The sessions will use more meaning oriented ways (than previously) to approach (revisit) some of the ideas mentioned in the previous courses on versification (the ear, the music, the beat), and imagery (the senses of hearing, touching, seeing, ?tasting).  But I'd also like to raise the issue of 'showing not telling' that is the idea that good writing is a matter of appeal to the senses, the 'concrete' and that abstractions are used at our peril (here an interaction with the Haiku course).  There's also the business of synaesthesia where senses become metaphors of each other. 

 

The theme also gives rise - from the reading point of view - of the ways in which ideas have been presented in concrete terms.

 

For a poet the idea of the physicality of language itself is crucial, and perhaps we could look back at the ways in which traditional metrical forms have, as their main function, the bringing us back to this very physicality.   Language is physical as sound (hearing) and as sight (reading), sometimes both at once.   Physical sound works in very many ways in poetry, and (as we saw briefly in the course on imagery) the most obvious way it works - in onomatopeia - is not nearly as simply as it may seem when we just say that the sound 'mimics' the meaning.   The physical shape of the poem on the page is used by some poets in a way analogous to traditional uses of sound in metre.

 

There's also the odd way in which hearing words gets mixed up in our brains with the experiences with which we connect the words.

 

And then there is the elementary connection that poetry has historically with music and song, and what it is about song, or it's traces in the 'music' of verse, that makes it somehow more moving and compelling than other ways of speaking.