Alicia's bat poem is less metrically "quirky" than I remember it for some reason. Apropos the discussion about stressing articles, it seems that L5 may locate a metrical stress on "a", or perhaps the article resists the metrical pull somehow and the second and third feet are one of those phyric-spondee pairings we hear about sometimes.
Also, L2 seems to be pentameter only if one gives a stress to the initial "And," which is plausible but not the first impulse a reader might have on first reading.
I'd be curious, if Alicia is willing to say, how Alicia goes about evaluating the metrical suitability of her own lines when she writes them and whether there's a "standard" that she shoots for in terms of following the "rules" as she understands them. Not just Alicia, but anyone. Does it ever happen that you write a line or two that please your ear but you go back and try to scan the line and find it breaks some rule or principle that you subscribe to as a general matter? Do you "fix" the line or do you honor your ear and just go with the line, carping metrists be damned?
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