POETRY WORKSHOP
Stone’s throw
Alison Chisholm explores a water poem that runs deep
Alison Chisholm
STILL WATERS?
The air falls silent; trees stand motionless above the facing shore. Their twins that hang below it are still swaying – ever so gently – to the quiet singing of the pool.
I throw a stone and watch it smash those trees to splinters. Rings of light flow outwards, disintegrating softly on the shore.
Each ring is fainter; in time, the patient trees reconstitute themselves, becoming whole again but not quite still: those waves, no longer visible, have been absorbed into the music of the pool, its memory of every stone I ever threw.
When the first glorious outpouring of a poem has happened, the poet’s next concern is the way it will develop. For a poet who writes in a variety of styles, questions of whether or not it should have rhyme and metre are near the top of the list; but in either traditional or free verse patterns, another important consideration is the poem’s rhythm.
Dictionary definitions of rhythm link it with metre; but it might be useful to think of metre as the mathematical structuring of stressed and unstressed syllables, while rhythm has more to do with the flow and feel of the words. This may sound amorphous, but rhythm implies a subtlety of sound that is apparent when we read a poem silently, and obvious when we read it aloud. For interest, try this for yourself. Read the poem from the page, concentrating carefully on every word. Then speak the poem, listening to the patterns its rhythm puts into your voice.
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