Writing Your Rhythm: Using Nature, Culture, Form and Myth

he following exercises are from Writing Your Rhythm: Using Nature, Culture, Form and Myth, which will be available from Story Line Press in Spring 2001. The book has over two hundred exercises (most work either alone or in a group setting). Writing Your Rhythm has a focus on the connections between form and nature, as well as an emphasis on emulation of various techniques in writing. Each chapter also contains a short discussion and background of the particular topic or technique and an occasional related anecdote. Although the book contains exercises for generating both prose and poetry, it establishes the rhythm at the root of all good writing and asserts that practicing poetic techniques can be useful to finding this rhythm.

Emulation: Response and Creativity

Introductions to basic elements of form such as meter need to be creative and fun — experiential, performative, and involve emulation. Just as we all understand geography better when we have visited the place, we better understand particulars of poetry when we have tried the techniques ourselves. The two following exercises using emulation and response have worked particularly well in workshop settings.

Spells and Trochaic Meter

Trochaic meter (a pattern of stressed, unstressed syllables) is a particularly effective meter for creating a "hypnotic" motion in a poem. The word derives from the Greek trochaios (running or tripping). The Greek trochos means wheel. Trochaic meter has a kind of forward-skipping effect. Poe's familiar poem, "The Raven," is a good example. Following are the opening lines:

	Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
	Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
	While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a  tapping,
	As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
	"Tis some visitor," I   muttered,   "tapping at my chamber door —

					Only   this and   nothing   more."

					—Edgar Allan Poe ( 1809-1849)

The trochaic meter helps to create the effect of the mysterious and dream-like in the poem.

Variation in meter is as important as establishing the underlying pattern. It is relatively common for lines within a basic iambic pattern to begin with trochees. Sometimes, a trochaic foot might be used within a basic iambic passage for particular emphasis, as in Wordsworth's "gloomy" emphasis in the following line from "The Prelude":

"In silence, through a wood, gloomy and still."

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, when the witches cast their well-known spell, the blank verse of the play changes to trochaic meter, with rhyme and a repetition of sounds and words to heighten the effect of the magic:

Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing —
For a charm of pow'rful trouble.
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Write an emulation of the above spell.
List the necessary ingredients in the first four lines (try using ingredients of this day and age). The choice of ingredients can also be a good way to talk about symbol. The items used in the spell could be chosen for their symbolic purpose: a love letter, a test, a dress.
In the second half, include an incantation (with words such as double, double, toil and trouble...) and the intent of the spell.
Use trochaic meter throughout the spell.
One caution: When I use this exercise in classes, I like to suggest that students frame their wishes in the positive (for obvious reasons). For instance, if you want to get someone out of your life, try a spell for something positive which will take the person far far away from you.

Completing Kubla Khan

"Kubla Khan, Or A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment" is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous fifty-four line fragment. In a prefatory note to the poem, Coleridge explains that an entire poem (200-300 lines) appeared to him in a dream. In ill health, he had fallen asleep after taking a painkiller (likely laudanum). He was reading Purchas His Pilgrimage, likely the following sentences: "Here the Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." He believed he composed the entire poem in his sleep, but adds: "if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort." On waking, he began to write down what he remembered. He was interrupted, however, by a person on business who took him away from the poem for more than an hour. When he returned to his room, Coleridge found that the rest of the poem had escaped his memory. Because conflicting accounts from Coleridge himself exists, the circumstances surrounding the poem remain somewhat mysterious.

One can certainly relate to the notion of the interrupted process or idea, though our accounts may not be as dramatic as Coleridge's stated loss of two hundred composed lines. Many poets have since attempted to complete the famous fragment.

Kubla Khan

Or a Vision in a Dream.  A Fragment

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
	Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills.
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills.
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted 
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
nd sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

	The shadow of the dome of pleasure
	Floated midway on the waves;
	Where was heard the mingled measure
	From the fountains and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

	A damsel with a dulcimer
	In a vision once I saw:
	It was an Abyssinian maid,
	And on her dulcimer she played,
	Singing of Mount Abora.
	Could I revive within me
	Her symphony and song,
	To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there.
And all should cry Beware!  Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
	—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

(The Khan is a reference to the first khan, or ruler of the Mongol dynasty in 13th -century China. The named places are fictitious, as is the topography.)

Though you might endeavor to complete the poem on your own, you could also try writing a collaborative closure:

In a group, read the poem aloud.
Notice how Coleridge uses rhyme, though not in a recurring pattern. The poem also has a generally iambic beat. Sometimes the line has five beats, sometimes four.
After noting such elements, read the poem aloud again (to get back into the rhythm).
Each person should write the next line of the poem, keeping in mind the general iambic beat and changing rhyme scheme. Don't give the meaning of the line too much thought, but allow the unconscious to take over somewhat. Try to "catch" the rhythm of the poem. (Take only about a minute or two per line) and then pass the papers to the right.
Each person then writes a second line, and passes the paper. This continues until the papers have traveled around the room, and you have the one which you began.
Complete the poem with your own final line, and read a few of them aloud.

Diane Thiel's book, Echolocations, has received the 2000 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in November from Story Line Press. Her work appears in Best American Poetry 1999, The Hudson Review, and Poetry. Her writing guide, Writing Your Rhythm, is forthcoming from Story Line in 2001. She received her BA and MFA from Brown University and currently holds the Visiting Poet/Assistant Professor position at the University of Miami. For more information, see Ms. Thiel's web page.