Nyctom brought up one of my favorite topics under a General Discussion thread--heterometric poetry. If this has been featured here before, apologies. I'm off to the States for a couple weeks, and will peep in when I can, but thought I'd leave you all with something to discuss.
Heterometric poetry may be metric poetry of different line lengths, or, more rarely perhaps, lines of different feet. Organic, musical, surprising, it can range from the sublime (Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode) to endearing doggerel (Ogden Nash). And frankly, it is something we see too little of, at least too little skilled examples of, in the ranks of New Formalism.
Here are a few examples. Though distinctly "hetero", this first is also grounded in the iambic. (I am probably biased against "ars poetica" poems, but this has a delightful wit to it--I think it even gets away with the slightly pat closing phrase--which goes back, slyly, to "meaning" rather than "being"):
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be worldless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--
A poem should not mean
But be.
|