Ben's Language Lab

Daily Dose of English 205

Poetry

Daily Dose of English 205

Intermediate

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Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about poetry. Poetry is something very interesting in the world. It's got a very interesting place. It's a form of art that I think that pretty much everybody knows of, everybody's heard of, but the amount of people that are interested in poetry and read lots of poetry and write poetry is way, way lower than like you'd expect based on the popularity of the, the known-ness of the art form, I guess, right? Because something like football is so popular or is so famous because it is so popular. Everybody in the world, soccer as we'd call it in the U.S., because it's just so well known. Even something like American football is relatively well-known in the entire world because it is so popular in a big country, a very well-known country like the U.S. But there are plenty of things, like there's lots of things that will match the sort of opposite description, but poetry really stands out to me as an example of an art form that is so like there's a very different level of famousness to like actual engagement or whatever. The number of people that you meet that read poetry for fun or write poetry is just so much lower than as a percentage of the people that know what poetry is, which is interesting. However, I think that there is a relatively high amount of poetry that we come across in our day-to-day, which we might not think about as poetry, and that's kind of what I wanna talk about. Because I am less personally interested in like a poem that somebody wrote, but I do think there's a lot of other poetry out there that makes it a really interesting art form that I would like to know more about for a couple of reasons. I just thought of a random tangent though is that some people in the U.S. say the word poem as one syllable poem rhymes with Rome or or or gnome poem which I think is really funny because it's I don't know it does that I don't think that's right I think that's the less common pronunciation of poem which is more like Does it have a rhyme? I don't know if poem actually has a rhyme. Oh-um. Go-um? No, I don't know. Another tangent is that there's lots and lots of words that don't have rhymes in English. Because English rhyming is actually, might be a little bit different than your native language, potentially. Let me actually, I want to look it up. I spelled rhymes wrong. Rhyme is very hard to spell. R-H-Y-M-E-S. It's got R-H-Y in it. It's weird. I noticed this when I was learning Spanish, because rhyming functions differently in Spanish than it does in English, which surprised me. My assumption was that rhyming is the same. But in English, it has to do with the final stressed syllable all the way to the end of the word, right? And so that's one of the famous reasons why a word like orange or silver doesn't really have a rhyme because that stressed point, that ilver or orange in that case, everything else has to connect with that, to rhyme, is what I'm trying to say. So like, what's another word? Controller. I'm looking at things on my desk. Controller. Anything that has oler at the end rhymes because oler is the ending stress syllable and then just the rest of the word. But you start from the vowel, right? So controller rhymes with stroller or patroller or Fuller, I guess, not really a word. Fuller is a word, but that's different. But in Spanish, it's only about the final syllable. The stress doesn't actually matter as much, I think. I don't really understand it that well, because to me, rhyming is that final stress thing and beyond, which is, yeah. And the reason I bring this up is because rhyming often is very important in poetry. And certain kinds of poems or rhymes end up becoming, well, sorry, certain poems use different kinds of rhymes or different kinds of meter. Meter is about the syllables and like the structure of something. And so one of the most famous metered poems is a haiku, which has five, seven, five syllables in it. And that is what the poem is. So you go one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four, five. And it has that nice rhythm to it, and that's the meter of the poem. The meter is also very frequently talked about in Shakespeare, which is often a kind of poetry. Many of his plays are written in a kind of meter, a kind of poetic verse. That is why his poems not only sound old, but also very different than a lot of the like spoken language if that makes any sense. There's that, there's a rhythm to it that even can carry between characters. A lot of plays at that time were written in different meters which make them really cool and they make them sound more like a song almost. There's this rhythm to it going through the poem and it creates this flow of meaning, I guess. Yeah, it's a flow of like ideas rather than like strictly just meaning and language as we use it. Oh, and another kind of art that uses a lot of similar things of meter and rhyming is a lot of rap and hip hop music has a lot of the same sort of roots as just straight up poetry or spoken word stuff. A lot of people will say like, oh, it's not singing. They're not singing a song because there's not really tone to the voice, which is kind of true, but like it depends on how you define the word singing. But there absolutely is music there and there's art and there is like creativity in that form of a different kind of expression, which is very interesting. I'm running out of time. I have a lot more to say about poetry than I thought, but I want to go and touch on a couple of sources of poetry that I distinctly remember as growing up in the US that you might find interesting if you want to like get a little bit of a background into our sort of like Culture I guess because the two sources that I'm thinking of right now are specifically dr. Seuss and And then rolled no not rolled all that's somebody else. That's a different writer The book is called the giving tree Shell Silverstein, that's his name Yeah, The Giving Tree and what else did he write? Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends, that's what it is. So Shel Silverstein is an American author, writer, poet, whatnot, and he has a couple of books that are very, very famous in the US. The Giving Tree is one of them, and Where the Sidewalk Ends is another. The Giving Tree is mildly poetic, I think. I don't remember perfectly, but Where the Sidewalk Ends absolutely is a book of poems. And a lot of people know it, and there's a lot of great poems in it, actually. I've actually used it before with some English learners. We go over it, we talk about words, we talk about phrasing, we talk about rhythm as well because I think poems are great for learning rhythm in the spoken language because there is a certain way that when you read A poem it sounds better if it is read with like a proper rhythm, right? So I definitely recommend where the sidewalk ends it is Very interesting. There's a lot of it's great pictures great artwork and Yeah, definitely recommend it and apparently I just looked it up some of which it also includes some songs and won a Grammy Award for its audio edition, which is cool. So yeah, definitely look it up. I didn't even know there was an audio edition, so you could absolutely look into that. And then the other one is Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss is definitely more well-known in the US. But Dr. Seuss, how do you spell that? S-E-U-S-S? Yeah, Dr. Seuss. S-E-U-S-S. I think now he's no more known around the world because of, I don't even know who Dr. Seuss is, but there's some movies and stuff. The Grinch is from Dr. Seuss. But, oh yeah, okay, this was a person, but he wrote basically kids books that were, that had a lot, very few words and a lot of rhymes and a lot of like sort of goofy ideas and interesting pictures. And one of the most famous ones is definitely, is it red fish, blue fish? No, green eggs and ham. And green eggs and ham, the Lorax, red fish, blue fish, cat in the hat. There's all of these things and they often have rhymes in them. They often have like that flow to them. So I have several of them, I just know, right? One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish is a very famous line. But then there's also the, Sam I am, Sam I am, oh how I ate, oh how I hate that Sam I am definitely are like some lines that you'll remember because the books don't use very many words. It's mostly about the pictures and the flow of the words and yeah. So there are some sources of poetry that you could look into that if you're curious, I definitely recommend the books. I think that the other media adaptations of Dr. Seuss are a lot more like regular movies and whatnot. So the books are really cool. Definitely recommend them as a little bit of American culture and yeah. Yeah, I think that's everything I want to say. There's more to talk about, but we're over time. So I'm going to say goodbye and I will see you again tomorrow in another episode. If you enjoyed this, let me know down in the comments below what kind of poetry you're interested in or what you've heard before. But yeah, that's everything for me. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.


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