When I read a poem that moves me through and through, it sounds to me as if the meter is coming from the desire to sing--the order-making, beauty-making part of what the poet does--but the rhythm, which includes all the substitutions and "wrenchings" of language, comes from the emotion feeding the poem, the matter itself. Poetry is a kind of singing, but often about something that doesn't justify singing: that's the tension I hear, and the source of what's moving in a good poem, or much of it, anyway: the fact that under the singing there is something else, barely controlled, with difficulty, but finally controlled.
|