Tom, Greg is a shy forest creature, and he was very appreciative of my remarks, but I have emailed him suggesting that he comment. I know the sort of Frost explication of metrical intricacy you're referring to, and I'll continue my comments. Many of the formalists of my generation (Boomers) are very strict metrists: Steele, Gwynn, Martin, Davis. Greg takes daring liberties with meter, but his written verse is so attuned to the music of common speech, he gets away with things lesser metrists never could. For instance in Speaking of Trees (p, 64, Silent Partner) he writes in an IP poem "As the brow of a storm is darkening with violence," a fourteen syllable, five stress line, that seems perfectly natural at that moment in the poem. Given the portentousness of the scene, the length of the line seems right. (Could be scanned as a thirteen, because silence precedes and rhymes with violence, setting up an expectation for the latter to be elided.) On the next page in Neighboring Storm, which describes a furious domestic quarrel among a neighboring couple, he concludes:
They chirp like birds, and all is peaceful there.
But me? I'm rattled. I scan the sky for days.
Two full stop caesurae three syllables apart! Yet the effect is so colloquial, there's nothing forced about it. I'm sure in your perusal of the other threads and the excellent selection of Williamson on Caleb's site, you'll find numerous such examples.
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