III. Rhyme Is the Mathematics of Poetry
Murielle: And this brings us to form.
One of my frustrations with contemporary poetry is that we often talk about expression without talking about mastery. Historically, a poet was trained in forms, meter, rhythm, prosody. There were structures that had to become part of the poet’s knowledge.
I sometimes think of metrics as the mathematics of poetry.
Loïc: That makes sense to me.
Because mathematics gives you constraints, but constraints don’t necessarily prevent creativity. They can give you a language within which creativity becomes possible.
Murielle: Exactly. Rhyme is a constraint. Meter is a constraint. But once you’ve mastered them, they become tools.
And this is where I think we have a transmission problem. We still have extraordinary poets, obviously. But as a culture, I’m not sure we have a clear answer anymore to the question: what does a poet need to know?
How is a poet trained?
A scientist doesn’t simply wake up one morning and announce, “I’m a geneticist because I feel very strongly about genes.”
[Laughter.]
There is knowledge that has to be acquired. There are tools. There are methods. There is a community capable of recognizing whether you’ve actually learned them.
In poetry, that structure has become much less visible.
Loïc: And that changes the question from talent to training.
Maybe sensitivity is not enough.
You can be extremely sensitive to something without necessarily being able to perceive it accurately, describe it, or communicate it.
Murielle: Yes! That’s an important distinction: sensitivity isn’t perception.
I’ve often thought that artists are trained to become more sensitive. But perhaps that’s the wrong formulation. What we need is to become more perceptive.
Because perception implies something more rigorous. You aren’t simply experiencing more intensely. You’re learning to observe.
Loïc: And that is something science does train.
Science trains observation. Not perfectly, obviously. Scientists are human beings. They have egos and biases. But the method continually brings you back to the question: What are you actually observing?
That might be one of the places where artistic training could learn something from scientific training.
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