Poetry on top of math

[Lee Knight]

I was browsing through the book "$30 Film School". In it the author addresses his past, wild adherence to bucking formula. And how it bit him in the ass. How it created double the work for him...

 

...cause his screenplay, while well received, was said to be scattered. The prescription was to write an outline. Go back and outline the whole script. Then rearrange his work of art in some sort of form that works. He did and found his art was more artful because of it. And they bought.

 

He comments how his punk aesthetic made it tough for him to accept formula. Then he realized all his favorite punk songs shared the same V, C, V, C form. Maybe the word is form not formula.

 

Poetry on top of math. And hopefully, if done right, the math is invisible. And the poetry stands strong on a firm foundation.

 

He elaborates. Paraphrasing, "While the 12 bar blues, the 3 minute pop song, and internet porn aren't original, they are all solid business strategies."

 

It's not what you tell, it's how you tell it. But it's still got to be poetry. The math's just the dumb structure holding it up.

 

Know what I'm talking about?

[Stackabones]

Isn't poetry on top of math prosody?

[Lee Knight]

Isn't poetry on top of math prosody ?

 

Oh you! Well ok... but he was speaking of how we can look at form as the math. So in a screenplay, for instance, without form... it's a bad film school "art piece". But impose some form (the math here) and it becomes something of substance.

 

I'm thinking of a lot of guys who show their early lyrics and while there's some cool images and some interesting art happening... it's... hmmmm... formless.

 

No math. Easy fix but objectionable to the uninitiated or stubborn or those who may perceive themselves as arty. Of course, some truly are arty, taking the math to the next level.

 

Yo?

[rockinrobby]

I'm like mad at math? There's too many numbers and stuff.

[eeglug]

All of art is about structure. In most songwriting, the structure is mostly predetermined: AABA, ABABAB etc. In storytelling (plays, TV & film especially), it's often a three act structure. (Some say there are only 6-8 types of stories.) In a painting or photography, it's the composition, which often winds up being a triangular or circular form etc.

 

Among the young tough rebels, it's a rite of passage to shun academia and tradition...which is often throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I was young once. It seems such a waste of time and energy now that I'm in my midlife crisis. Structure is inevitable. You can't run away from it no matter how badass you think you are.

 

When I was in art school, the big thing was to stop students from starting to draw a face or an eye or a gun or a car wheel - stop thinking about little details and think about the overall big picture. Kubrick once talked about reviewing scripts to make movies from and he said the big danger was to fall in love with a scene in the script. You need to judge the script from it's entirety and not on moments that seem cool.

 

Some of these lessons are easy to dismiss in songwriting because we are working with standard structures with verses and choruses. Also a song just isn't very long in the first place so it seems that the one cool moment is all you need to make it work. It's still worth thinking about though.

 

I'm not fully awake yet this morning so I'm probably talking outta my ass.

[Chicken Monkey]

Is internet porn a solid business strategy? I thought they were having trouble monetizing it.

[Lee Knight]

 

Some of these lessons are easy to dismiss in songwriting because we are working with standard structures with verses and choruses. Also a song just isn't very long in the first place so it seems that the one cool moment is all you need to make it work. It's still worth thinking about though.

 

 

Love your post. About the songwriting though... I do feel that there is a highly developed sense of structure with the great pop writers. The form is the big picture, yes. And we are talking about a small canvas, yes. But the form goes into the micro level and plays cat and mouse through the substructure.

 

No, I'm not on drugs.

 

I hear this internal form with the greats. Gershwin, Porter, Bacharach, Webb, Simon. L & M.

 

So to invite your whimsy with free form poetry is where it's at. Poetry not limited to words, but the poetry of the music too. The free expression. And then letting it enjoy a great structure. Maybe even a very refined structure that is poetry in its own design. It doesn't have to be simple minded to be simple.

 

Apple understand the potential elegance of simplicity.

 

OK, now I'm on drugs. (not really)

[Lee Knight]

 

Is internet porn a solid business strategy? I thought they were having trouble monetizing it.

 

 

You might be confusing the facts with the truth.

[Chicken Monkey]

 

i've got a presidential award. top math award. star student award (or something) in my history class..im the only sophmore out of all juniors and seniors... a story..and apparently poetry..we just started like a week ago...do. and what kind of stuff goes on with these jobs? I have.

 

 

There's no longer a button to report spambots? That's an outrage.

[Lee Knight]

Scary, isn't it?

[Mcfontio]

 

All of art is about structure. In most songwriting, the structure is mostly predetermined: AABA, ABABAB etc. In storytelling (plays, TV & film especially), it's often a three act structure. (Some say there are only 6-8 types of stories.) In a painting or photography, it's the composition, which often winds up being a triangular or circular form etc. Among the young tough rebels, it's a rite of passage to shun academia and tradition...which is often throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I was young once. It seems such a waste of time and energy now that I'm in my midlife crisis. Structure is inevitable. You can't run away from it no matter how badass you think you are. When I was in art school, the big thing was to stop students from starting to draw a face or an eye or a gun or a car wheel - stop thinking about little details and think about the overall big picture. Kubrick once talked about reviewing scripts to make movies from and he said the big danger was to fall in love with a scene in the script. You need to judge the script from it's entirety and not on moments that seem cool. Some of these lessons are easy to dismiss in songwriting because we are working with standard structures with verses and choruses. Also a song just isn't very long in the first place so it seems that the one cool moment is all you need to make it work. It's still worth thinking about though.

 

 

I'm not convinced that structure is the basis for art. Sure it can be analyzed and a structure can be defined. Structure can and does help us have a theoretical understanding - but is that where art comes from? How do we hit that stroke of genius? -That same stroke of genius that no matter how much structure many people could study, they will never be able to create something that good.

 

Say someone has practiced enough musical theory to play their instrument along with anything and not consciously think of the structure. They're just playing what they "feel". Is that still created through structure and not the persons consciousness/experience?

 

"Poetry on top of math. And hopefully, if done right, the math is invisible. And the poetry stands strong on a firm foundation"

 

We could probably see the structure in everything in the physical world. The notes in the music we love so much can be analyzed to supreme accuracy. But what about the emotion the music invokes? I guess the experience of love could be broken down to chemical happenings in the brain... But is our consciousness just a skull full of chemical 'happenings'? If that's the case, I could see that art is all started with structure - and from structure art is created.

 

Maybe not though. I'm getting all metaphysical here, but there's something magical about consciousness that our structured language will never be able to fully grasp.

[Lee Knight]

 

I'm not convinced that structure is the basis for art. Sure it can be analyzed and a structure can be defined. Structure can and does help us have a theoretical understanding - but is that where art comes from? How do we hit that stroke of genius? -That same stroke of genius that no matter how much structure many people could study, they will never be able to create something that good. Say someone has practiced enough musical theory to play their instrument along with anything and not consciously think of the structure. They're just playing what they "feel". Is that still created through structure and not the persons consciousness/experience? "Poetry on top of math. And hopefully, if done right, the math is invisible. And the poetry stands strong on a firm foundation" We could probably see the structure in everything in the physical world. The notes in the music we love so much can be analyzed to supreme accuracy. But what about the emotion the music invokes? I guess the experience of love could be broken down to chemical happenings in the brain... But is our consciousness just a skull full of chemical 'happenings'? If that's the case, I could see that art is all started with structure - and from structure art is created. Maybe not though. I'm getting all metaphysical here, but there's something magical about consciousness that our structured language will never be able to fully grasp.

 

 

Well, see... you're speaking to the unseemliness of it all. But step back for a second. No one's saying "no poetry". That was my point. The poetry does not come from the structure. The structure is there to show off the poetry.

[blue2blue]

There's no longer a button to report spambots? That's an outrage.

 

Are you guys saying that you no longer see a little white, red-rimmed triangle with an exclamation point in it? Like this: ?

[Chicken Monkey]

Are you guys saying that you no longer see a little white, red-rimmed triangle with an exclamation point in it? Like this: ?

 

Ahh-it's there.

 

 

When I'm signed in...

[eeglug]

I'm not convinced that structure is the basis for art.

 

You make good points although I'm not sure I follow all you say. Of course it's debatable whether I even know what I'm talking about either. If we sat and talked for a long time it's possible that in the end we agree with one another.

 

Here's a couple more confusing things to think about:

 

1. A little girl learns to bounce a ball. It's a cool discovery, a moment of poetry for her. She might bug her parents and everyone around her by bouncing it all day long. It's a cool moment and she repeats it over and over again but it's not art. It might become art later when she learns to harness it into the context of a game or other athletic display, which is the structure. But for now, she's just bouncing a ball.

 

2. My old buddy and idol, Ludwig van Beethoven is sometimes said to be pretty amateurish as a melody man in comparison to Chopin or Schubert. It's really hard to imagine anyone getting off on the short motif that is the basis of his 5th symphony. Luckily, he is the master of structure and he really knows how to take meager resources and making something out of them.

 

I'm not trying to get really down on the cool moments, but Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen have built careers out of an awful lot of empty cool moments that don't add up to much. I actually like the occasional Stevie Ray Vaughan but his soloing style is a lot of disconnected moments.

 

(In case you're wondering I certainly think it's possible to invent meaningful artistic structure 'in the moment' - some truly great improvisers like Hendrix or Coltrane and others have proven that.)

 

When all else fails I defer to everything that Lee said - he really knows what's up.

[Lee Knight]

 

2. My old buddy and idol, Ludwig van Beethoven is sometimes said to be pretty amateurish as a melody man in comparison to Chopin or Schubert. It's really hard to imagine anyone getting off on the short motif that is the basis of his 5th symphony. Luckily, he is the master of structure and he really knows how to take meager resources and making something out of them.

 

 

Yeah that^^^

[rockinrobby]

Is internet porn a solid business strategy? I thought they were having trouble monetizing it.

 

I got suckered in to an Internet Porn business deal? I got screwed... Seems I didn't fully understand the terms and conditions going in?

[Dingoist]

Now at first I thought, structure != math... that what the heck was Lee smokin' today (and could I get some).

 

But, the geek in me started reflecting about formal grammars. That is a derivative of math, but has a lot in common with linguistics so the two are related (I've done both linguistics as an English major in college, and formal language theory from computer science when I went back to school at the end of the '90s).

 

Now then, structure is mathematical if it can be defined. So that's where the math part comes in. Whether the definition is of ABABC type, or you break it down into other tokens, the description of music can be seen as a part of grammar theory. That's enough I'll go on that way without refreshing some of my knowledge (long since drifting away to the dusty shelves of my own mind) -- if you think about it, modern music notation itself is a formal language.

 

Now, that vs. free form poetry is that structure helps us listen. I used to dig free form stuff when I was a teenager, but when I became a more successful and experienced writer, I spent more time playing within the bounds of structure for the challenge. In fact, I'd choose different structures just to see how I could work within their bounds. And the fact that I got paid by magazines, and as a copy writer reinforced that structure was good

 

Structure gives bounds to great musical ideas. It makes it more palatable to the ear as a listener. It actually makes you strive harder as a writer (sometimes, esp when the inspiration is unformulaic).

 

Yes, and structure is math. At least not in the algebraic sense.

[blue2blue]

Ahh-it's there. When I'm signed in...

 

I think it's the stress of all this change getting to us...

 

I think a lot of people were surprised by how viscerally they took the attempted switch to HC2.0. I suspect some developers were, too.

 

But, you know, look at some of these post counts. (Am I the only one who wished his post count HAD got lost? Seriously, I think it makes me look like a loser and I've got a damn excuse. Sorta. Being a mod.) Many folks spend a lot of time here communicating with pals all over the world -- and virtualized, or not, those relationships mean something to people.

 

Crippling that communication put people in a bad mood, no question.

 

And even though we're back here in the old board, for now, there's the cloud hanging over our heads that they still want to change it over. I absolutely firmly believe that they really want to be sure it will be truly superior before they try it again -- but I also firmly believe they thought HC2.0 was better, save for a few small bugs. And I think the consensus of the people actually using the site, in some cases for hours a day, was that it was not. So we not only have to deal with delayed stress, but with uncertainty about the future.

 

Of course, one hundred years from now, what will it matter?

[Chicken Monkey]

I think it's the stress of all this change getting to us...

 

I'm no longer auto-logged in here, for some reason .

[Stackabones]

 

And even though we're back here in the old board, for now, there's the cloud hanging over our heads that they still want to change it over. I absolutely firmly believe that they really want to be sure it will be truly superior before they try it again -- but I also firmly believe they thought HC2.0 was better, save for a few small bugs. And I think the consensus of the people actually using the site, in some cases for hours a day, was that it was not . So we not only have to deal with delayed stress, but with uncertainty about the future.

 

 

I have no doubts that they are going to {censored} us over. The next change will be worse. Experts have been brought in to make sure of it. My guess is that the HC {censored}suits will just hire better PR folks to spin the last and next foul-ups.

[SnowAngel]

The problem with taking "structure" or "math" out of the equation of art is that you can lose its ability to communicate your idea.

 

In interpersonal communication (which I teach), the true transference of the idea and, therefore, successful communication -- which I hope is what we're going for in writing songs and any form of art -- is achieved by relating what we hear/see/feel to our own knowledge base and then attaching meaning to it based upon our experiences. If what we hear/see/feel is too unstructured or outside of our knowledge base, then we have to struggle to attach meaning to it.

 

Many times, we then just ignore it because it seems to be nonsense or we're afraid that we'll seem ignorant for not having the prior knowledge to understand what the "artist" is saying.

 

So, to me, for a work to be truly understood and communicate with the audience, it has to have a structure that is within the audience's mindset that permits them to assign some preliminary meaning to it.

 

Math, music and language are all related, if you ask me, by the way.

 

And the porn industry is still alive and well in the San Fernando Valley. Those producers are not the ones defaulting on their mortgages.

[Mcfontio]

Well, see... you're speaking to the unseemliness of it all. But step back for a second. No one's saying "no poetry". That was my point. The poetry does not come from the structure. The structure is there to show off the poetry.

 

It seems like we were arguing the same point? But I'm not sure what you mean by "you're speaking to the unseemliness of it all. But step back for a second.". Though, rereading my earlier post is also a little confusing...

[Lee Knight]

It seems like we were arguing the same point? But I'm not sure what you mean by "you're speaking to the unseemliness of it all. But step back for a second.". Though, rereading my earlier post is also a little confusing...

 

 

I didn't think we were arguing at all. You made some great points...

 

Art doesn't come from structure.

 

I think you're right. But... great art has structure. That's my point.

[Mcfontio]

Yep, we weren't disagreeing at all.