Chicken first or egg?
I'm little use at answering the question that started this thread years ago and will hide behind a timid "it depends." However, my publishing credits have picked up since I stumbled onto a "kiln" approach to revision, which means several firings for each poem.
Most of my recent work is in my own perverse form of loose blank verse (for which, paradoxically, I have very strict rules). However, I take a metered draft and run it through two of these three strategies: a free verse diet (amazing how many prepositional phrases and deadwood "logical connectors" reveal themselves as unessential and as merely padding out the meter), strong-stress lines (known in these fora as "accentual verse," I believe), and syllabic lines. The poem returns to meter chastened and refined from the firings it goes through. And sometimes I am humbled to discover that the poem needs to be about something I kept subordinate in early drafts.
So to return to the question that started this thread, I would say that I try on several forms of line for size before the poem returns to meter. And every now and then I discover that a poem is better suited to rhythm other than blank verse.
|