Analysis and Classification of Prosodic Styles in Post-modern Spoken Poetry

We present our research on computer-supported analysis of prosodic styles in post-modern poetry. Our project is unique in making use of both the written as well as the spoken form of the poem as read by the original author. In particular, we use speech and natural language processing technology to align speech and text and to perform textual analyses. We then explore, based on literary theory, the quantitative value of various types of features in differentiating various prosodic classes of post-modern poetry using machine-learning techniques. We contrast this feature-driven approach with a theoretically less informed neural networks-based approach and explore the relative strengths of both models, as well as how to integrate higher-level knowledge into the NN. In this paper, we give an overview of our project, our approach, and particularly focus on the challenges encountered and lessons learned in our interdisciplinary endeavour. The classification results of the rhythmical patterns (six classes) using NN-based approaches are better than by feature-based approaches. 1 Prosodic Styles in Post-modern Spoken Poetry The most important development in modern and postmodern poetry is the replacement of traditional meter by new rhythmical features. Ever since Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), modern (nineteenthto twenty-first-century) poets have been searching for novel forms of prosody, accent, rhythm, and intonation. Along with the rejection of older metrical units such as the iamb or trochee, a structure of lyrical language was developed that renounced traditional forms like rhyme and meter. Poetic movements and groups like the Imagists (Beyers, 2001; Cooper, 1998; Silkin, 1997), the Black Mountain poets (Berry, 1997; Finch, 2000; Steele, 1990), as well as European poets before and after the second world war (Meyer-Sickendiek, 2012) developed a post-metrical idea of prosody that employs rhythmical features of everyday language, prose, and musical styles including jazz and hip hop. In parts, they intended to create a fluent, in parts a disfluent prosody, for example in Dadaistic Poetry. The text-based patterns include “end-stopped lines,” “line-sentences,” as developed by Ezra Pound in Cathay; dismemberment of the line; spatial dismemberment of the line by indentation, as William Carlos Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Hussein Hussein, Timo Baumann Figure 1: The vertical axis is the grammatical rank; the horizontal axis is the metrical rank. Intersection points help to identify the poem, for instance, the line arrangement (Wesling, 1996). Williams does in his triadic line verse; systematic enjambment (breaking a sentence or phrase into two lines); or dismemberment with enjambment of the line. To classify these different features in the line arrangement of each poem, we make use of the theory of the grammetrical ranking. The term grammetrics, coined by Donald Wesling, is a hybridization of grammar and metrics: the key hypothesis is that the interplay of sentencestructure and line-structure can be accounted for more economically by simultaneous than by successive analysis (Wesling, 1996). In poetry as a kind of versified language, the singular sentence interacts with verse periods (syllable, foot, part-line, line, rhymed pair or stanza, whole poem), a process for which Wesling finds ‘scissoring’ an apt metaphor, assuming that meter and grammar can be scissored by each other, that the cutting places can be graphed with some precision (Wesling, 1996, p. 67). In Weslings scheme (see Figure 1), the vertical axis designates the grammatical rank and the horizontal axis the metric rank. Intersections of the two axes are represented by circles in which the axes meet; small circles for small coordinate points, large circles for large ones. Of all possible intersections on the grid, only 16 points are encircled, because normally only these 16 points are filled in poems. The 16 shear points can be represented in two clusters defined by their centers at the main coordinates of word foot and sentence line (large circles). To detect the specific phrasing of each of these grammetrical units, we make use of Richard Curetons theory of Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (RPEV) (Cureton, 1992). Cureton proved that the phrasing is a typical feature for poetry-readings. Following Weslings theory of grammetrical ranking, Richard Cureton has divided the poetic rhythm into further components (Cureton, 1992, p. 124) as follows: 1) The grouping structure is based on the hierarchical segmentation of a poem, similar to the grammetrical ranking mentioned. 2) The metrical structure identifies the regular alternation of strong and weak beats at a number of hierarchical Analysis and Classification of Prosodic Styles in Post-modern Spoken Poetry Figure 2: Rhythmic phrasing in English verse (Cureton, 1992). levels, differing between the beat and the time span between two beats. Both two structures explain the so-called “time-span segmentation”. 3) The time-span reduction combines the information gleaned from these metrical and grouping structures. This is illustrated in a tree structure-style hierarchical organization uniting time-spans at all temporal levels of a poem. 4) The prolongational reduction provides the prosodic phrasing of tensing and relaxing patterns in a readout poem. The prolongation refers to the anticipation and overshooting of a goal, such as the end of a line in an enjambment. So, all in all our classification pursues two basic questions. (1): Can the poem be determined grammetrically? We use a scheme developed by Donald Wesling (Figure 1), which combines grammatical and metrical ranking. (2): are these grammetric patterns isochronous? In addition to grammetrical ranking, we use the scheme used by Richard Cureton (Figure 2). Based on these two theories, we distinguish 18 rhythmical patterns based on three types of patterns as shown in Figure 3: (a) text-based patterns (unemphasized enjambments, sprungrhythm, parlando, rubato, long line poems, and free associations), (b) audio-based patterns (emphasized enjambments (gestic rhythm), syncopations, variable foot, cut-up rhythm, cadence, and flows), and (c) decompositions (lettristic decompositions, syllabic decompositions, staccato, ellipses, permutations, and dialect poems). We expect that these 18 patterns represent the whole range of free verse prosody in poems read by the authors. For this reason, we establish a gradual one-dimensional continuum, whose two poles are denoted by the terms fluent and disfluent. The prosodic spectrum with 18 poetic styles in the free verse spectrum is illustrated in Figure 3. In this paper we analyze the following 6 classes along the fluency/disfluency spectrum: The first two are based on “soft enjambments”. The (1) “parlando style” allows a mostly fluent reading of colon-based line-arrangements of the poem. A similar structure is used in the (2) “variable foot”, but this pattern emphasizes each gap to the run-on-line. A more disfluent style occurs in the (3) “unemphasized enjambment”, when they are strong (not colon-based, but separating articles and nouns or even prefixes of words). When these strong enjambments are emphasized, we got the pattern (4) “gestic rhythm”. Two further patterns occur in modern “sound poetry”: The (5) “syllabic decomposition”, used since dadaism combing syllables; and the (6) “lettristic deiomposition”, based on the combination of consonants. Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Hussein Hussein, Timo Baumann