[winter]

Perhaps this subject is too intangible or slippery to get a grip of, but I’ve been trying.

In the case of blank verse, it has become commonly accepted practice for poets to vary quite widely from the strict iambic pentameter norm. Loose blank verse is more common today than the strict form.

Tim Murphy has given advice that poets should master iambic pentameter first before moving on to other meters. That’s good advice.

But I was wondering – people here who have mastered IP (in as much as one can “master” anything) and who have then begun to experiment with loose iambics – how difficult did you find that transition?

And would you consider the art of writing loose blank verse simply a matter of ear, whether the five-beat line sounds right, or is there more to it than that?

Any modern / contemporary poets you'd recommend for the study of loose blank verse?

[Michael Juster]

Like any shift, it's hard at first, but you have trust that your ear can hear what fits your vision. I've got one of my first of this ilk posted at my website--www.amjuster.com--called "How We Got To Elmira." I wanted some of the sombernes of IP but also the more conventional conversational rhythms, so put an extra syllable in every line so it's slightly breaking in and out of IP. I've also put in some distant inexact rhymes because the piece is about almost making it but being frustrated--the perfection of exact rhymes (which generally I favor) wasn't right for this piece.
I usually recommend Andrew Hudgins' The Neverending for people looking for interesting contemporary IP, and it is, of course, hard not to recommend Howard Nemerov.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Rob, you can consult any thread of mine for discussions on this, as I'm always being told off for loose metrics.

I normally only write loose when I'm trying to write loose, but the thing that always comes up is that different people READ lines differently. I don't know how much of a problem that is - you can never dictate any given person's take on anything, as you know.

I sort of think of it the other way round to what you said here. I start out in a loose, demotic way and then, if I see a need with the piece, tighten. I really LIKE sloppy, speech-like, loose metrics. Well, it works for the kinds of things I'm writing, for a start. And it's a tone thing, too. AS you say the strict IP can be a bit ponderous. Often when I go into tight iambs I go tet.

Having said which, I don;t know how qualified I am even to be commenting. Have my recent attempts worked? The Milton one, for example, was reworked into a more Blank Verse form, though I may never have posted the final edit.

Hope that helps.

KEB

[winter]

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

[VictoriaGaile]

Isn't there a difference between "loose iambics" and "iambics with substition"? I thought most good IP used substitutions to add interest; otherwise you get a thudding drumbeat instead of music with a steady pulse.

My impression was that "loose iambics" meant that the pulse itself was more irregular. A heavier use of caesurae, for instance, or more than one substitution per line.

[winter]

Originally posted by VictoriaGaile:
Isn't there a difference between "loose iambics" and "iambics with substition"? I thought most good IP used substitutions to add interest; otherwise you get a thudding drumbeat instead of music with a steady pulse.

My impression was that "loose iambics" meant that the pulse itself was more irregular. A heavier use of caesurae, for instance, or more than one substitution per line.

My impression was that loose iambics meant the addition of unstressed syllables into a line of IP, which can of course throw the pulse off course a little, although the line is still identifiable as basically iambic. That’s why I reckon the Hecht piece is loose. Many of the lines are IP with the commonly accepted substitutions, but other lines have additional unstressed syllables.

However, I could be completely wrong in that impression.

Substitution is different. An IP line with two feet substituted, as far as I am concerned, is simply IP, not loose at all. Certainly I use a lot of substitutions in my own writing, but have tended to stay within the accepted substitutions rather than opting for looser lines.

But perhaps different people use the term “loose iambics” in different ways – that wouldn’t surprise me. What you are saying about caesurae is interesting. I don’t know whether it’s important in determining the looseness of a line or not, but I’d like to know more about this.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

That passage from Hecht seems almost syncopated in places.

Caesurae will make a difference, as they slow the line down. Too many and you can barely keep the pace, none and it starts to almost flow away. Vowel lengths and consonants will also contribute to this.

It strikes me there IS a name for all this: sprung rhythm. I'm not going to quote Hopkins, he's so distinct his voice takes over from everything. I find him almost impossible to read much of or learn from, he's so intense & sort of rapturous.

However, here's some Stevens (greatest American poet of the 20th century, anyone?). This, at random when I opened the book, is from section X from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction:

The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the bank.

There was a will to change, a necessitous
And present way, a presentation, a kind
Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,

The eye of a vagabond in metaphor
That catches our own. The casual is not
Enough. The freshness of transformation is...

And one stanza from The Bouquet:

Through the door one sees on the lake that the white duck swims
Away - and tells and tells the water tells
Of the image spreading behind itself an idea.


Oh, all right! Here's Pied Beauty. It's familiar enough that we can ignore the words a bit & focus on the rhythm (I'm not doing the indents, & also clearly not the stress marks you find in Hopkins).

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
for rose-moles all in stipples upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.


It;'s worth noting apropos previous remarks the way the caesurae slow it up, dapple the rhythm; see line 4. This is beautiful use of semi-colons!

KEB

[VictoriaGaile]

My impression was that loose iambics meant the addition of unstressed syllables into a line of IP, which can of course throw the pulse off course a little, although the line is still identifiable as basically iambic. .... Substitution is different.

Er, what exactly is the difference between "adding unstressed syllables" and "substitution" with anapests or dactyls?

I'd scan the Hecht piece thusly:
L1: IP
L2: tiiai
L3: aiiii
L4: attii
L5: iiaii
L6: tiiii

I'm out of time this morning but you get the idea.

[winter]

Originally posted by VictoriaGaile:

Er, what exactly is the difference between "adding unstressed syllables" and "substitution" with anapests or dactyls?

I see where you're coming from now, Victoria.

In strict IP, only trochaic or spondaic substitutions are considered acceptable. Of course, many poets substitute with anapaests and dactyls and I personally have no problem with that if it works in the particular poem, but I would call it "loose iambics". It could well be that there is more to it than that - hence this thread - and if you have any insights I'd be interested to hear them.

It strikes me that the difference between loose iambics, sprung rhythm, and 5-beat accentual meter isn't all that easy to define. Not that it matters all that much, I suppose.

[MacArthur]

Well...just to weigh in with my personal dogma - "loose iambics" involves more than one substitution per line, particularly if both subs consist of an extra syllable WITHIN the line.

This mostly applies to tetrameter and longer - shorter measures are inherently more forgiving.

An extra syllable at the end of a line is likely too innocuous to count...and an initial reversed foot is also too customary (and natural) to be very "loosening".

Two reversed feet - and perhaps even two anapestic substitutions - in some sort of parallel construction are probably OK also. eg:

Dance in a horse's hide. Dance in the snow.
(Weldon Kees - Farrago)

A "double iamb", "spondaic substitution" or whatever you want to call it (Minor Ionic?) isn't - strictly speaking - a substitution at all...the passage, in an iambic context, can nearly always reasonably scan as two successive iambs, or an iamb following a trochee. Try it...you'll see.
This is also WAY overrated (and over-used) as a source of rhythmic interest. Sounds prosey, really.

I just spent most of a year reading a whole passel of "Contemporaries of Shakespeare" BV dramas - as well as re-reading a fair amount of Shakin' Willie, himself.

The Elizabethians are all OK. Even Chapman and Jonson can escape being boring.

(BTW caesurae don't always mangle the rhythm:

Dost thou not feel me Rome? Not yet? Is night
So heavy 'pon thee, and my weight so light?

Jonson - Cataline)

The Carolines regained most of Shakespeare's smoothness, but without the lyric genius (Ford, Tourneur, Shirley)
(You want to learn how to enjamb on a blank IP line, read "The Atheist's Tragedy" Cyril Tourneur...although it's a ludicrously stupid drama, the verse is outstanding. Much the same for Ford's "Tis Pity She's a Whore"...and a better play.)

But the Jacobeans...Oh God, it's just sludge - even the much-overrated Webster.
(Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and Beaumont when he was writing with Fletcher. Middleton much of the time.)

Need a break afterwards? Dryden's "All For Love" is...well, sublime.