In her book, The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song, Ellen Bryant Voigt highlights the significance of syntax, she writes, “this structure—this architecture—is the essential drama of the poem’s composition.” Advertently, in her approach to understanding the motions and sensational energy of the poetic line, she embraces a mathematical deconstruction, analyzing the progression from stanzas to sentences to lines to phrases to words to syllabic sounds. This structure, reminiscent of Robert Jourdain’s theories of music, allows us to understand how language presents and processes sounds in terms of tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition and performance in a poem. A poem’s theatre is its syntax. From the satirical syntax of Tanure Ojaide to the extreme obscurantism of Peter Akinlabi, contemporary and classical formal poets have manipulated sentences over the years to engage and titillate the sensuous mind. One of such powerful poems that aroused my fascination is Jakky Bankong-Obi’s “Season of Wreck and Pivots” for its eclecticism and dexterity.

The poem opens wool-gatheringly, intensely and momentarily, with an articulation of the frictions that engineer the landscape of Guzape Hills in the momentous time from the “sheaves of wild savanna,” “common flowers,” and “plainsong of old trade-winds.” This tremor in lyricism of the poem continues as a companion, carrying us as readers in the undercurrent of the Sirocco wind, a Mediterranean wind that comes from the Sahara and the plaintive notes of “ama’s solo / chanting throeing the fields.” Here, there is a steady buildup and persuasion of agreement between words, sounds and meaning. This coherence also makes every negative space almost unignorable. The quiet moments, such as the enjambment between “Time worn” and “sheaves” are cacophonous. The parataxis between “chanting” & “throeing the fields” is a lo-fi soundscape. Notice the dynamism also created in meaning too through the enjambment between “to be” & “a ley.” Mimetically, the persona colonized by this acoustic occupying, finds herself plaintive to what she considers more to be a “debriefing” — a sort of bodily invasion. Following after an ecopoetic parallelism that elicits a desertification to ecological spaces, ubiquitous in Bankong-Obi’s work, the persona feels violated, handspun and pilfered from.

In the third stanza, she makes a declarative statement implying the consequences of this action, but also inverts the statement into an interrogation. “Because of nostalgia / or the requisite pruning of flesh?” Syntax is also symbolic here, as we observe the semantic change in speech that comes with the addition of the question mark. The question mark is a growing unknown, a pondering that “foreclose / on a vanishing purview.” Again, she asks more directly, “So what does it mean to be a ley, a woman, bereft and adrift?”

The struggle with language, as Gregory Bateson concludes, as always, is the conflict “between the denotative and the connotative forces in words.” Where the language seeks to define or denote, it mostly ends up suggesting or implying. Thus, we are unable to reconcile semantics rigor mortis with connotation. But Bankong-Obi’s metaphors lean more towards a sentimentally interpretative impressionism of her persona rather than a borderless expository, revelatory or descriptive analysis. Whatever is predicated by the subject becomes a temperance that is indulged in its passion by the dialectic of her syntax. Where there is change, there is the harmattan wind returning “on the same frequency as devastation.” Where there is the torching of change, there is the “pining, levanter’s / brittle bore paring November’s long shadows / to a cache of ruin.”

Although the poem sparingly utilizes a consistent meter, there are moments where rhythms emerge, alluding to music. The line, “O Sirocco! Plaintive and rote as ama’s solo chanting throeing the field,” has a trochaic rhythm that allows the time of narrative to not just be measured in semantics, but also in sound. While the poem endears for its polemical tension on the feminine propaganda, it triumphs mostly for its relative flow of words, both symmetric and asymmetric, maintaining a resonance of sounds that marries to words and creates a hypnotic music that enchants.

Discussion around contemporary free verse poetry often come with its mostly unorganized, sometimes tired and worn-out music or rhythm scheme, which formalists believe formal poetry can compensate for. This debate taking a political turn creates a divide where form is linked to conservatism and free verse with progressivism. With form, A. E. Stallings, an American poet and translator, writes:

It’s helpful and effective to have some limitations on one’s choices and even to ‘give up’ some control over the poem. Which, I suppose, is a little scary for some people. To give up some control to the muse, to outer things. I feel there’s almost a sort of Ouija Board feeling about rhyme and meter, where maybe you’re in control, and maybe you’re not. […] Maybe it’s a negative freedom, something like a negative capability type of freedom.

However, the power of syntax, in free verse as reflected in Bankong-Obi’s poem is in its ability to manipulate effect and rhythm, with less rigid, forceful pattern systems of formal poetry, from creating the colloquial to the subtle to the dramatic. Non-contemplative is the effect of meter measurable of free verse, but cadence as the pulse of syntax, and patterns as the relations and parallelisms of words, phrases, lines and sentences can be felt if used as less than a gimmick, but more intentionally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash