Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Resonance Review

Resonance Review

Last month I got a review from DRsmith and he did one on a poem I had written called Sheba. It was a structured poem with a beats per line constraint as well as a rhyme scheme.

Now most who follow this blog must know by now that when I’m not writing I’m working out in the shop on my trucks. In the automotive repair field there are a lot of cool diagnostic tools…There are volt meters for measuring electrical pressure, amp meters for measuring electrical flow, devices for measuring continuity of a circuit, and on and on and on.

When DR gave me this review I felt like I was in the presence of a veteran mechanic…not a wrench turner but a word smith who specialized in poetic systems . To use a mechanical analogy he had a tool in his kit that I call a resonance meter. He hooked one lead to the front of my poem and the other to the back and each line started scrolling on the CRT providing a reading on resonance…sort of like a heart monitor and he called these blips, “Speed Bumps.”

Now I knew exactly what he was doing and referring to….The resonance meter a poet uses is in their ear and they nod their heads programming in the meter and compare it with the beats of the line…if the flow is uninterrupted they go onto the next….Good poets do this so routinely they don’t have to give it a second thought…

Many prose writers however, don’t have that same ear for resonance… Some don’t even know it exists. When I suggest changing this word or that, many writers think I’m being critical of their word choice. Since they appear to be tone deaf, they think I’m trying to impose my style of writing and it makes them mad… even though they don’t always admit it.

I think most prose writers at writing.com ought to take a poetry course….Both free form and structured and try and develop an ear for resonance and then apply that to their writing. Once a prose writer learns to do this I guarantee they will go back to some of their earlier works and cringe. Then they might reflect….this is a stretch….and connect…maybe what Percy was hammering me about wasn’t word choice….maybe it was resonance….duh!