Perhaps this is the right place for me to Ask the Poet Lariat (and any others who might have an opinion) about a poem I'm currently slaving over. If we had an "Embryonic Board," I might post it there; but we don't.
I've been working on a poem intending for it to be free verse, but with every revision, the lines are falling more and more into a fairly accentual trimeter. I'm not using rhyme, nor an alliterative pattern. I'm at the stage of needing to narrow down my intent for the lines, because late in the poem some very troublesome lines are not limited to three stresses, and I wonder if I should focus on making them so or allow the original f.v. intention to triumph. I'm caught between two possibilities, because I could also "open up" the first half of the poem; right now, the poem is made quite rough by the imbalance, I think.
I know that some f.v. skirts the edge of being metrical, often in an accentual sense. My question:
<dir>Is a non-rhyming, non-alliterative, accentual trimeter possible/worthwhile; i.e., is a kind of "blank" tri-meter worth attempting?</dir>
Looking over my revisions, I see I've been using phrasing w/ the help of fairly syntactical line breaks to create "turns" in the poem; I'm not talking of breaking only to create three stresses per line, at odd enjambments.
|