Rhina, that's a fine way of looking at it.
I think it may be related to a different notion that also appeals to me. That is, "meter" is a shared, public and communal way of talking, or singing, and "rhythm" is perhaps a more personal or private matter. One of the things poetry does is allow the merging of the public and the private, the universal and the individual. This merger elevates the individual into the universal (giving it meaning) while personalizing the universal (keeping it from being an arid abstraction). We may share meter and form, but we remain ourselves. When I read one of your poems, for example, I know that only Rhina could have written it, and it sounds just like her, and yet the poem is made up of publicly available, shared metrical figures. Meter is a concession to universal forms, and rhythm, perhaps, is an insistence on the individual.
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