Jerry: Peace, buddy, but I think that when you say "everything has meter," you're confusing meter and rhythm.
Everything has the latter. The former is very specific, and not many things have it. That's because meter has to do with counting. (Just like dancing and music do.) Of course, you can count the stresses in anything, but the number ceases to be meaningful once it's divorced from line. That's because meter means "
X number of beats per line."
Except when it doesn't. Some poems, like the Donaghy above, or Larkin's "Cut Grass" (the subject of a long discussion some months back on the Larkin About thread), have an ambiguous or perhaps a shifting number of beats per line. Nonetheless, they bear such a strong resemblance to regular metrical verse that it makes more sense to classify them as metrical than as not. I agree with Janet that at a certain point analysis doesn't help much. And I agree with Cantor and with Miles Davis that ultimately there are two kinds of music: good and bad. But I still thought it might help the discussion to get some terms clarified. Meter is a way to describe rhythm. All speech has rhythm. Not all speech has meter.
Last thought: I personally wouldn't go so far as to say that every time someone at the Sphere "says 'this is too loose', what they're saying is, 'This is poor metrical writing'." Sometimes what they're saying is,
this poem has too many substitutions for my taste. Sometimes what they're saying is,
any substitution is too much for my taste. Sometimes they're saying,
only 20% of the feet in an iambic poem may be substituted, and I have scanned your poem, and you have substituted a whopping 31% of the feet, and this fact reflects very poorly on your hopes for ever truly understanding poetry. Sometimes they're saying,
you made light of my point on General Talk and I think you're an asshole. We say a lot of things around here. Some of them are bullshit.
--CS