[Perry Miller]

I just discovered that, despite not yet getting through boot camp, I can post on this forum. In my effort to get 15 critiques under my belt, I looked on back pages and found the poem Roof by John Riley, which engendered quite a debate about whether the poem was metrical or not. One member even scolded John for posting the poem on the wrong board. Fortunately, a moderator came along and judged the poem to be metrical.

But this got me worrying about my own poetry (once I start to post it). My tendency is to count syllables and let the stresses fall where they fall. I'll do it like this: Let's say that I am going for the sound of IP, I'll give myself a range of 9-11 syllables per line to write in. Once I've written a draft, I will then count the beats in each line. Usually the beats will be 5 for some lines and 4 for others. That is, in fact, what I want, since over the years I have found that persistent IP -- always 5 beats per line -- sounds too intense for me. If I allow some lines to have 4 beats, that creates a more relaxed cadence.

Given all this, I'm worried that some members will insist that I post my poems on the Free Verse board; but I don't consider most of my poems to be free verse. Rather, the term I use for them is "loosely metered". To the extent that I do a tremendous amount of counting of syllables and beats when writing, it would feel unfair to me to be permanently consigned to the Free Verse board, which I assume gets less traffic. I just don't see myself as a free verse poet.

So the question is, what is meter? Meter can be strict meter, as in actual IP with standard variants. Or, according to the rules, it can mean accentual syllabic. "Accentual syllabic" implies less rigidity than strict meter. That's how I view my writing, as accentual syllabic.

What I like to say is, "The ear hears everything." So if I write within a tight range of syllables and a tight range of beats, the reader's ear should hear the regularity of that -- and to the extent that the reader is hearing a pattern, that to me qualifies as "meter". I'm saying this because I'm hoping to avoid arguments over the kind of poetry I'm writing.

Now, sometimes I do this: I'll write a poem in this loose meter, and when I'm done I'll discover that I have broken a lot of phrases across line-endings, phrases which would sound better if they were contiguous. So then I'll rewrite the poem with the phrases intact, causing the syllable count per line to vary widely. In THAT case I would put the poem on the Free Verse board.

I should also say that when I am writing in loose meter, I sometimes allow the last line of each stanza or strophe to choose its own length. Despite that, I will still consider the poem to be metered. I also sometimes allow lines to go long for special effect, or to be short for special effect. I guess what I'm saying is, if there is a discernible rhythmic pattern to a poem, I will consider that to be sufficiently metrical to put it in the Metrical forum.