Michael and Katy, thanks for replying.
Michael, I really liked the “How we got to Elmira” poem on your site. The extra syllable is interesting; the rhythm never quite goes the way the reader expects. Cracker of an ending too.
And yes, I have noticed that you often use a loose meter, Katy. I suppose part of the difficulty is in making it obvious that the looseness is deliberate if a consistent pattern isn’t developed (as in Michael’s one extra syllable). You obviously know what you’re doing, but it's like rhyme - if a rhyme seems accidental to a reader, the word may have a different effect from that the writer intended. So with looseness of meter, you have to give a distinct impression of calculated design.
I was reading Anthony Hecht the other day. I don’t know his stuff at all well, although I know he’s popular around here.
I must admit – I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked his verse. I was reading See Naples and Die. There are some brilliant lines in that poem. It seems so simple, so effortless, and it’s very hard to write like that and make it work.
It also looked pretty loose. That surprised me too, as I had been given the impression that Hecht was a hero of the strictly metrical-orthodox. This below doesn’t look like strict IP to me:
I can at last consider those events
Almost without emotion, a circumstance
That for many years I’d scarcely have believed.
We forget much, of course, and, along with facts
Our strong emotions, of pleasure and of pain,
Fade into stark insensibility.
For which, perhaps, it need be said, thank God.
So I can read from my journal of that time
As if it were written by a total stranger.
Here is a sunny day in April, the air
Cool as spring water to breathe, but the sun warm.
We are seated under a trellised roof of vines,
Light-laced and freaked with grape-leaf silhouettes
That romp and buck across the tablecloth,
Flicker and slide on the white porcelain.
- Anthony Hecht, from See Naples and Die.
He does slip in orthodox lines and establishes the metrical base, but he adds syllables all over the place.
I was wondering what he achieves by that – perhaps a conversational tone, rather detached, casual, a flatness?
But not a dull flatness, never boring.
Rob
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