New Perspectives in Alliteration (well, half, anyway)

On September 1st I participated in a conference on New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry and Cultural History. It was organized by Tim Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia. It was a fascinating experience — a topic like “alliteration” doesn’t have a tight connection to any particular academic discipline, so people can come at it from any direction. And did we! It was a great opportunity to meet people I only knew from reading their poems, like Paul Deane, Adam Bolivar, and Rahul Gupta. I couldn’t attend all the talks, but here’s what I saw in my half of the parallel sessions.

Modern and Contemporary Alliteration

Harriet Truscott, “Type-setting, Poem-making, Pattern-shaping: Alliteration and the poem as a print object”

This was an eye-opener. To Harriet, poems are something different from what I’d thought. She painted us a picture of a typesetter loading type into a frame. To the typesetter, alliteration is a motion, as they reach to the same box for a letter — or even a space! From this point of view, the printed poem on the page is an adaptation, made by the typesetter. Her example was Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro“. If you click on that link, you’ll see something quite different from what Pound sent to the printer, and what the printer put in the magazine. That’s because HTML doesn’t care about how many spaces you put into the text. Pound and his typesetter did, though. The original had several spaces in the middle of the lines. So… what’s the actual poem? I think she wants us to treat everything as an adaptation — even the typewritten page the poet sent to the publisher, which would have been my guess.

Paul Deane, “The Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century Alliterative Revival”

Paul traced the history of alliterative poetry over the past 150 years, from the discovery of ancient manuscripts by the Victorians to the science-fiction and fantasy fans who have been writing under the cultural radar. That latter group has been well documented by Dennis Wise in his book and in a series of blog posts at Tales after Tolkien. My favorite line: “Gerard Manley Hopkins doesn’t count!” Without Paul’s work, my own paper wouldn’t have happened, so it was good to meet him and hear the story of his decades of work to publicize modern alliterative verse. 

Jacob Edmond, “Bad Bad Beat: The Alliterative Alignments of Revolutionary Rhythm”

Scholars have a tendency to focus on poetic alliteration that’s derived from Old English. (guilty!) To this body, Jacob wants to add the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Iambic pentameter doesn’t go well with Caribbean speech-rhythms, so his poems are quite different. He uses short lines, usually with two stresses, which makes alliteration really stand out. He likes to alliterate on “b” and “d”, to give his verses a feel like drums accompanying them.

Alliteration in Numbers

Maria Hartman, “Alliteration in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ in Swedish Translation: A Mixed-Methods Study”

Edgar Allan Poe loved alliteration. This talk was about the tradeoffs you have to make when translating him into Swedish. Lots of S-words in English are P-words in Swedish, so which do you want to keep: onomatopoeia or alliteration? And when a character is Prince Prospero, do you try to keep the P’s? Or do you change him to Duke Prospero, so everyone will get the reference to The Tempest?

Joe Hoffman, “The Hunt for Alliterative Melody”

We’ve already read this one. 

Rafael Pascual, “Alliterative Metrics and Digital Methods: A new Index and Database for Classical Old English Verse”

Rafael told us about his work in the trenches of digital humanities. This is the kind of thing that makes life so easy for numerically-oriented investigators into how poems work. (In case I should ever run into one.) He calls it a database in the title, but when he’s talking he says it’s an Excel spreadsheet. (Not everything has to be Big Data!) Each half-line of Old English poetry gets a row, in which it is labelled by scansion, alliterative pattern, and position of the caesura. It’s going to be online under the title “The Scansion of Old English Verse”. It’s intended as a replacement for Hutcheson’s “Old English Poetic Metre”. Rafael noted, as an example application, how to use it to find what he calls “clichés of alliteration”, which may help with attribution of anonymous works (is my guess).

Alliteration in Translation

Selene Genovesi, “Finding Phonetic Fidelity: Alliteration in English Translation of Trilussa’s Poetry”

I’d never heard of Trilussa before. As Selene introduced him to us, he was a 19th-century Romantic poet, with extra Roman. The Italian language was just getting standardized back then; Trilussa wrote in the Roman dialect. He wrote a lot of political satires that, as translated for us, were pretty brutal. Selene has a gorgeous reading voice, which made a funny contrast with the subject matter. The main point of the talk was about a recent translation by Lawrence Hooper of his poems into Cockney, which some scholars say is insulting but I accept Selene’s argument that it keeps the disrespectful tone intact. Trilussa’s alliteration was (fittingly) three-fold: for reinforcement, playful manipulation of words; and as a mnemonic aid. The talk was followed by a spirited discussion of whether it was legitimate to alliterate on the apostrophe at the beginning of a word, so that e.g. “here” and “there” alliterate in Cockney. I think the consensus was “yes”.

Margaret Ann Noodin, “Naanabweginiwewe gaye Nanaabikidowinan (Folded Phonemes and Waves of Words): Anishinaabe Alliteration in Songs and Stories”

Margaret is a poet in the Ojibwemowin language. The language is agglutinative. It makes different parts of speech out of the same concept by adding suffixes. As you can see in the title, the suffixes can pile up pretty deep. Ojibwemowin poetry, therefore, has an alliterative pattern that’s tightly bound up with the subject matter. She sang us a song that illustrates it well: the root for “opening” applies to springtime, flowers, river mouths, and being bitten by mosquitoes. All those ideas begin with “zaag” so the poem is highly alliterative, four letters deep. Presumably, a poem that talked about two contrasting ideas would find itself falling into an ABAB alliterative pattern.

Carlos Fernandez, “Cayeron … como caían los cuerpos muertos del Dante”: José Martí’s Alliterative Adaptation of Dante’s Inferno in “El presidio político en Cuba”

This talk zoomed in tightly on the line in the title of the talk. The Inferno, which is an unimpeachable choice of source material for a poem about being sentenced to hard labor in a pre-revolutionary Cuban prison camp. All those “k” sounds give the feeling of dead bodies piling up. 

Jean Martinely Iata, “It’s Not a Broken Record: The Dynamics of British and Malagasy Battle Raps’ Poetic Sounds”

Few things in our sublunary existence approach the perfection of a Platonic ideal, but one of them was, until this talk, my ignorance of Malagasy battle rap. The genre is derived from US hip-hop culture, but the rappers on Madagascar have given it their own twist. They write with a two-line structure: the first is an image to be taken literally; the second is the figurative application to the person who needs to be taken down a peg. The narrative images get fricative sounds (f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ) and the punchlines get plosives (p, t, k, b, d g). In a way, this means that Malagasy rappers use slant alliteration the same way US and British rappers use slant rhyme.

Plenary Talks

Joseph Phelan, “Made to Match: Alliteration in the Poetry of Robert Browning”

Robert Browning had a long career, during which fashions changed tremendously. His use of alliteration rose and fell over time. “The Ring and the Book” is the peak, after which he seems to have gotten the feeling that he was getting too “mannered” (a word I had to look up). There’s a correlation between lines that include alliteration and lines where Browning deviates from strict iambic pentameter and some other way to flag the end of a line was evidently needed. Best throwaway line: ” ‘Browning’s macabre poems’ is practically a pleonasm.” For a contemporary critical source, Prof Phelan referred us to the marvelously-named Coventry Patmore’s “Essay on English Metrical Law“, whither I shall proceed directly.

Chris Jones, “Over all Nations: Alliteration and Indigeneity in the Work of Carter Revard”

“Birch Canoe” by Carter Revard is only six lines long, but Prof. Jones spent an hour on a close reading of it. Electron microscopes don’t read so closely. Carter Revard was a half Osage scholar of Old English poetry. This poem is a perfect fusion of those two things. The “indigeneity” in the title refers to the unfortunate infestation of the fields that study early-medieval England by anti-immigrant racists, and forces us to use circumlocutions like “early-medieval England” after they crufted up the term “Anglo-Saxon”. They’re very proud of being the spirit of their homeland, but if you want to talk about being indigenous, the descendants of immigrants from Germany don’t have a leg to stand on, compared to the Osage. By the time Prof Jones got done, we could see that almost every word in the poem, which on the surface is about paddling on a stream in America, harked back to something in Old English literature. For example, “the lightfoot deer” has a web of semantic and contextual relations to the “hæðstapa” in Beowulf. A real tour de force.