Real-world analogy for poetic structure?
April 7, 2014 12:34 PM   Subscribe

This is kind of silly, and maybe I can't figure it out because there's no great answer, but if anyone can come up with a creative solution to this, it's Ask Metafilter! I need some kind of workable real-world analogy for a poem's structure--something where choosing a particular form affects your end result. Or something where you have to choose each element carefully in order to get the result you want.

So far the closest thing I can come up with is a baking analogy: a lot of baked goods contain the same kinds of ingredients, but depending upon how much you use and how you use them, you might get a cookie or a cupcake or a biscuit.

(As in poetry, most poems involve words and lines and stanzas and rhyme schemes, but depending upon how you use them, you might end up with a sonnet, or a villanelle, or a limerick.)

I'm feeling like the baking analogy isn't super-relatable for kidlets, though. Any other ideas? It would be best if this is something a kid would generally have been exposed to by, say, age 15. (So no office-life examples, for instance)
posted by like_a_friend to Writing & Language (13 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Legos? If you use a bunch of the wing-shaped pieces you're liable to wind up with something that flies; use wheels and you've got a car or a scooter or something. The pieces that you'd use to build a house will look, on their own, significantly different from the ones used to build the Death Star.
posted by jbickers at 12:38 PM on April 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


Visual art? Collage vs. oil painting vs. watercolors vs. photography?
posted by Going To Maine at 12:48 PM on April 7, 2014


Knitting a garment? Lots of variables to tweak: yarn choice, needle choice, how tight you pull the stitches, stitch pattern, general structure of the garment (top-down? bottom up? seamless?) etc., etc.
posted by fancyoats at 12:49 PM on April 7, 2014


Best answer: How about something using new media? An idea written one way might be something you'd email; another in Gchat; a third, a Facebook post; a fourth, an Instagram; a fifth, a tweet, a sixth, a text. And for each medium you might choose different lengths and vocabularies and formalities... but they all use words.
posted by shivohum at 1:00 PM on April 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


Chemistry? Lots of things become poisonous or delicious according to very slight changes in molecules.
posted by jsturgill at 1:13 PM on April 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


Also, architecture generally. Bricks for a house vs. ice blocks for an igloo, etc.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:41 PM on April 7, 2014


I would use a cells/DNA analogy - all animals are made up of cells, which look similar up close (but not exactly the same). But depending on how you arrange those cells, you could get a salmon, or a parakeet, or a giraffe. Furthermore, not all birds fly, just like not all poems rhyme, but they're all birds/poems. Styles of poetry build on previous styles much like species are descended from other species. Their form is constrained by the forms that came before, so that blank verse (if I have the history right) has iambic pentameter because sonnets used it, just like humans have appendices because some evolutionary forbear needed them.
posted by five toed sloth at 1:49 PM on April 7, 2014


Maybe something from film/TV? The structure and narrative conventions imposed by a commercial vs a short film vs a feature film vs a multi-season show? Also: the visual possibilities of large vs small screens.
posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 3:04 PM on April 7, 2014


I write a fair bit of poetry. Once on a walk in the woods, I found a tortured, twisted piece of wood. I would swear it looked like the body of Jesus on the cross. For days I searched for its match, its completion, that would make its arms.

Assembling a poem is like collecting the pieces of a three dimensional collage.

The words, gathered one by one, complement each other in music and meaning (and in the music of meaning).
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:24 PM on April 7, 2014 [2 favorites]


Maybe I'm missing some of the point, but to explain this to kids, I would just play some music--150 bpm dance music, meditative New Age music, Bach, 20th C. experimental music, etc.--and claim that the point of different poetic forms is to suit a range of different circumstances and moods in the same way.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 4:36 PM on April 7, 2014


Response by poster: Thank you, guys! These are all great analogies. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of my own form (hah), I only have about 50 words and no sounds or visuals to get the idea across, so I think the email/Facebook/tweet/text analogy is probably going to carry the day.
posted by like_a_friend at 6:59 PM on April 7, 2014


Ever play cards? Well, every game uses the same 52 cards, but the way they come off the deck makes all the difference. Every hand draws from the same deck the way every poem draws its words from the same lexicon. But they can be different suits, different numbers in different sequences, and a skilled card player can arrange to use them in an order that accomplishes his or her aim, where an unskilled one, putting them down in a different order, can fail spectacularly.
posted by wjm at 3:01 AM on April 8, 2014


Response by poster: If you can believe it, wjm, we are actually not permitted to reference cards as that may insinuate gambling, the mere mention of which will irretrievably corrupt the souls of all children.
posted by like_a_friend at 2:53 PM on April 9, 2014


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