PROSODY
and the preciousness of life
a site dedicated to the elucidation and practice of prosody
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Over the last 25 years, I've taught various aspects of prosody in contexts as diverse as the Harvard Divinity School, Duke University, SFSU Poetry Center, Laboratorio Alameda in Mexico City, BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, HIAP Gallery Agusta in Helsinki, Deep Listening Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, New School for Social Research, the Robert Wilson Watermill Center and Hofstra University.
In 2006, I co-founded, with choreographer Daria Faïn, an integrative artscience called The Prosody Body, along with its performative body called The Phoneme Choir (subsequently morphed into The Commons Choir).
In spring of 2018, I taught a 3-month prosody course at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. The course consisted of 11 sessions and was titled Prosody, Privatization, Performance and Peace. This course established the basis for an ongoing, ever-evolving, expansive prosody curriculum, as well as a committed group of participants and practitioners. The course is currently presented under the title Prosody and the Preciousness of Life, continuing prosody's total implication in the composition of our lives.
A prosody program is also currently being proposed as an interactive, trans-disciplinary field in various educational settings. The program could also be considered a very extensive creative writing course, covering, for example, poetry's basic elements of composition, comparative classical and contemporary poetics, evolutionary linguistics, biosemiotics, psychoacoustics, phonosemantics, mantra, and cosmogony.
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general definition of prosody:
Prosody is limitless expression beyond, and encoded within, the lexical limits of language. It's extralinguistic, as well as intrinsic to our impulse to speak. Prosody is, of course, poetry's basic elements of composition: tempo, tension, intensity, timbre, rising and falling intonation, rhyme, meter (and all its metaplasms), duration, cadence, caesura, pause, pitch, sound and syntactic recurrence, and assorted stresses (comprised of loudness, duration and pitch variables). A whisper is purely prosodic, as is a word withheld. Prosody is the overall measure, the music, the manner of making meaning. Pragmatically, emotion, mood, attitude, implied meaning, and the tonal differences between questioning, explaining, exclaiming and commanding, are also prosodic phenomena. Socially, it is by means of prosodic correlates (timbre, intensity, pitch, loudness, formants, frequency contours, interactional response time and speech rate) that we form snap inferences with regard to each other's qualities, character and condition. While conscious use of prosodic elements sets poetry apart from speech, these same elements also constitute speech. And in turn, speech can be set to poetry. This song/speech contrariety is one of the oldest stories on earth... Non-acoustic (retinal/written) transcriptive, typographic devices such as font-choice, boldface, striking-through, overprinting, handwriting, word-spacing, enjambment, line page-placement and use of white space can also be read prosodically, as an extra-lexical score or performance notation. The poem’s stored performance on the page or screen (or in the cloud) might be its only presence, written for no ulterior stage, as pure page or screen prosody untransduced from vocalization, awaiting the metabolic speed of diffusion on paper or speed of light electronic transmission. (And in our soundless reading of writing, prosody is present, perhaps even more boundlessly, in mind.) As a science, prosody can be defined as suprasegmental phonology, focused on the primary correlates of prosody (intensity, pitch, duration, rhythm) of course not necessarily related to poetry. On the other hand, the science of versification (orally transmitted, prehistorically, then written as treatises on pronunciation, articulatory phonetics, phonotactics and appropriate metrics as applied to poetry, tracing back to the Vedic Pratishākhyas, the Dravidian Tolkāppiyam, Aristoxenus's Ἁρμονικὰ στοιχεῖα, Hephaestion's Enchiridion, to name a few) is as old as versification itself. (I think it's fair to say that linguistics itself was conceived for the purposes of poetry.) Defined more broadly, the science of prosody includes a rich array of current linguistic research in areas such as biolinguistics, psychoacoustics, cognitive philology, sociolinguistics, phoniatrics, semiochemical ecology, evolutionary linguistics, phonosemantics, kinesics, biosemiotics, affective prosody, comparative poetics, graphemics, corpus linguistics and choreoprosodia. Yet, these sciences are rarely, if ever, referred to within the teaching and practice of poetry, even though tending to the opaque, material qualities of words is basic to verse. Reciprocally, poets' contribution to linguistic science is, I believe, negligible-to-nonexistent. Of course, literary studies and cultural literary theory and criticism (often written by poets themselves) necessarily focus on the language-art object. Still, a vital interchange, a profoundly integrative, non-polar prosody artscience, has not been part of the curriculum. "I am myself hopeful that linguistic studies will bring to contemporary criticism a vocabulary and method more sensitive to the basic activity of poetry and less dependent upon assumed senses of literary style." Robert Creeley Prosody and gesture are co-occurrences in the same semiotic system, processed in the same areas (Broca's and Wernicke's) of the brain. Motor gestures conduct/accompany/pantomime prosodic expression. Deictic gestures point things out. Iconic gestures like waving goodbye or throwing a kiss substitute for words. Lexical gestures are like non-verbal, semiotic onomatopoeia. Gesture Theory posits that language evolved from manual gesturing. Gesture enactment helps us select and recall words. In effect, articulation is a highly specific sequence of gestures performed by the tongue within the vocal cavity. Gesture is one way in which performance is a part of prosody's multimodality. Prosody conducts conversation, syncs work, organizes play, frees emotion, regulates bioprocesses and modulates mood. "... it’s that I experience myself inside these constantly swerving, intensely physical processes of semiosis. Biochemistry and language just don’t feel that different to me." (Donna Haraway). In terms of evolutionary development, in my approach, prosody is the precursor of both language and music. And ontogenically, prosody (beginning with embryoprosodia and even conception and preconceptive impulses to nurture and parent) is the precious proto-linguistic motherese (Infant Directed Speech). Through tone and touch, we're basically made to be infinitely attentive, receptive, nuanced and loving. Although prosody is conventionally considered a suprasegmental phenomenon, I include the segments (the phonemes) as part of prosody — these few dozen fundamental sounds specific to human phonation, as potencies in themselves. In terms of both physics and metaphysics (say, vibration, invisibility, indivisibility) the elements of composition of poetry — the forces that pattern matter — can be directly experienced as cosmogenic, as background silence, un-caused sound, relic rhythm, the beginning's pre-condition, formative phonemic energy, initial arising re-enacted as the impulse to speak. Prosody includes cosmos as part of nature. Nature makes 'our' nature part of the cosmos. Immateriality of language is also part of prosody. Here, I'm not referring to 'transparency' in contradistinction to 'opacity.' The term 'transparency' is often used to disparage poetry unaware of the physicality of its medium; see-through poetry. Prosody is partnered with the immateriality of mind and the inscrutable arising, presence, disappearance of language. Prosody is formative rhythm, if you prefer. It solves and dissolves the hard problem of the division of energy and matter. Spiritual Prosody, if you will. Perhaps Subtle Prosody. Here, Samuel Beckett's statement is perfectly apt: "All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.” Prosody is that which makes language poetry. Which words? Entheogenic words. Logos is human perception of language by means of prosody. Because language exists at all, words are realization no matter what we say. Prosody inscribes spirituality in language. Vocal, vibrational patterns resume materialization. We speak seed sounds. Sequences of phonemes make mantras and orisons. The sequences, as speech, make interrelationship. (We formed around the phones, once upon a time.) Prosodic Listening picks up total interconnectivity: cross-species call and response and rhythmic entrainment. The unstruck word, anahata-śabda, the deepest listening practice. Patanjali's vāg-yoga, union with words as original. Word after word — grammar — the force for breaking through the doubled door of ignorance and ego. The meters each assigned a divinity. Meaning, however changeable (because contingent) is meant to last forever. For the Vedic rishis and rishikas, it was an initial act of ascesis that brought the world about; an operation dimensionlessness performed on itself; a fervor, if you prefer, embodied by the poets; disciplines and anti-disciplines; basic skills and somatic/energetic practices indispensable to the creation of poetry: nature-of-mind meditation, chant, fasting, withdrawal of the senses, pranayama, kumbhaka, dark retreat, medical practice, ritual, nonconformity, total attunement, lunacy, channel opening, becoming luminous. When appropriate, I've integrated ascetic practices in my teaching. I've always presented prosody as experiential, not as a study or topic per se. Prosody is what is most human about us; conscious, attuned conduct; the totally transformative power of tone of voice and potency of words emanating from insight and heart; the pleasure of rhythmic reciprocity. The role of the poet: the responsibility in picking up the pith elements of composition as the means for realizing one's life in being of benefit to others. The writing of the poem is both a small part of the practice of poetry and all there is to it. I've called this capacious approach 'integrative' or 'implicate' prosody. Conscious Prosody, for balancing; Vestibular Prosody, for forthrightness, for conflict resolution, for bioregulation, for being conscious and caring for each other. Prosody Diagnostics. Dead Giveaway Prosody. It's written all over us. I have been variously practicing, researching, presenting, performing, propagating and publishing prosodic works for over 30 years. In 2006, with choreographer Daria Faïn, I co-founded an experiential art-science named The Prosodic Body. In 2008, in order to put into practice and perform our research, Faïn and I then formed a theater group known as The Phoneme Choir, commingling movement and language as choreoprosodia. In 2010, to apply our practice more directly to social, systemic, civilizational and karmic suffering and wellbeing, the choir morphed into The Commons Choir. In March of 2018 I began teaching a prosody course (through the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, grâce à Simone White) titled Prosody Privatization Performance and Peace — a poetry and creative writing course with voice, movement, somatic, medical, meditation, mantra and spiritual practices integral to the teaching. This ongoing course is now called Prosody and the Preciousness of Life. And there will be further iterations and subtitles. Although the course is conceived in series, the individual sessions are also stand-alone presentation/discussions, complete in themselves. While the sessions do, for the most part, follow and fulfill a predetermined sequence, the energetics is also experiential and improvisatory; the sessions react to themselves; they may be out of sequence or in sync with breaking news or participant needs. Although the course is whole at every point, at the same time, the elucidation of prosody is exhausting and inexhaustible. It's prosody's ever-present and impossible wholeness that impels me forward, backward, outward, inward, everywhere, anywhere. 'This' story of prosody, told through the cosmogenic stich that brought the world about (and has continually been updated by poets to this day) with a special focus on contemporary poetry, poetics and the current plethora of prosodic innovations.
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CURRENT PROSODY COURSE SCHEDULE upcoming, online only, notices and links via the newsletter
Feel free to attend the meetings, singly or serially. For those new to the course, all is not lost. Prior meetings were based on notes I presented as talks, which I then drafted as essays. These drafts can be found here. And the original announcement for this iteration of the prosody course — Prosody and the Preciousness of Life — can be found here.
Sunday Dec. 3, 2023, 1:30-3:30PM EST
An Undemeaning of Meter (part 2 of 2)
For decades, I've been expanding on prosody, working against any restrictive definition, such as its most reductive equation with meter (with meter itself reduced to metronomic tedium and entombment). In my lifework of telling an entire story of prosody, having been dismissive of meter as well, I felt I had to turn and face the demeaned, the desiccation ... the cadaver. This isn't a defense of meter as integral to prosody, or recompense for the short shrift it's suffered. Rather it's an openness to our most ancient mediator of speech and song, a log of the extended, unexpected shock of meeting this self-imposed requirement, as well as an expression of gratitude for its windfall. We live in meter's shadow. (text from Part 1 can be read here)
Sunday Dec. 17, 2023, 1:30-3:30pm EST
Sowa Rigpa Treating Poetry, the Poetics of Traditional Tibetan Medicine
"May all I make, compound or assemble together be medicine."
I'll present a new science or method of inquiry or critique by correlating traditional medicine and experimental poetics. Anything can be a medicine. Anything can be a poison. I'll focus on the 3 poisons and 3 fruits, the primary cause of disease, the 5 elements and 3 humors in relation to reading and writing poetry. (prior, partial presentation described here)
Sunday Jan. 14, 2024, 1:30-3:30pm EST
Trans-Species Prosody and the Elemental Interdependence of Everything
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announcement for the most recent series of meetings:
As before, the meetings will be in person, online, recorded or available as text. Again, the newsletter will be used to provide all the necessary details. If you're not already signed on, you can do so here.
I'd like to design the schedule together, accommodatively. in determining the best overall day of the week for meeting, the time of day, and the interval between meetings, please get back to me soon if you have any preferences. The course will be, as before, donation-based (modeled on Sanskrit dāna.)
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Where we left off, and what the pause was all about: after expanding on prosody for five sessions, I wanted to deal exclusively with prosody's most conventional, restrictive definition as 'meter' — contrastive, binary foot-scansion, spectra reduced to stricture. This zeroing in exploded into a vast, overwhelming task to reckon with (a course in itself). At the same time I began full-time training in Tibetan Medicine (whose interrelation with poetics I'll address in a subsequent newsletter) and at the same time I bought a dilapidated pre-CivilWar farmhouse crying out for restoration. All at once.
Picking up where we left off: there'll be 6 interdependent sessions:
An Undemeaning of Meter (prosody from scratch; see full into below)
Prosodic Body/Subtle Body/Energetics/Biophysics Rolled Into One
The Medium is the Medicine (what it is is how it works)
Trans-species Prosody (the singular and plural for 'species' is selfsame; it's not 'communication' but consciousness; it's total Pratītyasamutpāda)
Vibe (energy as vibration and the physics of sound)
Implicate Prosody (one's rhythmic, reciprocal conduct indissociable from ethics, ecology, equity and attuned responsibility in light of the predominant extinctual paradigms and necronormalcy)
What's new: I'd also like to occasionally use the newsletter as a sort of prosody periodical, for informing with regard to the developments and dimensions within prosody as a field. And, as many of you know, I often intermix the meetings with various breath, mantra, movement, medicinal, heart, mind and listening practices, a modicum of the ascesis that has always gone hand in hand with the calling of poetry. At some point, if there's ample interest, I'd like to organize a separate, all-day session for instilling these pith supports.
AN UNDEMEANING OF METER (preview of the first session)
"La métrique est la théorie du rhythme des imbeciles." Henri Meschonnic
Meter protects the syllables. In this sense, meter is mantric.
Meter also means 'to clothe or cover.' That with which one covers oneself in order to be invisible to death. That with which one covers oneself to keep from being harmed by one's own sacrifice.
Meter is our mother, and our father. We're made of beat. Meter is metabolic. Everybody's different. Meter makes it so. Aperiodic people may need to move more methodically. Feet first.
Meter is public. Where we agree to meet.
There is no clear correlation between an anarchic, arbitrarily autarchic beat and disease, unsociability and ecocide. Or is there?
What, exactly, does meter meter, and how fully aware are we of what that is?
Are syllables figmental or actually existent? We speak in syllables. Syllables synchronize segmental and suprasegmental streams. Syllables are the sensorial (and not merely analogous). Or are they nucleated nothingness? Content's peristalsis coursing through us? Syllables are self-arising resonance of the original light. Syllable is the prototypic quantum model: workable as particle and/or wave. We'd be cosmogenesis-less without them. (We're destroying our world because speech is not perceived as seed syllabification.) Elemental ritual. Creation! One complete jaw oscillation with one sonority peak.
Or we could say that syllables are an accommodation of scarcely understood, glaring neuromotor constraints.
Here's how it works: infants teach grownups syllables as how things get pointed out.
(Certainly I can say that prosody caused syllabification.)
It's sonority that determines syllable (see the Sonority Sequencing Principle). Sonority is vocal tract openness, fullness of airflow, sustainability, perspicuity and supraglottal ease (intraoral air pressure is inversely correlated with sonority... the less effort the freer the force). As such, sonority is our least impeded love. Through sonority we may re-heed human being.
No one can know sonority or syllable without owning phonotactics and the paths of articulatory phonetics. Because we say "play" we parse am pli tude, not amp lit ude (unless you shoplift.) Accordingly, I'll suggest writing experiments with words made of phonemes nearest to each other in sonority (e.g., high vowels and sonorants) or furthest apart (low vowels and stops); with words made only of the most constricted or most open vowels and consonants; with only voiceless obstruents or only continuants or the two in alternating strophes; or a work with only open syllables (no closing consonants, like Bantu and Japanese).
Can phonotactics be meaningfully violated? Can we hear so impartially, to travel outside our phonic ruts? Can we turn the syllable inside out? Hear another people's phonotactics inhering in our own? (PIE, from which English stems, was rife with consonant clustering lost to us: sr, dw, dl, lg, dn, gw, sd, tst, sg, dt, dd, kt, ks, gs, tk, dg, wb, lksn, and the like.
Relax for real, reinvent morphophonemics. Shout out the unvoiced. The cat's out of the bag: sound and meaning correlation is the constituent principle of phenomena. We don't just skip and flit along the surface of phonetic symbolism and onomatopoeic imitation (croak).
Other experiments: treat English polysynthetically: write sentencewords. Language is one lexeme. Pre-differentiate. Or work with word as utterly non-indivisible.
miinibaashkiminasiganibiitoosijiganibadagwiingweshiganibakwezhigan: the longest word in affixally polysynthetic Ojibwe (Anishinaabemowin) is a blueberry pie, i.e., blueberry cooked to jellied preserve that lies in layers in which the face is covered in bread
Words are about to pass out of existence. Words are about to pass out from existence.
Before it's too late, hear the qualities of the individual speech sounds (as they are the set of elements, the building blocks). Or go about it more graphically (Dante was a phonic coiffeur).
It is due to meter that both quantity and quality continue to pertain to poetics.
But does the quantity/quality quandary still weigh on us? Does English carry weight? Although weight attracts stress and heavy can land on long, these forces don't necessarily equate. The 5th century CE sackings of Rome can be understood as a clash between quality and quantity: accentual, alliterative East Germanic Goth collapsing the system that had sustained quantity-sensitization of Latin for 700 years, while collaterally reasserting 'vulgar' stress and prefiguring the rhyme-happy Dark Ages and the quantification counter-revolutions to come (from Claudio Tolomei's Accademia della Nuova Poesia right up to Zukofksy's neo-neoteric Catullus translations.)
In effect, civilization and syllable quantification are correlates.
Civility weaponizes itself to become the barbarity it believes it supersedes. Are classical metrics wrapped up in this history, having overspread the neo-Latin 'developing' vernaculars?
Civilization keeps rules from arising from nature.
"What honour were it then for our English language to be the first that after so many yeares of barbarisme could second the perfection of the industrious Greekes and Romaines?" — Thomas Campion
Is there an ur-meter? Is it not recurrence in the cadence, the line's closing feet, that has carried melody all along (over 90% of Ennius's lines close with word-stress on the beginning of the fifth and sixth feet)?
Or is English rhythm strictly an inside job: nothing more than stress isochrony allowed by vowel-weakening in unstressed syllables? (Schwa is our drone, our om.)
If measure is dead to the immeasurable (the myriadly moraic) how can there be music?
After great pain, a formal feeling came —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.
Emily Dickinson
