Chris:
"Counterpoint" is indeed a fine way to describe what you're suggesting. The idea of cutting against or across the linear grammaticality of the sentences seems to me to get at the heart of what makes poetry different from prose -- ideally, at least, even though none of us ever quite achieves the ideal. When I am most rewarded as a writer I manage somehow to create a little space outside of time, or outside of linearity, if you will; when I am most rewarded as a reader I find myself in another writer's space outside of time. Yet for that space to exist I need the inexorable ticking of the meter dragging me forward -- no stillness without motion, no light without darkness: an argument for meter, whether strict or loose. Yet I can't be dogmatic about it, for writers often come up with surprising ways to achieve their ends. Whitman, for example (a writer sometimes reviled in this neighborhood), can often take me along with verses that I would expect to dislike if all I knew of them was an abstract description of their form.
RPW
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