[Alan Sullivan]

I had an email from Greg Williamson the other day, in which he wondered what I thought of the meter in this sonnet by Red Warren; and, if a meter even existed, how might it be defined. I told Tim Murphy of the message, and he hauled down Warren's "New and Selected" to read the lines aloud, in a Kentucky accent remembered from the days when he studied with the old man. Tim thinks the key to understanding Warren's peculiar rhythm lies in the Southerner's childhood. It is the chant of the auctioneer, who hits certain syllables hard, and blurs all the rest into a quick spill, blotting out secondary stresses. Listening to these lines with that thought in mind, one can indeed find a five-beat accentual rhythm in most of them, though l.7 is a stretch.

Mortal Limit

I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.
It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags
Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming
Of dream-spectral light above the last purity of snow-snags.

There--west--were the Tetons. Snow peaks would soon be
In dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height
Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see
New ranges to mark a last scrawl of light?

Or, having tasted that atmosphere's thinness, does it
Hang motionless in dying vision before
It knows it will accept the mortal limit,
And swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore

The breath of earth? Of rock? Of rot? Of other such
Items, and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch.

[Len Krisak]

Oh, this I know, and know full well:
I do not like this, Doctor Warren.

Now, what the heck went wrong there?

For whatever it's worth (no snickering, please),
I count (yes, with my ear) 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, and
8-beat lines.

Yeeessshhhhh

[Kate Benedict]

For my penny, "Red"'s poem rolls off the tongue just beautifully. It might be thought of as a formal/free verse hybrid. Perhaps a bit purple in the description department ... but I, at least, do not find fault with the sound.

Surely we shouldn't assume that RPW set out to write a strictly metrical work and failed. It is far more likely that he decided to write a looser, "loucher" sonnet. [Newbies, we've had merry discussions here about "loose" and "louche" meters!]. Along with the enjambments, the looser meter gives the poem a nice forward momentum, and keeps the rhymes from hitting too hard.

These are the strategies that bring the art forward. These are the strategies that bring down a rain the "shame on you's" on the metrical board. Of course, skill is all.



[This message has been edited by Kate Benedict (edited March 01, 2001).]

[Paul Deane]

This reminds me very strongly of Robinson Jeffers' typical rhythms in some of his longer narrative poems, like Tamar.

It's a rhythm I like very much. If it's free verse, it manages to strike the ear as verse not prose ...

I suspect the key to the rhythm is that it's built around phrases, not feet. But that's a stab in the dark, I'm afraid, not a theory I can elaborate on.

[C.G. Macdonald]

Certainly if a novice, or a less well-known poet, posted this on the metrical board, there would be suggestions to move it to another board--adamant posts that it is not metrical at all. And what do we make of lines like: "Hang MOtionless in DYing VIsion beFORE" (?!) Jack Foley, getting in over his head at "Poetry Flash," claimed that Kay Ryan writes rhyming free verse. This struck me as too absurd a claim to refute, but it did get me to wondering: Are there any renowned or readable examples of rhyming free verse. I'm not wild about this one--it reminds me of Jeffers too, but only in a sort of half-baked, touristy way. But I would say it is readable/competent/even occasionally engaging, and can we call it anything other than rhyming free verse? Though I recognize the "ghost of meter" lurking about.

[Alan Sullivan]

I expected a range of opinion on this. I don't think I would go so far as to call the poem free verse, since it does seem to have some sort of a pulse, however irregular. The language is colorful and charged. The only word choice that really bothers me is "items."

All that said, though, I think the poem is as windy as the Gros Ventre. It uses an over-blown, over-important style that fails to conceal the lack of any real purpose or inspiration. In the final line it degenerates into pure bathos. So I am with Len on this one.

I see no way forward in this sort of verse. It looks to me like flypaper for mediocrity.

Alan Sullivan

[Michael Juster]

I have been mulling C.G.'s interesting question and thought I'd note that Walcott's Omeros is darn close to rhymed free verse. I reread part of it on the flight back from London, and spent some time trying to figure out the meter. With the exception of a few short sections, it seems to me that we are looking at rhymed verse in lines that tend to have five stresses and twelve syllables as a norm, but there is a lot of variation and no real meter I can identify. Perhaps I have demonstrated my own unworthiness by doubting a Nobel Prize winner's metrical commitment, but, ya know, I get mad just thinking about how those Swedes pass me over.

[Richard Wakefield]

Frost's "After Apple-Picking" is very metrical but very, very irregular in its lines, so much so that I'd have no trouble calling it rhymed free verse, much as RF hated the idea of free verse:

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.

I count the lines as having 6, 2, 5, 5, 5, and 5 accents. While many of the lines are in clear iambic pentameter, there are lots of exceptions, including a line with but one accent. In this poem it works because the irregular line lengths, to my ear, mimic the disjointed thoughts of someone overwhelmed with weariness, barely coherent. The irregular rhyme scheme conveys the same impression, and in fact the closing rhyming word, "sleep," goes back six or seven lines for its mate, "heap," as if the poor old codger almost dropped it altogether.

But if young Robert What-Was-Your-Last-Name? posted it on the metrical board, we'd fix it right up for him.
Richard

[Len Krisak]

Richard: I usually agree with you on these matters, but
even in the six lines you quoted, you'll note that with
the exception of the word "Apples" as a trochee substituted
in one line, ALL these lines are iambic. That doesn't make
the poem free verse, any more than any poem in a nonce
stanza by Herbert, Hardy, or Wilbur--a poem using different
line lengths--is free verse. Besides rhyming, the poem is in meter!

Nor do I think anyone on the
board would have pummeled Frost for it. One of the great
beauties of this poem IS its very willingness to go catch
the last train for the last rhyme before it's done.

[ewrgall]

I would read the poem as a "speech". A speech employs a lot of the tricks of poetry (this one uses rhyme here and there). In speech making you stress words for effect, not to satisfy a form. You are interested in result, NOT process. Three good speech makers could read this three somewhat different ways and it would sound alright each way--"Formal" poets attempting to read this would screw it up everytime. To make a joke--this is not "free verse" it is "free stress". In other words---this aint page poetry---it is a loose script for voice---the speaker (or the actor of the poem) gets a lot of leaway here. The author may have had his own way of doing this "speech" but what we are left with is a loose script (that's what he gave us on the page whether he knew it or not--a loose script). Add that new term to your critical vocabulary. (Poets have always "done" first and critics have "named" after the poets get done doing.) A recording of the poet doing his own poem would give us an "exact script" (unless it were a performance poem then we would need a videotape) but here on the page the poet did not bother to stress mark anything so we are left with a loose script of his speech. Don't beat your brains out over something that is not poetry by a stringent definition. Recognize it as a speech.

PS---Actually I dont think it is very good.

[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited March 04, 2001).]