o jah mon
Hi all—
Like most everyone else, this is my first x-posure to Brathwaite and I’m pretty much blown away by his poems. On a personal level, it’s strangely heartening to see a modern-day poet so successfully embracing techniques like alliteration, consonance, assonance and rhyme, since (in some of my drafts) I tend towards those repetitions of sounds, even though I’ve tried to tone it down and/or break myself of the habit occasionally over the years. With lines like “first there is the frost and it was light / blue almost white / like cloud. Icing of furushima / and then it was real cloud. / like the blue/ mountains” there’s obviously still hope for these techniques in the right hands (63).
Brathwaite is so strongly aware of the sound and rhythm (and silence) of language—down to the last syllable—that I hope we get to hear him read at some point. I tried to down load some stuff to bring too but couldn’t get it to work either. Reading his work also really made me aware of the percussive and rhythmic capabilities of one and two syllable words, as happens in “Words Need Love Too”: “bringing yr lips at last out/ not to resist/ not to resist but kiss/ kiss shapes back into their proper pout / & speech back into their proper sounds / & even beyond these proper sounds / soft song / soft songs / chant canticle poem & halleluja halleluja halleluja” (28). The kiss and pout are wonderfully alliterative, and they link to their meanings within the poem surrounding love/ communication / words / speech through it and through repetition; the three-syllable “halleluja”s seem even more expansive and dramatic when proceeded by all of the shorter, more percussive words about words. His use of nation language fits so strongly into his rhythms it makes me wish I had one, but, sadly the little test told me I speak 80% General American English and 20% Yankee, whatever those are. Valley Girl just really doesn’t seem like it would cut it (though you never know…)
Thanks,
Eve
Like most everyone else, this is my first x-posure to Brathwaite and I’m pretty much blown away by his poems. On a personal level, it’s strangely heartening to see a modern-day poet so successfully embracing techniques like alliteration, consonance, assonance and rhyme, since (in some of my drafts) I tend towards those repetitions of sounds, even though I’ve tried to tone it down and/or break myself of the habit occasionally over the years. With lines like “first there is the frost and it was light / blue almost white / like cloud. Icing of furushima / and then it was real cloud. / like the blue/ mountains” there’s obviously still hope for these techniques in the right hands (63).
Brathwaite is so strongly aware of the sound and rhythm (and silence) of language—down to the last syllable—that I hope we get to hear him read at some point. I tried to down load some stuff to bring too but couldn’t get it to work either. Reading his work also really made me aware of the percussive and rhythmic capabilities of one and two syllable words, as happens in “Words Need Love Too”: “bringing yr lips at last out/ not to resist/ not to resist but kiss/ kiss shapes back into their proper pout / & speech back into their proper sounds / & even beyond these proper sounds / soft song / soft songs / chant canticle poem & halleluja halleluja halleluja” (28). The kiss and pout are wonderfully alliterative, and they link to their meanings within the poem surrounding love/ communication / words / speech through it and through repetition; the three-syllable “halleluja”s seem even more expansive and dramatic when proceeded by all of the shorter, more percussive words about words. His use of nation language fits so strongly into his rhythms it makes me wish I had one, but, sadly the little test told me I speak 80% General American English and 20% Yankee, whatever those are. Valley Girl just really doesn’t seem like it would cut it (though you never know…)
Thanks,
Eve
posted by Eve at 1:27 PM
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