for email. After all, poetry can change the way you and your readers think of the world and its inhabitants; it can break new ground for language; turn a blank sheet of paper into a teeming concert of voices and music. Though any of us may have the potential to make that happen, having an understanding of how several tools of poetic composition can be used (and audaciously “mis-used”) gives you more ways to try (and if we do this right, we might surprise ourselves most of all). We'll cover key poetic terms and devices by studying poems by a handful of modern and contemporary poets and then get a chance to try our own hand at writing new poem drafts from a select number of prompts. Throughout the course you will have the opportunity to workshop your poem drafts and get feedback on your work, working towards a more polished poem.

From the lesson

Rhyme

This week we’ll explore how rhyme leverages patterns of sameness and how we can estrange similarity for compelling poetic effects. We’ll check out examples of “rhyme”—sonic, visual, conceptual—from outside of poetry too.

Read Any Good Snooks Lately?3:25

There’s No “A” in Showdown: Cathy Park Hong's Ballad in A1:43

Lipo-what?!5:05

What That Was2:05

Meet the Instructors

Douglas Kearney
Assistant Professor
Program in Creative Writing, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota

Ballad in A is a lipogram.

Now, a lipogram is a type of poem in which you restrict the use of certain letters.

For example, for Ballad in A, Cathy Park Hong only

allows herself to use one vowel, and that vowel is 'A'.

But Doug!

[SOUND] What about 'I"ll'?

Fine.

One time, she uses the letter 'I'.

One other vowel.

But you get the idea.

Now what does that do?

Well, for us, it gives us this collision of sounds,

that a, a, a, and sometimes the hard A of ei.

It also makes it so that if I were to highlight this poem,

I would basically just make this gigantic mess of pink highlighter.

So what I want you to do, is I want you to pay attention to those terms that we

talked about at the beginning of the module.

Perfect rhyme [SOUND], slant rhyme [SOUND], and especially,

assonance [SOUND], that repetitious vowel sound.

I want you to keep those things in mind and

reread this poem aloud to yourself.

I'll wait.

You're back, excellent.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about this poem.

The scene in this poem is a pretty archetypal scene.

If you've ever watched a Western, you've seen this whole thing happen.

Some guy runs in from out of town, starts some junk,

runs out, insults the sheriff or marshal, goes out,

the marshal has to set things back to right, they have a gun fight and it ends.

Now, usually of course, the good guy wins.

But in Cathy Park Hong's poem, both of them end up dead.

One of the things that all of this repetition of the 'a' sound provides for

us, is on the one level,

it gives us the opportunity to tell a relatively straightforward story.

But, because of the constraints of the lipogram,

it creates a much richer sonic experience than perhaps we'd had if we

just told it using any vowel sounds we'd like.

Further, because of the forced decisions that Hong

has to make to meet the requirements of her lipogram,

she creates a scene that is sometimes, I would say, a bit surreal or

maybe even cartoony, which gives the story a whole different kind of tension.

All that comes from the sound that populates her word choices.

So for example, you might not think that the meanest thing a person could

call another person is 'crawdad', but suddenly we have that playful sound.

One of the things that Hong likes is to find terms that are a little bit more

archaic or surprising to fill her poems and give them these different textures.

Now, if we look at the poem, we have this whole idea of

"Kansan's cantata rang at that ramada ranch."

Now, you hear that rhyme?

Cantata and ramada.

That goes to the ranch.

And 'Mañana', another rhyme in there, that "Kansan snarls I'll have an armada,".

You hear that run of rhymes?

Cantata, ramada, manana, armada.

Hong has bars, yo.

Straight bars.

Anyway, when we're looking at that, think about the idea of the difference between

"I'm going to have me a posse", which is what you might usually hear in a Western,

to the "armada", which is a huge fleet of ships.

I mean, imagine the level of guns that our Kansan is saying

he's going to bring to this marshal.

Another thing that we have is, as we move down in the poem, we have,

"Marshall's a marksman, maps Kansan's track", and so he's tracking the Kansan.

And then one of the funnier images for me, but also one of the few

that seems like you would actually inherit it in this language,

in Western, is the gnawing of the fatback, right?.

So even here we have different textures of the letter 'a'.

Different sounds, gnaw, a, a, against the fat, a, a, back.

So even when one is using just one vowel, think of the range of sounds,

the subtle shifts that will charge

these moments of difference from the hard rhyming and the repetition,

the assonance, into moments that are more subtle, slight changes in the sound.

It's really dazzling what Hong is doing with this poem.

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