In reading to my son lately, I keep coming across couplets that only work if "again" rhymes with "rain." I slow down and put on a funny voice for one word. "A Gaaain." Now, if you ask me, "again" rhymes with "begin," with an emphasis on the "i" instead of the "a." But then again, I have a horrendous Texan accent and most people do not.
So I have two ways to think about this:
1. The author clearly intended for me to pronounce the words a certain way. They make that clear. I wouldn't decide that I didn't like a note in a page of sheet music and I was just going to play something else. So I can do the funny voice and make it work. I can bring their vision to life.
2. The author may have intended one thing, but I can reject that. Don't force your pronunciation of "again" on me. My dialect is just as valid and saying that yours is better is linguistic imperialism. And especially don't force that while my impressionable son is listening.
If he starts saying "A Gaaain," I might explode. I'm all prepared for a Midwestern accent with plenty of "aww jEEze," and "well, oKAY then." I am not prepared for whatever "A Gaaain" is.
There's too much here to really analyze or make any kind of statement about if poetry is inherently about power or inherently biased, about how to write poetry or read poetry. I don't know. I'm not a poet. But I do have some related antidotes to share.
When I was in junior high I clashed constantly with my English teacher. (I actually clashed with most of my English teachers, but for the purposes of this story, I'm only talking about one of them.) The breaking point came during the horrible poetry unit when we argued over how many syllables there are in "chocolate." I say two: Chock-lat. She said three: Chock-o-lat. No amount of arguing or demonstrating got me a better grade on that sonnet.
I do get excited when rhymes get my accent right. In Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, "aunts" rhymes with "pants." Heck yes, it does! Vindication! This alphabet book gets me and my accent plight!
Yes, it's about power. Language is about power. Funny thing: sometimes, just when you think you've won a language power fight, you find out you've lost.
ReplyDeleteI remember, in high school, in what was still the British Caribbean, the anticipation with which we waited for the Cambridge University Local Examinations Syndicate to send us the first "A" Level GCE English Literature exam to include Caribbean poetry. This was the result of a long bout of activism against this small aspect of the "cultural imperialism" part of actual overt imperialism. "Finally," we thought, "a poet like us."
But when we sat in the examination hall and began the exam, we saw, with dismay, that the poem was Jamaican, written in heavy Jamaican dialect.
Jamaica has a distinctive dialect using pronunciations and actual words not shared, at least not at that time, with other English-speaking Caribbean islands.
After the exam, it turned out that none of us had made any real sense of the poem. We could make a passing fair stab at understanding the British writers: Chaucer and Milton and Keats and Hardy --- all that lot --- even James Joyce -- but the Jamaican was truly foreign to us. 'What is it that Jamaicans call "Duppy Gun"?' we asked each other afterwards. Few of us guessed that it was a plant, one we all knew too. Even that was not obvious to us from the context. And rhyme and meter made no sense either. (Did I mention that Jamaican pronunciation was not like ours?)
The Brits., our colonial masters, knew what they were doing. They had won that round ----
There's a scene in Mary Poppins where Julie Andrews pronounces "again" that way. It took me years to figure out what she was saying.
ReplyDeleteForgot to mention: aunts rhymes with pants when I say it :)
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