[Rose Kelleher]

I guess I would say that much of the pleasure of syllabics is the pleasure of recognition, namely, the pleasure that ensues on the fifth or sixth or tenth read, when one recognizes that the poem is not, in fact, free verse, but written in stanzas that are, after a fashion, rhymed and metered. The haiku stanza has become common enough that it fairly gives itself away to a certain set of sensitized readers, but I suspect that there are few readers, if any, who immediately pick up on the arrangements of Moore's stanzas. In part that's because they're individually crafted. It's also in part because of the feminine rhymes you admired - and the fact that many of the rhymes are eye rhymes, or other types which are difficult to hear (e.g., dead/repeated, an/injured fan). She decouples rhyme from accent, and as such, spotting her rhymes, let alone hearing them, becomes nearly impossible - and probably meaningless - without the lines being broken where she's broken them. So - could you relineate "The Fish"? Sure. Would it still rhyme? Maybe. Would the lack of rhymes detract from the poem? Depends on your taste - in my opinion, the recognition of the stanzaic scheme is a major part of the pleasure of reading the poem the first few times.

I'd also note that these poems, like lots of syllabic poems, are not necessarily written for the ear. Is that a bad thing? Depends a lot on one's taste, which is based on one's critical commitments, both the spoken and the unspoken ones. For my own part, while I usually think of myself as being very into sound and rhythm and memorizability, I think there's still enough graduate student left in me to really admire the less visceral pleasures of Moore, including the pleasure of recognizing an ingenious, unique, and inaudible form.

So the syllabics in "Fish" are not just a composition aid for the writer, then, but an important part of the result - just in a way that may be hard to spot if you don't have the text in front of you. Yeah, that makes sense. I tend to forget about anything in a poem you can't hear, but that's my problem. I also remember being told, in some forum or other, by some guy who sounded very authoritative and sure of himself, that a poem should work even when the reader doesn't recognize the underlying form; e.g., if you have to justify your sestina by explaining what a sestina is, it's not working. I tend to agree, so for me, a syllabic poem should work even without that "pleasure of recognition," but again, that's my thing. Thanks, John.