Poetry as Heartbeat (Audio)
Michael Enright, host of CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition is conducting a series of interviews on poetry with Bruce Meyer, professor of English at Laurentian University. The first, entitled How Poems Sound (Jan 22/06), starts with a search for the best definition of poetry. The best is Coleridge’s, who calls poems ‘the best words in the best order’.
With similar simplicity Meyer asks listeners to cover their ears, then hold their throats in order to hear and feel the different stresses made by vowels and consonants, first soft humming, second heavy expelling; just like a heart beat. Poetry then is measured motion, patterns of stresses and sounds, beats. Light-heavy, heavy-heavy, heavy-light… with each preportedly conjuring an objectively realizable ambience, designed to elicit a specific, predictable feeling, mood. And iambic pentametre? All about the breath: apparently, from centuries of observation, five beats is what us English folk can comfortably recite without need of breath. And there’s more, like Freddy Mercury’s poetic genius in We will Rock You:
Poetry is Life and Vice Versa
with Bruce Meyer
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