Rhyming wine and cheese is all about memorability, form, and content…
Ever wonder what makes the pre-propaganda we all know and love so much? What came before is always important to consider in all culture studies. There are many common tools used to create stories from cultural experiences. Poetry is one of them. So, I thought a thread about its use throughout history to influence people would be appropriate.
Poetry is everywhere. Pop songs, proverbs, love letters, hallmark cards, quotations, advertising, and even politics. Alliteration and other rhetorical formulas are used extensively to create memorable catch phrases and impressive sound bytes.
What is beautiful is memorable.
What is memorable is pleasurable.
Rhymes, wine, and some cheese…
Poetry tries to get people to reconstruct the structure of its form. It acts as a memory aid to remember the content in the rhythm it provides. The formal characteristics of poetry provide a means for people to ‘copy & paste’ thoughts and communications to each other in a memorable way.
This simple line is an example:
‘You get what you get and you don’t get upset.’
Why is it memorable?
What is poetic?
Why is it memorable?
Is it pleasurable?
It’s metered and it rhymes. Our brains instinctively recognize the inherent patterns.
Before the printing press memory was the prime mover in all poetry!
All poetry comes from what came before. Poets and writers are reacting to history. Even if it’s just a personal history or an experience about a subject. Rap music is a prime example of this. Poetry is about the depths of the soul.
Rhyming Wine and Cheese – Structure and content – Sound and Sense!
The sounds, the sense, the patterns
All create expectations within the rhythms of a line
The frames, the shapes, the structure
All are used to extract the patterns to form a theme
A lot of big brands nowadays are using poetry to cut through the noise and clutter and grab viewers attention by connecting through verse. This art of creative storytelling aims to strengthen the bond between the brand and its audience and take it to a new ‘emotional’ high. Let’s take a look at some brands that have employed a burgeoning creative trend: using poetry to make a campaign stand out and give people a more personal connection to a brand.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Coca-Cola debuted a new spot in the fourth quarter featuring an inclusive message in the form of an original poem for the brand. Microsoft rolled out a 60-second ad featuring Academy Award winner Common reciting a poem about the power and possibility of artificial intelligence. A+E Networks unveiled a new brand campaign using an interactive film about storytelling and America with a poem. Link
WWI Propaganda & Poems
Poetry is visual and visceral.
Rhyming wine and cheese communicates directly to our sense of pattern.
It needs emotion to function.
These examples are what help sell a product or an idea.
If it can grab you by the heart, even visually, then it responds!
Titillation in poetry uses oral and aural roots – are you not amused?
Distinguishing the Dynamic sounds is how our perception system works.
You can still see the roots of oral tradition in children’s books by the repetitions in the patterns of words.
Our brains are wired within the limbric system to recognize patterns automatically.
Our memories tune in to the rhythm of the sounds. Hexameter is a good example. Homer used it extensively in his work. All this is considered rhyming with wine and cheese
I believe poetry accentuates this process. Inserting content and subject matter into these frames is what helps us to memorize complete lyrical content within a structured faculty. Ever notice how no written prompts are needed when you listen to your favorite songs? Do you remember how easy it was to memorize the lyrics? Ever ask yourself why? The vast ocean of memory human existence has accumulated over the millennia is yours to drink from. Our forefathers and mothers from long ago knew what they were about.
The above is a representation of the hippocampus within our brains.
This is the physical area in our heads that stores memories.
Oral-formulaic composition is a theory that originated in the scholarly study of epic poetry and was developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It seeks to explain two related issues:
The process by which oral poets improvise poetry.
The reasons for orally improvised poetry (or written poetry deriving from traditions of oral improvisation) having the characteristics that it does.The key idea of the theory is that poets have a store of formulas (a formula being ‘an expression that is regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express a particular essential idea’)[1] and that by linking the formulas in conventionalized ways, poets can rapidly compose verse.
In the hands of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the approach transformed the study of ancient and medieval poetry and oral poetry generally. The main exponent and developer of their approaches was John Miles Foley.
Poetry is symbolic literacy.
Memetics are comparable to heuristics. These forms encode content and transmit meaning inside a goal oriented system, a meme space! This ecosphere we call cyberspace reflects all this and more.
Each of us is a node receiving and transmitting information. We communicate with each other intermittently in time and space concurrently in imaginal time in cyberspace.
We enter into ‘teleconferences’ with each other in groups, forums, chats, etc. These places give any attendee a visual and auditory space where people are privy to conversations. Any information can be relaying this way. It also offers the opportunity to record these conversations too.
Social networks are all built this way.
This type of ‘hardware’ is built into our brains as well. See Noosphere by Pierre Teilhard and Richard Dawkins for more on this concept.
From this it’s possible to conceptualize bodies in cyberspace. These bodies are memes, ideas, and concepts and they rely on our memories for their survival.
They can spread across networks like wildfire and persist in our collective consciousness. Memes encourage action on an emotional level. They spread by their performance value and through verbal interaction. They plant the idea of performance into all who observe them.
This is no theory.
Some say it’s like magic. It isn’t. It is a technology. The internet itself has triggered more memes geared toward social change than any other medium on Earth.
Communication innovation is the name of the game…
“A marketer is an artist in human souls.”
