Post, thread withdrawn.

I am still interested in reading quality examples where the distinction between met/non is blurred.



[This message has been edited by Jason Kerr (edited June 14, 2006).]

Jason,
You will be surprised to find that I understand and have had the same experience. If you look at the italicised poem posted in my Deep End poem thread you'll see one of mine that relates to what you say.

Meter on its own is not relevant unless it expresses the spirit of the poem. Application of meter to a poem is my idea of poetry death. That's what I meant when I said that a poem makes its own form. But the verbose over-analysis of ideas, sometimes indulged in, seems to me to be nothing but bad and inarticulate prose.
Janet

Enjoy it, or not.

Unless I encounter it in a workshop. Then I verbosely over-analyze it.

Here's a poem which I'm pretty sure was intended by its author as a metrical poem. (Note the helpful initial caps, which aren't present on his unambiguously non-metrical stuff.) For the life of me, I can't come up with a satisfactory scansion. Or rather, I can't come up with the same one twice in a row. I have decided to label this het-met (heterogenously metrical, for those who haven't heard the phrase before), though I believe that term usually implies some sort of fixed scheme.

What do you think? Metrical? Non? (This poem was on my mind because I took my snarky quote on Maryann's thread from here.) I'd note that the rhyming seems to determine the form more than any meter.

--CS

Machines
Michael Donaghy


Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

Clay,
Absolutely and wonderfully metrical.
Janet


PS: I've been out of the loop for a while. Does anyone still believe that "metrical" means always the same beat? It's necessary to be able to write regular meter before you learn to fly but meter is "felt" and "recognised" by those who know how to read it. That's not a license for learners to fly before they have mastered their own feet ;)

I read a good comment of Dana Gioa's in Alan Sullivan's blog. The thing that makes poetry work is the "dance". I believe that. And dance doesn't have to be a dull thump.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 13, 2006).]

Precisely.

Jason, I know that this is not exactly in line with the subject of the thread, but I would counsel you to worry more about the overall quality of your poetry - what the hell it is you're saying, and the language with which you're saying it - and less about how it should be metrically defined. The poems you have posted to date have all been metrically indistinct, yes, but they've also been vague and indistinct in many other ways, and were criticized as such. It's easy to be seduced by intellectualizing and mechanics, but first you have to confidently control the basics; and that means language, rhythm, voice, sound, and exposition as well as metrics.

In short, I don't believe that the question of how a poem should be classified is nearly as important as the question of whether it is a good poem or not. What Clay said.

Michael

Michael,

I'm touched by your remarks, redundant though they are. I already took this criticism in its appropriate place, and with appropriate candor. But I thank you all the same for the extra attention - I promise I'm working on it. Your counsel was taken before it was given.

Like I said already - I wouldn't have posted this if Maryann hadn't asked. I took the extra time out of earnest wonder, fascination with the topic, and because someone else seemed to share that. Seems appropriate for a discussion board.

What's the matter? You don't think I can multitask? http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/wink.gif

It’s a good question, Jason. It’s a limitation or slight drawback of having Metrical and Non-Metrical boards that there may sometimes be uncertainty as to where to put something. I don’t believe (pace Clay in the other thread) that a clear boundary can be drawn between metrical and non-metrical. Any definition of metrical seems too simple. For example, poems can and do vary the number of stresses per line (sometimes on no particular pattern, as in some of the great classic odes) and remain both rhythmic and metrical.

I do think there’s a Shadowlands region inhabited by poems whose metricality or not will be perceived differently by different readers. I would say the Donaghy poem above is metrical (I don’t think it matters that one can’t identify a fixed pattern or alternation of stresses per line) but others might hear it differently.

Here’s a poem called “A Day in Autumn” — which I’ve run together as prose:

It will not always be like this, the air windless, a few last leaves adding their decoration to the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs of the boughs with gold; a bird preening in the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up from the day’s chores, pause a minute, let the mind take its photograph of the bright scene, something to wear against the heart in the long cold.

Does that sound metrical? Most readers would say no, I suspect. There are so many places where stresses fall back to back (AIR WINDless, LEAVES ADDing, LAWN’s MIRRor, and so on) that you could easily read its rhythms as prose — especially if your metrical ear is tuned mainly in the iambic direction.


Now the poem as printed:

A Day in Autumn

It will not always be like this,
The air windless, a few last
Leaves adding their decoration
To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs
Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up
From the day’s chores, pause a minute,
Let the mind take its photograph
Of the bright scene, something to wear
Against the heart in the long cold.

R.S. Thomas


And here’s another one by the same author:

Death Of A Poet

Laid now on his smooth bed
For the last time, watching dully
Through heavy eyelids the day's colour
Widow the sky, what can he say
Worthy of record, the books all open,
Pens ready, the faces, sad,
Waiting gravely for the tired lips
To move once -- what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one word
Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases
For the day's news, just the one word, ‘Sorry’;
Sorry for the lies, for the long failure
In the poet's war; that he preferred
The easier rhythms of the heart
To the mind's scansion; that now he dies
Intestate, having nothing to leave
But a few songs, cold as stones
In the thin hands that asked for bread.


Again, reading this almost as if it were prose, with hardly a pause on the enjambments, one might well be tempted to put it firmly in the non-met camp. But actually, both of these can be read as (almost entirely) in accentual tetrameter, like a number of Thomas’s poems.

it will NOT ALways be LIKE THIS,
the AIR WINDless, a FEW LAST
LEAVES ADDing their DECorATion
to the TREES’ SHOULDers, BRAIDing the CUFFS...

LAID NOW on his SMOOTH BED
for the LAST TIME, WATCHing DULly...
SORRy for the LIES, for the LONG FAILure
in the POet’s WAR, that HE preFERRed...

To me a clear case of lineation playing a necessary role in clarifying meter. It helps to pause briefly at the end of each line, enjambed or not, something encouraged — dare I say it? — by the line caps.

Notice the medial caesura in most lines — two speech stresses on each side. It seems clear that Thomas was influenced by the old Anglo-Saxon meters as used for Beowulf, though his alliteration is only light and occasional. Once you catch on to what the poet is doing, you’ll probably have little difficulty in hearing these as metrical — if you’re attuned to accentual meters. If you aren’t, you might hear them as non-metrical.

Never mind.

[This message has been edited by Clay Stockton (edited June 13, 2006).]

Quincy to Quince:

I broadly agree with you, I think, but it's dangerous to rely on whether or not a *reader* is *attuned* to meter. Most readers don't have a clue. It's why you can usually get away with blank verse with readers who "really don't like metrical poetry" more often than not. The fact that it doesn't occur to them that a piece deploys a consistent meter does not equal an absence of consistent meter.

Quincy

When I'm trying to decide where something should go I sometimes run it by another poet, asking the question, "Does this look metrical if you're not expecting meter?"

If I hear "no" I post in non-met. (That's what I did with "Domestication" and "Reach.")

(I know this method is fallible. I can miss people's intended meters when they are mixed or when they change midstream without some signal.)

What's prompting my thoughts on these questions lately is that I'm plotting to post something that really is non-met--has no set number of beats per line, is quite profoundly non-regular--and it's making me very nervous because it feels blah. (This may relate to Rose's comments on the other thread.) Unless I chicken out, you'll see it Thursday, and it's possible that those who comment will find something useful to point to in these threads.

Maryann