occult iconism
Otherwise figured poems, which are not
openly such. This is the case of the madrigal “Rapisce i cori e l’alma”
(“Hearts and souls are charmed” ) in Marino’s “Lyra”. The “Lyra”, looking well
at it, is shaped like the outline of a hand whose fingers show the well-known
gesture of contempt (le ‘corna’), a contempt addressed to another poet, the
hated Stigliano; or else Frugoni’s “Cane di Diogene” (Diogene’s Dog), a poem
the theme of which is time and represents a key.
Pictures 73, 74
onomalingua
A word coined by Fortunato Depero, from one
of his manifestos of 1916: “An abstract verbigeration derived from
onomatopoeia, from “rumorismo”, from the brutishness of futurist free words. It
is the language of natural forces: wind-rain-sea-river-brook etc. and of the
artificial rumbling beings created by men: bicycles, tramcars,trains,
automobiles and all the machines; it is the whole complex of emotions and of
sensations expressed with the most rudimentary and the most effective language…
In the monologues of the clowns and of the comics of the variety show typical
hints at the o. can be found… with o. it is possible effectively to speak and
to understand each other with the elements of the universe, with the animals
and with the machines. O. is a poetic language of universal understanding, for
which translators are not necessary”. See also: imaginary language, grammelot,
glossolalia.
Pictures 95, 96
onomatopoeia
(sounding together)
Onomatopoeias may reproduce nature sounds
and machine sounds, in a kind of direct speech and in this case the language
includes in itself verbal forms that do not exist within the lexical body by
which it is composed. Or else they may give rise to auditory sensations similar
to natural or mechanical sensations, by means of some phonetic combinations
that are analogous to the sounds to be imitated; and in this case already
existing lexical forms are chosen and referred to extra-linguistic sounds.
An example of the first case is the
imitation of bird warbling, like: “cheep cheep – tirelire – cockododledoo” or
“crash” to designate a collision or the sesquipedalian word created by Joyce to
evoke the thunder in “Finnegans Wake” (see: mot-valises) and numberless others
from Aristophanes to Pascoli.
An example of the second instance is the madrigal by Tasso
“Sovra le verdi chiome”, where the birds sing “quivi quivi” or by Poliziano the
hunting scene: “ogni varco da lacci e can chiuso era;/ di stormir, d’abbaiar
cresce il rumore;/di fischi e bussi tutto il bosco suona;/ del rimborbar de’
corni il ciel rintrona”. Here
the poet takes advantage of words that are onomatopoetic “per sé”.
O. becomes a contrived figure when it is
prolonged for whole linguistic segments and then the result is next to that of
the artificial or imaginary languages. In the German linguistic area, in the
Baroque period, and in the bucolic genre all the possibilities of the German
phoneticism were experimented, nearly bordering on the non-language territory.
In the Italian Seicento the song of the nightingale must be recalled, from M.
Bettini’s (1614) “Hilarotragoedia satyropastoralis” and then Pascoli’s
onomatopoeia from the “Nozze” in the “Myricae”.
In the avant-garde poetry o. becomes – with
the futurist free words - one of the most widely used stylistic elements,
taken up by the Dutch Theo van Doesburg, for ex. in “Troop parade” (1916).
After the second world war I must mention “Trincea” (1966) by Austrian Ernst
Jandl, “glasslass” by American Dick Higgins, the witty “Dubbi esistenziali di
un’oca francese” (“Existential doubts of a French goose”) by Paolo Albani.
Pictures 97 - 100
open composition
Also called ”composition by field”; a form
that has been introduced by Ezra Pound – it is the form of the “Cantos” –
consisting in putting side by side objects and events in order to create a
constellation of meanings, that are disposed in a collage. It comes out a
juxtapositional, paratactic, asyndetic syntax within which the poet must work a
mimetic strategy, not allowing a static description, in order to throw into
relief the relations of communication through a kind of presentational instead
of a descriptive language. The forms with which the poems of “The Waste Land”
by Eliot and “Hugh Selwing Mauberley” by Pound are typical of this kind. A
similar structure, in our opinion influential on the same “Composition by
field” had been started by Blaise Cendrars’ “Prose du Transsibérien et de la
petite Jehanne de France” as a collage of lyric situations, derived in its turn
from the cinematographic montage (Griffith), a
technique well-known to Cendrars.
oulipo
A shortened form of “Ouvroir de
Littèrature Potentielle”, a group of writers composed by Raymond Queneau,
François Le Lionnais, Jacques Bens, Jean Lescure and Jean Queval and later
Jacques Roubaud, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. The principle of “potential”
is fundamental in O. according to this principle the stricter are the ties,
often of a mathematical nature, that literary creation sets itself, the more
inventive creation will be (a classic instance of potential literature is
indicated in the sonnet). The group has engaged in proposing new modalities of
literary creation, through ties imposed to their materials or through rules of
transformation to be applied to the existing material. The literary game is
revaluated by O., in its gratuitous artificiality. Roger Caillois in “Les jeux
et les hommes” (1958) describes the four fundamental drives in the play: the
drive to a ruled competition (agon), the drive to abandon oneself to the fate’s
verdict (alea), the drive to simulation and to travesty (mimicry), the
enticement of giddiness and self-loss (ilinx).
Literary forms of the agon, challenges to
enigmas (myth of the Sphinx), poetical disputes, the octave improvisations in
Tuscany, the gallurese albaréa, such games as the charade (to guess a word,
one of its parts in which it can be broken out having been indicated) and its
counterpart, the rebus or television quiz.
Chance is present in literature with the
dada collage (T. Tzara), with the surrealist so caled “exquisite corpses” and
in the combinatory literature from the cabala to Mallarmé’s project of the
“livre”, to the machines that produce propositions and aphorisms (J. Swift), to
the present hypertexts. The way from sense to chaos may conclude with a return
to sense, in other words with the attempt to interpret the chaotic distribution
that has been obtained: it is what happens in the composition of the anagrams:
the letters or a word are distributed chaotically, and are recomposed in order
to form a different one (Lycophron, IV-III B.C.). An analogous method has been
proposed by American Jackson MacLow, a disciple of the musician John Cage,
based on the choice of a series of arbitrary rules, fit to co-ordinate the
assumption of the lexical material (“The pronouns, a collection of 40 dances”,
1964, translated and issued on “Antipiugiù” n. 4, 1964).
Mimicry invades dissimulation and irony and
includes figurative travesties of language in the figured poems (Alexandrine
paegnia), the calligrams (Apollinaire), the futurist free word tables, the
imprese (devices) (Accademia della Crusca), the emblems (Alciati), the rebus
(Leonardo da Vinci), the mot-valises (Joyce and others).
Ilinx is the search for giddiness, for
perception disturbance: or else the non-sense, like Carroll’s paradoxes, Lear’s
limerick, the paronomastic nursery-rhymes, aphorisms (K. Kraus), the chaotic
lists (Gadda), Burchiello’s poetry, the “mise en abîme” (Gide, Perec), the
absurd theatre (Jonesco, Beckett, Adamov, Tardieu): a fit of dizziness for
logic, that can be summed up in the classic Greek paradox: “All Cretans are
liars. I am a Cretan”.
oxymoron
(keen, although apparently stupid)
A rhetorical procedure consisting in combining
two contradictory words, whose grouping may be metaphorically interpreted. Ex.:
eloquent silence, hot ice, bitter love, vital death, charming wraths.
paegnion
(children’s play)
It must not be confused with the
technopaegnion, a name given by D. M. Ausonius to his own experiments of
anadiplosis (see: technopaegnion). The paegnion is a form of poetry composed by
lines of different length, placed one over the other so as to obtain the
outline of a figure cut against the background of a support. Sometimes the
contour of the lines is curved to trace the outline of a desired figure. It was
started in the Alexandrine epoch by Simias of Rhode and other Greek authors;
then it was taken up again at the times of Constantine by Optatianus Porphyrius and flourished again in the Baroque period,
in Italy and in Europe.
Pictures 101-103
pangrammatic, song or line
(also vocalic)
A song that contains all the letters of the
alphabet. By Pascasio di San Giovanni
(Poesis artificiosa, 1674): “Vix Phlegeton Zephiri queres modo glabra Mycillo”.
See also: vocalic song and
AEIOU.
paragoge
(addition)
A grammatical figure used by poets
consisting in adding a syllable at the end of a word. “Fue” instead of “fu”;
“die” instead of “dì”. It is also called epithesis.
parallel columns
Lists of nouns or verbs or adjectives in
the form of parallel columns, as in the third book, chapter XXXVIII and in the
fourth book, chapter LXIV of Gargantua, by Rabelais.
Picture 20
parallel, lines
(see: rapportatio)
parallelism or correspondence
A figure of speech consisting in repeating
the same concept in two different forms, or in two lines having the same
structure. Ex.: “sol nel passato è il
bello, sol nella morte è il vero”.
parole in libertà
In his “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura
futurista” (1910) Marinetti indicated as specific means of literary expression
the “parole in libertà”, the only ones able to translate, by analogy and
suggestion the psychic mechanisms of feverish modern life.
In his parole in libertà, syntax, punctuation
are abolished and the qualifying parts of speech (adjectives, adverbs) are
set in clusters and placed within brackets. Moreover parole in libertà tend to
take up a form of pure phonic mimicry as they are transcribed in a free
expressive spelling where the hatching throws into relief the aspects of the
significant which in normal spelling are overlooked, such as timbre, tone,
height and the duration of the individual sounds of the message, so that the
futurist page takes up the appearance of a sui generis musical score of
optophonic quality, where a continuous circuit is established between orality
and writing in a reading made jumping all over the place in true freedom.
Marinetti’s great poem “Zang Tumb Tuum” (1914) is printed in different characters
and type sizes which a careful management shapes into a graphic ballet miming
the excitement of the spoken text which has the aspect of a magmatic prose in
actual progress. In this style are composed many other works by futurist
authors, from “Rarefazioni e parole in libertà” by Corrado Govoni (1915) to
“L’ellisse e la spirale” by Paolo Buzzi (1915) from “Il fuoco delle piramidi”
by Nelson Morpurgo (1923) to “Depero futurista” , an exemplary bookject by F.
Depero. A particularly splendid achievement is “Piedigrotta” by Francesco
Cangiullo (1916) which is an uninterrupted visual surprise where the graphics
explodes into pyrotechnic phonemes mirroring the Neapolitan festival.
Already in these pages the parole in
libertà tend to aggregate into calculated word-tectonic structures which will
later become the “Free word tables”
Pictures 113 -116
paronomasia
(similar sound)
A figure of speech founded on the
similarity of sound between two words of different meaning. In order to achieve
special effects, the poet places side by side two assonant words “amore amaro”
(bitter love), “vista la svista?” (found the fault?) “non aver arte né parte”
( to be a good for nothing) (but see in English to have neither rhyme nor
reason). Toti Scialoja ‘s poems ( “Versi del senso perso”) (1989) are
paranomastic rigmaroles: “in una camera senza porte né finestre una scolopendra
fa una danza triste” (1989) (in a doorless windowless room there roams a sadly
wriggling worm); or “con il verme di Viterbo venerdì venni a diverbio”( I
wasted a few words with the wrongful worm of Worthing) or again from A.
Campanile “il tenore fa le scale per le scale della Scala” ( the tenor sings a
scale scaling the stairs of La
Scala). The paranomasia can
be of two kinds: “apophonic” if the difference lies in the tonic vowel of its
components (care-cure-core, ardore, ardire) or “isophonic” if the variant
consists in a non-tonic vowel or a consonant (tempo – tempio, alto,almo,
luce-lume). The apophonic paronomasia creates the calembour, the concetto, the
agudeza. The isophonic on the contrary acts on the form: “Ed agendo ed
ardendo /amor s’acquista” (G. Imperiale), where the semantic opposition
contrasts with the phonic consonance.
Picture 117
periphrasis
(circumlocution)
A conceptual figure of speech which
consists in circumlocution used to express a concept that could be signified by
a smaller number of words or even by one word:
the king of the forest (the lion), the end
of life (death).
permutation
Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606-1682), a clergyman of
Spanish origin, published an imposing work “ Primus
calamus ob oculos ponens metametricam…” (1663) later followed by “Primus calamus tomus II”(1668) entirely
dedicated to visual poetry and to the experiences of artificial poetry. The
author’s main interest, apart from the imposing collection of documents, was
not so much creating poems as studying contrivances that by interchanging the
components of speech might automatically give rise to a series of poetic
objects in a sort of baroque oulipos. For example, here is a “cubus
metametricus”, that is a cage of wires suitable to house a whole
interchangeable ode. Caramuel thought , in almost cabalistic terms that he
could recreate the universe starting from the word ( a contemporary of his,
Athanasius Kircher, left with the Kirchner Museum at the Vatican’s Roman
College some imposing collections of human knowledge in a sort of
protoencyclopaedia).
The mathematical pattern on which the idea
of cosmic reconstruction is based is permutation, one of the total orders that
may be given to a set of elements. The practice of that method in art dates
back to a much earlier time, that is to the art of Franco-Flemish musicians of
the fifteenth century, who upheld the counterpoint polyphonic method. Another
early example may be found in the Sixteenth century with the peals of bells,
with tables of permutation which provide the number of possible changes of
bells on the basis of different ensembles, where, for instance with a set of
twelve bells we have the possibility of 479.001.600 different changes for a
time of 37 years and 355 days. A modern form of using permutation in literature
was started by Gertrude Stein in her poems and carried on by the English poet
Brion Gysin in his beautiful sound poem “I am that I am” (1958)
Pictures 118 - 121
phonetic, poetry
Not to be confused with sound poetry, of
which it is a part. It was born in 1915 within the dada movement, at Cabaret
Voltaire, where Hugo Ball recited “wordless poems”. They were shortly followed
by Raoul Hausmann’s and Kurt Schwitters’ phonetic poems (see the consequent
poem by Schwitters). From 1916 to 1919 Pierre Albert-Birot issues on his
magazine “Sic” the “Poèmes à crier et à danser”. Always in the Cabaret Voltaire
T. Tzara had recited some “bruitistes” poems, aping African language sounds.
Also Michel Seuphor’s poems are phonetic poetry, being based on a declamation
of the alphabetical letters or of abstract words made up with the alphabet. The
poetry of lectrism of the second post-war period is rather similar.
Pictures 55 - 63
plastic poem
Photos of objects or papers made by the
Japanese artist Kitasono Katuè and published on his review “Vou” (1960).
They show analogies with Jiri Kolar’s “evident poetry” and with many of the
object metaphors of the Catalan author J. Brossa.
Pictures 122 , 123
plaustral, poem (major)
See: sesquipedalian.
pleonasm
A grammar structure consisting in using one
or more words that are not actually necessary for the meaning of a sentence: “ As
to you, you couldn’t care less! ”;
“You do say the oddest things, don’t
you?”
poème mécanique
In English “type-poem “ and in Italian
dattilogramma. The poème mécanique was published by Pierre Garnier on the
review “Les Lettres” (1964).
poetical orphism
(see: simultaneism, sound poetry)
poetry core
A word coined by Carlo Belloli, designating
his visual tridimensional poems, edited by Mediterranean Publishing Company, Rome-New
York, in 1951. Afterward it
was adopted by Arrigo Lora Totino to designate his sculpture-poems.
Picture 37, 38
poetry and music
The relationship between poetry and music
is connected with the complex relationships existing between words, voice and
sound on the one hand and music and language on the other.
For the Hellenes poetry was an essence
which was at the same time linguistic and musical, it was techne mousiké, made
extremely easy by the inherent music of the quantitative metrical system of
short and long syllables, which inevitably led to the chanting of the verse to
throw quantity into relief, which was already music in itself.
The accompaniment was provided by the
kithara ( the lyre) for monodic epic poetry,by the flute for the elegy, by the
bàrbitos ( a sort of lyre) for the scholia
(convivial poems) and epithalamiums (
wedding songs), by the aulos ( a sort of flute) for dithyrambs and the
choruses of tragedy.
Also in the ancient Hebrew civilization
there existed a close relationship between poetry and music, in view of the
sacred aura that surrounded the ‘word’. In the liturgy of the Temple the sacred singing was of two types: the
cantillation, an intoned declamation of the biblical prose, based on a system
of stresses, and the psalmody in which a central note is repeated and short
embellishments underline the syntactic turns of the verse.
Byzantine hymnography developed from the IV
century A.D. with the forms of contacio ( a lyric-dramatic homily, structured
as a hymn divided into two equal stanzas; but the metrics is already
accentual) and of the canon, a development of the contacio, consisting in a
sequel of hymns (odes) differing in metre and melody, with two or more stanzas
modelled on a key stanza (irmo).
In the West the music-poetry relationship
in respect to the ancient tradition changes little by little as one prefers to
go in search of autonomous principles of musical consistency, no longer subject
to quantitative metrics: there appear the trope ( poetical-musical
interpolation of sacred singing) and the sequel (hallelujah-like
vocalise rendered autonomous) see the
famous sequels by Jacopone da Todi (“ Stabat Mater”) and by Tommaso da Celano
(“Dies Irae”).
The secular poetry of Provençal Troubadours
is monodic. Though most of the musical accompaniment is lost. The music closely
followed the text and threw into relief the elegant tricks of versification.
The most common forms were the sirventese ( from sirven, courtesan) on subjects
not concerning love, the enuel ( annoyance) on annoying matters, the plazer on
pleasant matters, the aube ( on the subject of dawn and the lovers’ parting ),
the plenh (complaint) and the dialogue forms of the contrast ( an argument in
verse on opposing themes), of the tenso (contest), of the pastourelle and other
forms of the Trouvères of northern France, such as the rondeau ( a love song,
with the repetition of the refrain), the ballad, intended for singing and
dancing, the lai and the virelai, the German Minnesang, a song to celebrate the
Minne, that is love, in the sub genres of the Lied ( a love song in several
stanzas), the Leich ( a convivial love song), the Spruch ( monostrophic and
sententious).
From the XIII century onwards there was the
grandiose phenomenon of the emancipation of music with the development of
polyphony in the ars antiqua and in the ars nova ( 1150 up to and including
1300): music is in search of principles of metric organization of the musical
tempo no longer bound to the linear discursiveness of the verbal text and these
are the great architectures of the Franco-Flemish polyphonists of the XV-XVI
centuries; on the other hand poetry was on its way to becoming a purely
literary genre where the music quality will be absorbed into the sound harmony
of the verse : the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, Politian, Pulci, Ariosto.
With the madrigal of the end of the
Sixteenth century and the beginning of the Seventeenth there came into being a
polyphonic form of music with a continuous structure which sings poetry set to
music in a sophisticated ‘ sound painting’ (Gesualdo da Venosa’s and
Monteverdi’s madrigals). It is the era of the ‘ recitar cantando’ theorized by
the “camerata fiorentina” as a new theatrical realism; it is the birth of the
opera and of poetry for music, that is of the libretto ( see the particular
musical quality of Metastasio’s verse) , with the distinction between
recitative and aria.
With Nineteenth Century romanticism the
idea of the Wagnerian Wort-Ton-Drama of total art makes its appearance, but at
the same time the Lied (Schubert) with texts drawn from contemporary authors (
Goethe, Schiller etc.) flourishes again. The Italian production of romances (F.
P. Tosti) is of minor value. The French chanson de varieté, connected to the
Parisian café concert and cabaret , to the operetta, to the music hall and to
the early cinema ( R. Clair) is of greater interest.
At the end of the 19th century,
with the birth of French symbolism, poetry is seen as “verbal instrumentation”
(R.Ghil), based on the use of the intrinsic musical quality of vowels and
consonants: it is a development of the style of Baudelaire who sees the
specificity of poetry as musical perfection of the lines and mathematical
exactness of the metaphors. In
his “Art poétique” (1874)
Verlaine declares: “ De la musique avant toute chose. Le reste est littérature ” where by music he
means the music of the word. With Mallarmé we are confronted by a condensation
of the pure significant and we are on the threshold of sound poetry (q.v.) The
critic Zumthor speaks of the function of orality and of the presence of the
voice (“Flatus vocis, metafisica e antropologia della voce” , (1992). On the
other hand, in the field of ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology we
realize that the word-music relationship is set in different terms from one
culture to the other and is conditioned by the attitude of each culture towards
its own language, particularly in those languages that don’t have a clear-cut
distinction between speaking and singing. Thus we can distinguish between the
level of the basic phonetic and prosodic units (intonation of syllables, phonic
and dynamic structure of the words, stress and so on) and the level of the
major structural units (metric structure, phraseological articulation, lines
etc.)
The former case refers to the “intoned”
languages, such as the Sino-Tibetan and some African languages, where the
meaning of the words depends on the height and type of intonation with which
the syllables are pronounced, so that the melodic profile of the singing is
‘generated’ by the words of the text.
In the latter case it is interesting to
observe that music borrows from poetry several principles of formal consistency
and syntactic figures (line. stanza, phrase. period, parenthesis, ellipsis
etc.) which is a mark of the function of poetry as the model of poetry in
regard to music, though in the continuous tendency of the language to become
sound and that of the music to assimilate verbal expression. N. Ruwet has
underlined the fact that it would be difficult to imagine a development, apart
from the integration of the two systems, of many formal structures: reiteratio,
cyclic return, strophic forms, the refrain. We find other clues in the names of
some poetic forms coming from the sphere of sound and song: lyric, elegy, ode,
psalm, canzone, sonnet and so on) or dancing (chorus, ballad, rondeau).
polyphileic, language
It is the language in which a famous
allegoric prose work “Hypnerothomachia Poliphili” (1499) by the humanist
Francesco Colonna was written. The work is written in an artificial style which
mixes the vocabularies of a wide variety of different traditions into an
opulent form, tirelessly searching for combined solutions.
polysyndeton
(connexion)
A grammar structure consisting in repeating
the conjunction before each element, phrase or simple word to be coordinated.
It is used when one wants to achieve special effects in the narration, like
calling attention to the great number of the things listed or their immediate
sequence. F.i. “there passed before us the foot-soldiers and the horsemen and
the airmen and the sailors” ;” they made a great hullabaloo: they were singing
and dancing and shouting and quarrelling”. It is the opposite of the asyndeton
(q.v.)
precise poem
In 1932 F.T. Marinetti published with the publisher Tullio
d’Albisola his ‘litolatta’ “olfactory tactile thermic parole in libertà”
colour printed on tin sheets. Some of the poems are forerunners of the future
concrete poetry and are those the author calls “precise poems”, in which
Marinetti from the dithyrambic anarchy of the early parole in libertà moves on
to a calculated word-vision balance which is going to influence the verbal
visual quality of Carlo Belloli’s “mural poem-texts” (1944)
Picture 126
preterition
(omission)
A figure of speech of feeling which
consists in pretending to be unwilling to mention something ( a name, a fact,
an idea) but speaking of it immediately afterwards in such a way as to throw it
into relief. “Cesare taccio che per ogni spiaggia – fece l’erbe sanguigne di
lor vene ove il nostro ferro mise” (Petrarca) (“Not to mention Caesar who on every
strand made the grass bloody from their veins wherever he brought our arms”).
priamel dichtung
(from praeambulum)
Gnomic poetry widespread in Germany between 1100 amd 1500 and also a collection of
writings and dictums both moralizing and satirical or jocular belonging to that
genre. The text was divided into two parts: the fail and the climax. The fail
introduced and explained the theme, listing a number of situations pertaining
to the subject; the climax expressed the judgement. Paradoxically, here is an
example from Sappho “Some say that a host of cavalrymen, others of
infantrymen, others of sailors are the most beautiful things on earth, but I
say it is what a person loves”. Later the priamel was influenced by the
burchiello style, widespread in Germany (Kontrafakturen).
program
see: anagram
prolepsis
(anticipation)
A figure of speech of feeling which
consists in anticipating the answer to a foreseeable objection. F.i.: “Lies? We shall see if they are lies!” It is also a grammar
structure consisting in anticipating some elements in the sentence thus
changing the natural order of the sentence (that is the direct construction) in
order to throw some terms rather than others into relief . F.i. : “Books, you
should have given him, not toys”.
proparalepsis
see: paragoge
prosopopoeia
(personification)
From ‘ presopopo’ he who makes masks, mask
maker. A figure of speech of feeling consisting in giving life and human
qualities to inanimate objects or to an abstract idea or even in making people
who are far away or dead speak. For instance Monti in his “Prosopopea di
Pericle” imagines the statue of Pericles to be speaking about the epoch of Pius
VI. Other examples: glory has kissed him; the wind caresses the wheat in the
fields; the sea swallowed the survivors.
proteus
It consists in a fan of words all equally
apt to form a coherent linguistic message, but are to be read alternatively;
the words are joined by different syntactic links; the terms being synonymous,
or at least homologous, are polyvalent because of the presence of many words
of neutral genre that can act as subject or object, of adjectives that can act
as nouns, of polyvalent conjunctions and adverbs. In poem XXV by Porphirius
Optatianus , which is a proteus, there are four basic lines the words of which
are all used in a different order while none of them appears in each quatrain
more than once.
Pictures 128, 129
prothesis
(anteposition)
A grammar structure consisting in adding a
letter or a syllable to the beginning or a word for euphony. In Italian it is
generally the vowel “i” ( called in this case ‘prosthetic I) that gets added at
the beginning of words that start with impure ‘s’ when the preceding word ends
with a consonant. F.i. “ in Ispagna, per
iscritto, in istrada”.
pun
(assonance)
The play on words is produced by several
words that are similar in sound. Ex.:
“Ulisse, o lasso”; “O dolce amore, io moro”. See: alliteration.
railed or interwoven lines
See: versus intexti
rapportatio
A device by which the single elements of
two or more coordinate sentences are joined together according to their class:
that is, all the subjects together, then all the verbs and so on: He did not
throw, burn tie arrow, flame, bond”. The iconic aspect is not particularly
important, while what counts for more is the rhetoric placement. The
rapportatio is a figure of decomposition: the mind is subjected to a double and
opposite exercise, the one attributing more predicates to one circumstance
only, the other one making one effect only out of several things.
Picture 131
real kineticism, poem
see: simultaneism and orphic, poetry
rebus
The drawing may replace a whole word or
only one part of one and in this case the fragment not covered by the drawing
is transcribed into letters of the alphabet. But if the word can be split into
units making sense, then it is represented by two drawings. The rebus consists
in seeing words within words and is paronomasia transcribed by iconic means.
For instance: bull+rushes =bulrushes; one by Leonardo: “or so come= orso + una
chioma.
Pictures 132-134
reciprocal, figure
A figure of speech consisting in setting
two words side by side and interchanging them immediately. f. i.: “In istam
dicam mortalem vitam an mortem vitalem “ (St. Augustine. “Confessions”);
“Libero lascivisce e pargoletto / e lieto pargoleggia e lascivetto” (G.
Imperiale, “Stato rustico” (1607).
reciprocal lines
see: recurring lines
recurring, lines
Also called reciprocal or palindromic. A
combination of lines of different nature (for example a hexameter and a
pentameter ) which read backwards results in a metric structure equal to the
original one. For instance the distich :”praecipiti modo quod decurrit tramite
flumen/ tempore consumptum iam cito deficiet” gives this other distich: “deficiet
cito iam consumptum tempore flumen /tramite decurrit quod modo praecipiti”.
Luigi Groto, called the Blind Man of Adria (1541-1585) sang in one sonnet at
the same time happy and unhappy love, according to whether you read it onwards
or backwards “in an underhand invitation to the game of contraries” (G.Pozzi,
“Poesia per gioco, 1984)
redoubling
A figure of speech consisting in repeating
consecutively the same word in order to obtain a more colourful effect. “Bread,
bread! They all shouted.” , “Home, home, it’s time to go”.
reinforced-concrete poems
Created by the Russian artist Vasilij
Kamenskij in 1914: the text is cut up into many triangular and trapezoid
pieces and then recomposed by placing them together into an
architectural word structure..
Pictures 124, 125
repetition
A figure of speech consisting in the
repetition of the same word or of the same figure of speech in the same
sentence: Manzoni: “Don Abbondio was seated , as we have said, on an old chair,
wrapped up in an old robe, with an old skullcap on his head” Among the various
kinds of repetition, we may list the anaphore, the epistrophe, the
reduplication (q.v.)
resverie
(incoherence, in French)
A succession of couplets (up to seventy) of
4, 7, 8 syllables with a syncopated rhythm of a text , its sense broken up,
defined by P. Zumthor as “bout-rimé absurde”. For example: “Nus ne doit estre jolis/ s’il n’a amie.
/J’aim an tant crouste que mie /quant j’ai grant faim./Tien ces cheval par
le fraim maleurens…”.
reticence
A figure of speech consisting in omitting
something in a text either in order to call attention to the thing omitted or
to express some hesitation, some doubt or perplexity on the part of the
author. It is pointed out by dots: “He can, and if he can…conscience…honour…”
(Manzoni), where what is omitted is “require it”.
reticulated verse
A figure of distributive schemes so
artificial that we choose to explain it by an example (Picture 135) The text
the first line of which consists, for instance, of six words will be composed
by six lines; of these six words, the first will be the first of the first
line; the second will be the first of the second line and so on, and these six
words are the only ones that are not repeated. All the words are repeated
except the ones that happen to be placed on the diagonal line, but these are
joined together to form a diagonal verse. The figure offers the opportunity of
several ways of reading it.
Picture 135
retrograde, lines
Lines that can be read backwards: “gentile Lydia, sol
leggiadra e bella/umana non, diva superna e degna,/Diana al mondo virtuosa
insegna/signorile bellecia unica stella” “stella unica, bellecia
signorile/insegna virtuosa al mondo, Diana/degna e superna diva non umana/bella
e leggiadra sol Lydia gentile” (Livio Catto, “Opuscola”, 1502).
rhetorical question
A contrivance by which a question is put
not in order to get an answer, but to affirm with a greater force one’s
opinion: “maybe the earth is not round?”; “I, to do such thing!”
rhopalic or “fistulares” lines
Lines the words of which grow all the way
by one syllable: “rem tibi confecti doctissime dulcisonoram”.
Picture 137
rhyme
feminine rhyme = saggio, maggio, rise wise;
proparoxytone= màcero, àcero, terrible, possible; masculine = degnò, seguitò,
due, pur sue; perfect rhyme obtained by omophonous words, that is of identical
sound but different meaning, like “guardano mute e sole/mute e digiune al
sole” (D’Annunzio) “here fair Belinda on her fine couch lies/ meditating new
tricks and newest lies” (Pope); univocal rhyme, made with omophonous words of
the same meaning (see Dante’s “Canzone della Donna Petra” ); compound rhymes,
obtained by stringing together two or three words, generally monosyllabic
which, by means of the stress, achieve the desired sound (“oncia sconcia non ci
ha” (Dante), hypermetric rhyme obtained by means of a proparoxytone word whose
last letter is reckoned in the next line or elided by synalepha from the
initial vowel of the following line: “che se uno squillo si senta /passare in
Romagna la forte/ tutti d’un cuore s’avventano/tumutuando alla morte” (Pascoli)
(for if one hears a peal /go by in strong Romagna/ all of one heart rush
tumultuously to death); internal rhyme or middle rhyme is the one which takes
place between the final word of one line and a word placed in the middle of the
succeeding line: “odi greggi belar, muggir armenti/gli altri augelli contenti
a gara insieme” (hear bleating flocks and lowing herds, /the other birds,
happily vying, singing together) (Leopardi) assonance or correspondence of
sound, or half rhyme, that is imperfect rhyme obtained by two words in which
only the accented and the final words are equal: decoro- stuolo, bello-senno,
timido-lirico, vetta-secca (As far as English is concerned, however, the rhyme
situation is quite different: you can obtain rhymes which are perfect in
writing but different in sound and viceversa rhymes which do not look alike on
paper, but are perfect when read aloud. N.d.t.); consonant direct rhyme which
takes place when the words rhyming together have different accented vowels but
identical successive letters: temuto- lasciato, stilla-stella, scordare, amore:
rhymed couplets, when two consecutive lines rhyme together; alternate rhyme
when the first line rhymes with the third, the second with the fourth and so
on: ABABAB; crossed or closed rhymes when the first line rhymes with the
fourth and the second with the third: ABBA; interlocked rhymes when in a group
of tercets the second line of the first one rhymes with the first and the third
of the third tercet: ABABCBDCDED… repeated or re-interced rhymes, in one tercet
with the first line of a terct which rhymes with the first line of a second
tercet, the second line with the second etc; ABCABC: inverted rhymes :ABACBA; rich
rhyme, obtained by prolonging the omophony at the back of the tonic accent;
broken rhyme , given by the fact that the identity of the tonic accent does not
correspond to the identity of the sounds; rhyme for the eye, given by the fact
that the identity of the tonic accent doesn’t correspond to the identity of the
grapheme; crowned or repeated or hammering rhyme which repeats partially the
ones that goes before (echo); internal rhyme, more rhymese within the same line
(see hyperrhyme).
semantic poetry
Expounded by Pierre Garnier in his
“Spatialisme et poésie concrete” (1968) as poetry using speech in forms of
prescription, injunction, command . The reader becomes actor of poetry both as
individual and as public. Having outlined an itinerary, the author gives some
indications of path or of action, the word becomes purely a signal indefinitely
declined in the infinitive or the subjunctive or the imperative as the symbol
of an action, a gesture, a rite, a project. The world is no longer what it is,
but what the poet wants it to be: “va, cours, vole et nous venge!”
semeiotic poetry
Expounded by Julien Blaine and
Jean-François Bory on the review “Les carnetsa de l’Octéor” (1962)
and”Approches” (1966) as research of every type of linguistic sign, visual
gestural etc. produced on the basis of a code accepted within the scope of
social life.
Pictures 143 -145
serpentine or echoic or epanalectic , lines
Lines or couplets that begin with the same
word or set of words. See example by Eberardo Alemanno under echoic
lines.
Picture 146
sesquipedalian, poem
(one footand a half)
The fusion of fragments of words existing
separately also in more than one language.
The specimen by Gervase of Mekley
“honorificabilitudinitatibus”, quoted by many including Dante (“De vulgari
eloquentia”) and Shakespeare (“Love’s Labour Lost”) is famous. Another example,
by PF Passerini:
“Spinx jocoseria sive dodecastichon”
Abecedariogrammaticomusicopoeticogeorgicarchitectonicogeometricohieroglypicoiuridicophilosophicotgheologicum”
(in Schediasmata academica, 1650) or, in
modern times, by the futurist Cangiullo in “Piedigrotta”
“fetentechiavecoricchionemoposangaecchitemortaetuoiiefet”
simile
A figure of speech of content, founded on
the association of ideas and consisting in comparing two objects or sentiments
emphasising an element in common between them and disregarding all other
qualities. F.i.: “as hard as a stone”; “as cold as marble”: “as dumb as a
fish”.
simultaneism
It is also called “poetic orphism”and was
introduced since 1912 by Henri Martin Barzun on the magazine “Poème et Drame”
as the most coherent poetic solution to render the tumult and complexity of
modern life. When anchored to linear versification and to the diminutive “I”,
the voice of the poet is overwhelmed, overcome by the background noise that
besieges and envelops him. No longer, then, the verse but a musical score of
voices will be the suitable form and every voice will merge with the others and
will be dramatically contrasted to them. Once the traditional prosodic
conception is overturned, poetry will become sound-noise and as such, in fact,
it is found in Barzun’s great poem “Orphéide” (1914- 1923). Two other authors
were to follow him along this path, Fernand Divoire and Sebastien Voirol, the
former with a series of drama-poems, such as “Exhortation à la Victoire” (1914), the latter with “Le sacre du Printemps” (1914) and two more
poems with chromatic intervention.
In “Zang tumb tuum “ and in other poems by
Marinetti and in the works of other futurists (Cangullo, Depero, Balla etc.) we
will find different forms of simultaneity for several voices, and many more
specimens will develop, starting with the dada text “L’amiral cherche une
maison à louer” written six hands by Tzara, Huelsenbeck, Janco. But it is
mainly after Worl d War II , with the advent of sound poetry that
simultaneous texts will multiply, with authors such as Bernard Heidsieck, Henri
Chopin, Franz Mon, Ferdinand Kriwet, Joel Hubaut, Maurice Lemaitre, Paul da
Vree, A. Lora Totino, Nanni Balestrini.
Pictures 148 - 150
sonnet
A poem consisting of 14 hendecasyllables,
divided into 4 verses, the first two quatrains with alternate or open rhymes,
the other two tercets. The variants: tailed sonnet with the addition of one
or more tercets to form the tail; double or reinforced sonnet, with the
addition of a line of seven syllables after each odd line of the quatrains and
after every second line of the tercets; minor sonnet in which the quatrains and
the tercets have the same rhyme; anacreontic sonnet, similar to the minor
sonnet with a tail like the tailed sonnet. (N.d.t. - The English or
Shakespearean sonnet deserves a special mention. Like the Italian sonnet it
consists of fourteen lines, but the verses are three quatrains followed by a rhymed
couplet)
sotadic word, phrase, line
See: palindrome
sound poetry
Sound poetry was born with the historical
vanguards in the famous futurist evenings at the Galleria Sprovieri (1912-14)
and in other quarters and then at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1916 by the
dadaists. But even earlier with the groups of the
Simultaneists gathered round the “Poème et
Drame” magazine (1912-14).
At the same time were born Depero’s
onomalingua (q.v.) and Giacomo Balla’s verbal sound effects. But verbal sound
effects and onomatopoeia were already an aspect of simultaneists, futurists and
dadaists.
Pre-dada Russian poetry (A. Krucenych,
Iliazd) is already sound poetry like Chlebnikov’s Zaum (crossmental language) .
Dada poetry is usually called phonetic poetry (H. Ball, T. Tzara, R. Hausmann,
K. Schwitters).
In the years after the Second World War
sound poetry found a keen supporter in Isidore Isou, the founder of
lettrism (q.v.) in ultralettrists (see crirythme), in Henri Chopin ( see
audiopoème), in B. Heidsieck (see poème-partition). Meanwhile sound poetry is
finding more and more adepts both in Europe and in America
and Japan (see music and poetry).
Picture 151 - 160
square, poem
It is composed by a linguistic message
which is not completed in the first line and must be completed, even if only by
one phoneme, in the following line and so on,
thus achieving in the whole of the square
text a diagonal optical effect of virtual
kinetism
spatialisme
A type of poetry similar to concrete
poetry, introduced by Pierre Garnier in 1964 (manifesto on “Les Lettres” n° 33)
and in the later manifesto written four hands with Seiichi Niikuni (1966).
sprechaktionen
see sound poetry
stanza
Verse, that is a series of lines with a
strong pause at the end of the verse and with different rhyming patterns:
octave, sestet, quatrain etc.
strophe
Originally a tour of the chorus in the orchestra. A
set of lines ordered according to a given pattern in such a way as to form a
self-contained rhythmic period.” Stanza” might be a synonym of strophe, but not
exactly: the strophe may continue also in successive groups, as in Dante’s
terza rima with interlocked rhymes.
The main types of strophes : the distich
(or rhyming couplet). the tercet. the quatrain, the sestet the octave, the
ninth rhyme, the free scheme strophe, where different strophes and even lines
of various metre alternate, as in the strophes of Leopardi’s “canzone”.
The classical strophes are those composed
in imitation of those of the ancient Greeks: alcaic, Anacreontic, Asclepiadean,
Archilochian, Alcmanian, iambic, pythiambic, Sapphic strophe.
The distich is composed of two lines,
generally rhyming: “Close by those meads. For ever crowned with flowers/Where Thames with pride surveys his rising towers…” (A. Pope, “The
Rape of the Lock”, canto III). Tercet, or Terza rima, that is made of three
lines where the most common pattern is the interlocked rhyme ABA BCB CDC DED.
The last two verses of the Petrarchan sonnet are tercets, while the final lines
of the Shakespearean sonnet are a distich.
Quatrains, of four lines. The rhymes may be
alternate (ABAB) or crossed (ABBA)
The quatrain may be formed by
hendecasyllables , seven syllable , nine syllable, five syllable lines.
Sestet, of six lines. Generally the first
four lines at alternate rhyme, the last two a rhyming couplet: ABABCC, but also
ABBACC or AABCCB or ABBAAB: the typical line is the hendecasyllable with or
without seven syllable lines. The lyric or Provençal sestet, a variant of the
canzone consists of six tercets of hendecasyllables plus an envoy of three
hendecasyllables: the lines do not rhyme, but the final words of the first
strophe are repeated in the other strophes according to this pattern:
ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, EDBFAD,DEACFB,
BDFECA.
Octave, of eight hendecasyllable lines, the first six
with alternate rhyme, the last two rhyming together: ABABABACC.
Ninth rhyme, hendecasyllables: the first
eight like the octave, the last one rhymes with the even lines of the octave:
ABABABCCCB.Classic strophes: alcaic (Carducci): 4 lines, the first two are
rendered with two five syllable lines, coupled, one paroxytone, the other
proparoxytone; the third by a nine syllable line, the fourth with a double five
syllable line or with a ten syllable line. Anacreontic (Chiabrera) in two
varieties, one called also melic “canzonetta”, the other called “ arietta”.
The first is made up of strophes of 4 or 6 lines (eight syllable and four
syllable lines, or seven syllable and five syllable). The arietta is composed
by little strophes of 4 or 6 lines each, seven or five syllable lines.
Asclepiadean (Carducci) has three different types. The first consists in three
proparoxytone hendecasyllables or by three double five syllable lines plus a
proparoxytone seven syllable fourth line. The second type consists in two lines
formed by a couplet of proparoxytone five syllable lines plus a paroxytone
seven syllable line and a proparoxytone seven syllable line. The third one
consists in two proparoxytone seven syllable lines and a couplet of
proparoxytone five syllable lines . The Archilochean , rendered by Carducci by
a proparoxytone hendecasyllable and a second line composed by a paroxytone
seven syllable line and a proparoxytone one. Alcmanian rendered by Carducci by
two exhameters (first and third line) and two nine syllable ones (second and
fourth) Saffic (Carducci) consisting of four lines, the first three
hendecasyllables plus a five syllable line accented on the first syllable.
The imitation of classical models by Carducci
in his “Odi Barbare” is the most blatant sign of a crisis in the metrical and
more generally poetic structures and not in Italy
only (in France the propse poem and the vers libre of the
end of the nineteenth century are already transgressive metres). To have
attempted the impossible that is to recreate metrical forms born quantitative
in accentual metres is enough to understand and justify the subsequent
explosion of the vanguards, which by the way were to bring, through the
futurist mimodeclamation and the subsequent sound poetry to the revival of
classical quantitative poetry under obviously modern forms. (N.d.t.
In English literature the imitation of classical metres is present from the
time of Milton onwards. One prominent example is Dryden’s
“Ode on St Cecilia’s day, while Pope imitates Horace and even the Romantics
followed suit .( See Keats’ Grecian Urn. Shelley’s Ode to the WestWind etc.)
syllexis
(union)
A figure of speech by which the logical
attribute or the syntactic structure belonging to each of the terms of a
statement is arbitrarily extended to all its terms. By the same name we call a
syntactic structure also called “constructio ad sensum” , by which the verb
phrase is made to agree not according to the grammar value of a word but
according to its meaning. “I know a population that prefer to live apart from
other nations” (In English the plural verb agreeing with “people”, originally
probably a “constructio ad sensum” has now become a perfectly legitimate grammar
structure - n.d.t.)
symbiotic writing
In 1967 Ugo Garrega introduced on the
“Tool” magazine the symbiotic writing, an interlanguage in which several forms
of signs in reciprocal interaction partecipate, including the object intended
as word. Carrega has also focused his attention on the material we write on:
writing on different materials involves both different writings and different
styles.
Picture 147
syncope
(suspension)
A metrical figure consisting in the fall of
one or more sounds within a word. For example, in Italian, spirto for spirito,
opra for opera
syncrasis
(fusion)
A grammar figure consisting in the fusion
in pronunciation of three or four syllables into one. For instance, in
Italian, a-iuo-la. In English, awfully.
syneddoche
(inclusion, getting together)
A word figure of speech by which the part
is put for the whole or viceversa. It consists in transferring one word from
its natural meaning to another one having a relationship of quantity with the
former. More particularly it consists in mentioning the part for the whole: for
instance: “a champion of the pedal (of the bicyle) , or the whole for the
part: Parliament for the Members of Parliament, the genus for the species “the
animal”" (man), the species for the
genus; “zephyr” for “wind”, the singular for the plural “vice”, for vices, the
plural for the singular: “the skies” for the sky.
syneresis
(contraction)
A metric figure consisting in considering
as one syllable two or three contiguous vowels belonging to the same word, but
not forming a diphthong or a triphthong. An Italian example: in this line by
Carducci there are three instances of syneresis: “ e fuggiano e pareano un
corteo nero”( they were fleeing and looked like a black procession)
systole
(contraction)
A metric figure consisting in the
withdrawal of the stress of a word towards the beginning of the word. The
opposite of systole is diastole (q.v.).
