Gino's Ghazal Blog

Kind of Blue

In early 1964, I bought three or four vinyl LPs at Melrose's record store on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. One of those was Miles Davis' great Kind of Blue. Kind of Blue was released in 1959, so I was a little late getting it. I was a mason's helper in rural Kansas in August 1959, without access to stores that would've sold Kind of Blue. I didn't know about it until I saw it in the bin in 1964. Since buying it then on vinyl, I've bought Kind of Blue on cassette and CD. I have it on my  iPod and hard-drives too.

Today's Slate has an article honoring the album's 5oth anniversary. The article contains a clear, nontechnical explanation of the differences between improvisation based on chord structures and on modes (scales). Kind of Blue introduced modal jazz. The article has good clips from several different tracks to illustrate its points.

Poetry and music share the quality of being arts of sound in time, arts of rhythmic sound. Insight into Miles' modal jazz may give you some good reflections on poetry. I recommend both Slate's article and Miles' album.

Performing Ghazals

In the cultures of its origin and development, the ghazal is a lyric for music. Just a little time with Google will take you to sites about ghazal music, as in this site. In English, the ghazal is considered a form of poetry and not a form of lyric for songs. Poetry in English is often performed but not often with music. (Some lyrics stand well as poetry, but that's coming at the topic from a different angle.)

People from cultures where the ghazal is a form of music are often surprised by the Western view of it as a form of (printed) poetry. Western poetry has been performed to music: the poetry and jazz movement that originated in San Francisco is one example. Yet music and poetry haven't become very popular. Perhaps the ghazal can be the form that brings poetry back into cooperation with music.

Raindust, whose ghazal "Clouds & Rain" appeared in the special issue featuring that radif, has released a CD of poetry and music, Grin and Gulp Ghazals. Raindust performs the poems with an accompaniment of various percussion instruments (including a lawn mower!) and an oud on a few tracks. Here is her performance of "Clouds & Rain" in MP3 format.Download Clouds & Rain

Raindust's NadaOm Web site contains information on her practice and teaching of Nada Yoga (the yoga of sound). I will post soon on her mentor, Francis Brabazon. In the meantime, if you know of other meldings of the English ghazal and music, please let me know about them.

"Musicality in Verse," Part 2

The previous entry on this topic discussed consonants. This entry discusses vowels.

I've posted a new page, "A Game for Your Ears," which applies these ideas. The game is an exercise I wrote for my creative writing classes.

Consonants are formed by altering the flow of breath, stopping it, making it hiss, directing it through the nose, and so on. Consonants are formed in different parts of the mouth (& nose); some are voiced, others not.

Vowels are formed also by altering the flow of breath at specific points in the mouth, using positions of the lower jaw, the lips, and the tongue. Vowels are not stopped or subjected to friction. Vowels are voiced unless one is whispering. Vowels are defined, like consonants, by "minimal pairs": two words which differ only in one sound. The difference defines both vowels as phonemes (meaningful sounds) in that language.

For instance, "pit" and "pat" define the minimal pair, /i, a/. The inconsistencies of English spelling mean one has to actually pronounce the words to hear the vowel. The phonemic alphabet for transcribing English is fairly straightforward for consonants, needing only a few non-alphabet symbols; transcribing vowels requires more special symbols. For those interested in more specific information, antimoon.com presents English phonemes with corresponding symbols.

Disclaimer: One does not need to know the phonemic alphabet or be able to transcribe English into that alphabet in order to write good poetry. What one needs is a good ear for the language.

Kenneth Burke shows us how sets of consonants, such as m - n - b - p - d - t - f - v, can create the music of a poem. Burke doesn't discuss vowels, merely quoting Coleridge to suggest that consonants are primary. So, what about vowels? Vowels can not be organized in sets as Burke does the consonants. Vowels are grouped by linguists into front, middle, and back, and into high, mid, and low — relative positions in the mouth. Here's sentence illustrating the front vowels:

"He will wed her." In order, the vowels are high front, mid front, low front, and then a mid vowel (an "r-colored schwa"). These vowels aren't related in the way that, for instance, the consonants in "Many bold friends told of Paris." Yet the sequence — the flow — of vowels is obviously essential to the music of a poem.

I don't believe that poems, good poems, begin in calculation. A good poems begins in intuition, in a hunch that a sequence of words, an experience, an idea, a feeling is worth writing about. The sounds, along with the other elements of the poem follow from that hunch (inspiration, if you will). Conscious thought enters in revision, is not part of the initial vision.

By way of a closing example, here are the first two couplets of Brandy Bauer's "Ghazal (Kabul)," from the July 2007 issue of The Ghazal Page. She uses both consonants and vowels very effectively.

A bleak season arrived when I alit at Kabul.
Plunged into nothingness, a skeleton, this Kabul.

Here in the street, festering water and dust.
Whose fires now choke the qanats of Kabul?

I won't do detailed analysis of these lines; you will be rewarded by reading them aloud carefully. Note the subtle, and effective, relationship of "arrived" and "alit" in the first line or of "street" and "festering" in the third line.

I plan to return to this topic soon. If you have comments, including examples, please send them along.

 

"Musicality in Verse"

The title of this post is the title of an essay by Kenneth Burke, a great literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's contributions have been somewhat overshadowed, perhaps, by the dominance of postmodernism for a numbe of years. Burke just wasn't fashionable. A Google search on "Kenneth Burke" produced a gratifying number of hits that look good. I'll provide only the University of Minnesota site linked above from his name.

The essay this post is based on, "Musicality in Verse," appears in Burke's The Philosophy of Literary Form, Louisiana State University Press, second edition, 1967. In the post, I put Burke's insights into my own words with my own examples. The topic is significant enough for working poets that I may follow it up in a later post. I highly recommend that you get Burke's essay, if possible, and read it.

Burke's main point is this: some speech-sounds closely resemble others, differing only in one or two features. These speech-sounds form sets and are used by poets as they use alliteration. Burke calls these patterns "concealed alliteration by cognates." Sounds in the middle or at the end of words also count as part of this approach.

Every language's sound system consists of phonemes — speech-sounds that make a difference in the meaning of words. Phonemes are defined by "minimal pairs": two words with different meanings in which the only sound difference is the pair of sounds being defined.

A common example is the two English words "bit" and "pit." These words differ only in the /b/ and the /p/ sounds, so they define /b, p/ as phonemes in English. Both /b/ and /p/ are made by stopping the flow of breath with the lips and then releasing it. The difference is that /b/ is voiced and /p/ is unvoiced. When you say "b," your vocal chords vibrate (unless you're whispering); thus, /b/ is voiced. You hear these differences or you couldn't understand English. Try saying both "bit" and "pit" with your hands over your ears. You will hear the buzzing of your vocal chords on the /b/ but not the /p/.

Webster's 1913 dictionary has this example in its definition of "alliteration":

Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness. – Milton.

The /b/ and /v/ alliterations in this line are obvious. Less obvious to one's analysis, although obvious to one's ear are the b, p. and v cognate alliterations. (I'm dropping the slashes, used to mark phonemes.) V is alliteratively cognate with both b and p because of its phonemic features: it is made with the upper lip and lower teeth and is voiced. The unvoiced -th in "Behemoth" and "earth" also alliterate cognately with v (lips and tongue). The medial /g/ in "biggest" is also part of this group of cognate sounds.

Milton's play with vowels are also important to the effect of this line (which is, remember, out of context). I won't go into vowels now, so I definitely will discuss this topic again.