Today, good old Esoteric London brings us plastic bunnies.
Along with a great example of how rhyming can come a cropper by way of regional accent is formed by the way we talk. In fact, celebrates speech.
English is a big language, and it spans both time and countries. I remember beng puzzled as a kid by some of the rhymes in Shelley or Byron (no wonder!), & Mama Baroque would explain to me that it was a visual rhyme, or it was assonance, or the poet was just having fun, or it was how he pronounced the word because he was in a different time and place.
I’ve seen, or been privy to, many many conversations in poetry forums or workshops, where a rhyme in someone’s poem will be debated because to a certain ear it might make no sense as a rhyme. Things are said not to “work” because “you have to be English” (or Irish, or Greek, or Australian, or from Oklahoma, or whatever), and their knowledge of other accents seems in some areas to be rather weak. (N.b., the UK TV series Life on Mars went out in the USA with sub-titles.) People get all wound up about this (“It’s not accessible because I didn’t know about that pronunciation, I feel excluded”), and groups will debate the rights and wrongs of it until you want to hit them over the head with an Esperanto dictionary.
Rhyming slang: it should be compulsory in both schools and workplaces.
(PS: I have to admit I didn’t even know “rabbit” – as in “talk” – was rhyming slang. Never really thought about it. That’s another kind of downfall.)
a beloved Australian poet C.J.Dennis wrote a saga of love in the 1917 streets and anyone my age knows the reference ” ‘er name’s Doreen … ” which begins The Sentimental Bloke which goes to such nuclear-type war on Received Pronunciation, that it hardly resembles English, but as I said, beloved.
I went once to a Pam Ayres poetry reading in Melbourne, late 1970′s. Apparently it was the English language, but also extremely charming.
You see we should just never have started writing stuff down!
x
Well, I can;t agree with that…! But I do think people who write also need to listen.
I wasn’t being completely serious. But maybe a bit. More and more I find myself wanting to hear poetry rather than (just) see it. And hear it read with some style too while we’re at it… with some love for the sound.
x
This is a major theme throughout the work of the wonderful poet Tony Harrison
We need to hear it spoken certainly. Is it feasible though, just to hear verse? To go along and, on hearing a poem new to us, ‘get it’?
Well I have to admit that I can’t. One line slips away and doesn’t inform, doesn’t do anything, to and with what follows and it becomes just a game of trying to hold on to snippets or to one snippet.