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Preface Poetry, real poetry, is an extraordinary art form. Being a poet is much like being a composer of symphonies. Just as a composer writes each note on a musical staff, and composes harmonies for the different instruments, and knows when to enhance the percussion or the woodwinds, a great poet has an array of tools and techniques at hand, and puts each sound on the page, one sound at a time, in a deliberately chosen rhythm, for a reason. A poet might spend a year carefully perfecting a fourteen-line sonnet. This book, though it explores many powerful and technical things that poets can do with the sounds of words, is only a hint. It just cracks open the door, giving you a peek inside the huge world of creative life that poets live in. Though this is but an introduction, it is nevertheless an introduction to the real thing. The purpose of this book is to find ways to reveal the reality of poem power, to give students an eyeball-tothe-letter closeup of what goes on in a poetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thought. The architect Mies van der Rohe said that God is in the details; I hope that by putting a microscope on the beautiful details of poetry, I can show how wonderful they are.


If we look at this line from Robert Burns once more, and darken the stressed syllables, it looks like this:

My Ma ryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a sleep by thy mur mur ing stream Robert Burns put two unstressed syllables between each of the stressed syllables. Why would he do that in a description of a stream? Do you think a stream has a perfectly regular beat? 44

POEMS Marianne Moore said that poems were imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Real toads, however, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come easy. What we have learned is that poets are special writers, who know how to push language to its limits in order to say true things. Like composers of music, these composers of words do everything possible to create the most extraordinary expressions and observations. Poets are not just language decorators, trying to arrange pretty words; they are more like scientists or detectives, who give their lives to discover what is unknown, and then try to make a true report. Even in our brief introduction to poetry, we have seen that poets can play language like an instrument, rhyming words at the ends of lines, or within the lines, giving the lines a regular rhythm by arranging words based on the 139

Music of the Hemispheres