Beginning from the End: Strategies of Composition in Lyrical Improvisation with End Rhyme

Abstract

Beginning from the End:Strategies of Composition in Lyrical Improvisation with End Rhyme Venla Sykäri (bio) Having studied why rhyming couplets are such an effective vehicle of lyrical communication in contemporary Cretan tradition for over a decade, the first time I attended a freestyle rap battle in Helsinki the expression seemed profoundly familiar to me. At first sight differences between the two oral poetic cultures might seem striking: language, style, communicative contexts, and social implantation—in two socially and linguistically distinct corners of Europe. Nevertheless, the major argumentative images developed within the improvised flow of rapping tended to be verbalized in a couplet form very similar to that in Crete. In addition to the structural similarity of these core units, both traditions share the role of end rhyme as a primary parameter in composition, as well as the argumentative ambition. These qualifiers also characterize the rhetorical structure of several other traditional forms of contest poetry, which I have recently been able to verify in the performance of improvised gloses in Mallorca. The target of this paper is to analyze the structural and rhetorical principles that seem to be emblematic of extempore composition in all three of these rhymed forms of oral poetry.1 The analysis focuses on the methods that improvisers employ in the construction of end rhyme patterns and in structuring the semantic hierarchy of verse units in the spontaneous composition of verses in these traditions. End rhyme is a poetic device that ties verses together with parallel sound patterns situated at the ends of the lines. Although Richard Bauman (1977:18-19) specifically states that "the structural principles underlying the parallel constructions may serve as mnemonic aids to the performer of a fixed traditional text, or enhance the fluency of the improvisational or spontaneous performance," the role of rhyme is often acknowledged only as a mnemotechnic device that is utilized to help the memory in the performance of an existing, pre-composed text. In this paper, by contrast, I will speak of end rhyme's role as a creative and cognitive device in the improvised oral composition of verses. The methods of structuring the poetic discourse by situating sound patterns at the ends of the lines are the very heart of the cognitive practice, skill, and art of lyrical improvisation with end rhyme. These methods further relate to a model of semantic hierarchy, in which semantic weight, the argument, is also at the end of a structural unit of composition. The fact that the improviser has to command a technique of structuring the verses in a manner that is often the reverse to what the audience perceives is largely unknown outside the communities of improvisers. I also address a type of orally composed poetry, rhymed poetry with an argumentative core, which, in spite of the historical depth of its roots and nearly universal distribution, has so far received little attention in English language research. In what follows I focus on the poetic traditions of the Cretan rhyming couplets called mandinadhes, Mallorcan gloses, and Finnish improvised rap, freestyle. These poetic idioms all have end rhyme but they differ in their culture-specific conventions of performance and also in how the utterance as a whole is structured and composed. Mandinadhes represent a short, compact couplet form that states a desired point within its two lines. Improvised gloses are one example of the contest poetry stanzas of approximately eight to ten lines with a fixed rhyme pattern typical of the Southern European and Ibero-American areas. In Finnish improvised rap the length of the strophe can be either free or regularized by a time limit, but utterances often contain 16-24 lines. In addition to the length of utterances, the speed of rapping is very rapid. Both of these factors contribute to a greater variety in structuring the utterance as a whole. Each section of this essay will introduce the basic characteristics of the poetic idioms addressed, give one or several textualized examples of utterances in the tradition, analyze the rhyming and placement of semantic weight in these utterances, and then look at how individual improvisers explain their method. Following this I draw some conclusions concerning the similarities and differences...