Quote:
Originally Posted by Yves S L
Hello Nick,
I once wrote on this forum (to the offence of some) that skilled musicians take to meter like a duck to water, and perhaps even more effortlessly. The most important thing is to have an ear that can differentiate and apply rhythms at all levels of the spoken language; that is to say, the primary task when learning meter is to tune the ear to make and apply those distinctions. Skilled musicians already have a mind adapted for rhythm tasks, so it is only a matter of turning a cultivated ear to spoken rhythms.
Which is to say, your questions to me are entirely wrong-headed, like asking the best way to cycle a foot race, in that they appear to be asking for some kind conceptual classifications when the skill of sensory differentiation is the actual task, a task that each person has to learn for themselves. The only usefulness of the books to be a guide of what to pay attention to when listening to speech, considered poetic or not.
Once you have the ear, then just pick up anthologies spanning a few hundred years, and listen for yourself to the evolution of technique and accepted criteria. In Jazz, the improvisations of previous masters ask as a model of what has been done and what is possible, and so it is with poetry, with the past masters defining metrical practice, which you can either go along with or break away from.
The answers are in the poems themselves.
Yeah!
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Popping back for a moment to mention that this explanation did the trick, it's making sense to me now.
I tried to write a metrical poem this afternoon that was coherent, a good poem, and also tightly metered. It wasn't an easy task. But funnily enough I'm now realizing that a few of my earliest poems were close to metrical. Apparently I had an inclination for non-met and eventually moved away from it.