[Annie Finch]

HI All,

Having thought I'd just check out this interesting-looking discussion on prosody, I came unexpectedly on Tim's description of a reading it sounds as if I may have given, so in the absence of any other feedback, I thought I'd better respond. If it was indeed my reading he mentioned, the poems I read included one in amphibrachs, a passage in dactyls, and perhaps one or two anapestic poems and one in hendecasyllabics, as well as several poems, yes, in iambic pentameter.

Since the canon includes so very few poems in non-iambic meters, it's not surprising that even a poet like Greg who has memorized lots of canonical poetry may not have picked up the meter of the non-iambic poems on first hearing. One usually has to seek out non-iambic poems on purpose to find them; I imagine that even Frost, who chose to write occasionally in hendecasyllabics and other arcane metrical patterns, probably found them so rare in the English tradition that he didn't feel the need to mention them when he classified poetry into strict and loose iambic.

By the way, the new anthology edited by Kathrine Varnes and myself, An Exaltation of Forms, has sections on several non-iambic meters, though unfortunately not amphibrachs, and includes poems by both Alicia and Tim.

Nice to see all of you here.

--Annie

[Tim Murphy]

Hi Annie! You've blown your cover. Do contributors receive copies of your new Forms Anthology? Who is the publisher?

[R. S. Gwynn]

My belated two cents' worth on Frost's "loose iambic." This is most clearly heard in something like "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," where there's a heavy dosage of anapests sprinkled amongst the iambs. An older generation would have called this "logoaedic" verse, I believe. I wouldn't consider Frost's "loose iambic" accentual since he never (to my ear) falls below the iambic syllable count. In other words, if he's writing tetrameter, the shortest lines would have 8 syllables (or 9 with a feminine ending) but could stretch as far as 9 (one anapest), 10 (two anapests), etc. A true 4-stress accentual line could conceivably contain as few as 4 syllables, if all were heavily stressed:

One, two, three, four--
Blow out the candle and shut the door.

Frost rarely writes true triple meters (in which the triple feet would predominate) and his experiment with hendecasyllabics didn't extend far beyond "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep." He was always amused when critics stumbled over their scansion here.

Hi, Alicia and all. I haven't been in attendance much because we're in the process of moving. Between boxing books and dodging hurricanes, I haven't had much time. I figured I needed at least 60 liquor boxes for all the books. No problem, but it's been hell trying to drink all that liquor.

Got Bob's western anthology--a lovely little book.

[A. E. Stallings]

Annie, glad you dropped by.

R.S., "logoaedic"! What a nice word! It looks to mean something like "word-singing"... (Where's Tony, our in-house classicist?)

[robert mezey]

How nice to hear the word "logoaedic" again,
the first time in many years. Pappy Ransom
used the word in class, not infrequently, so
most Kenyon boys would recognize it.
I think Sam nodded on the Frost hendecasyllabic:
he must have been thinking of "For Once, Then,
Something" (which is certainly a companion piece
to "Neither Out Far nor In Deep" which is in
loose iambic trimeter, mostly loose---the last
stanza and five or six of other lines are strict).

[Annie Finch]

Logoaedic is a Saintsbury word also, I think. Would that be where Pappy Ransom read it, Bob?
Yes, "For Once, Then, Something" is the hendecasyllabics I was thinking of. "Neither Far Out nor In Deep," like "Come In," seems to me also to be loose iambic or loose anapestic or......logoaedic!

For something to seem truly accentual to me it needs to clash rising and falling feet, or use single stresses occasionally instead of feet. A big topic in the recent non-iambic meters seminar at West Chester was the question of whether accentual meter even exists, which the resident prosody experts left unresolved. . .like so many of these metrical ideas, though, its value is evident in the use we continue to make of the term.

Tim, the book, An Exaltation of Forms, was just published by University of Michigan Press in the spring. Contributors of sections (Sam is in that category, which he modestly didn't mention) should be getting copies, but the press unfortunately doesn't seem to be sending them to contributors of poems.

Alicia, I want to ask you a properly Lariat-type question about your work, but my brain is failing me and I go to LA for a week tomorrow. I hope you're still Lariating when I get back, and I'll enjoy doing it then.

Annie

[R. S. Gwynn]

Oops. I was thinking of the wrong Frost title. Bob and Annie are right, of course. I plead that my collected Frost was in a liquor box, somewhere. I don't know where the liquor went but agree with Robert Palmer on this.

Ransom totally drops the ball on Hardy's "Neutral Tones," which is one of my most-loved poems and a perfect example of what Frost meant by "loose iambic." I recall that Ransom (yes, the book is boxed up too) described its meter as "dipodic." This is wrong. The stanza pattern is iambic tetrameter, tetrameter, tetrameter, trimeter with heavy anapestic substitution. Remember that an old guy like Hardy would have counted "fallen" as one syllable--"fall'n."

Dipodic meters are wonderful in English, and one can hear them most clearly in W. S. Gilbert. In a dipodic meter, two iambic or trochaic feet are combined into a single foot, with a pattern of u'uu, or uu'u, respectively. Try reading "Locksley Hall" or "The Raven" with this in mind.

For some reason I've never been able to determine, dipodic meters are most noticeable in long lines.

Turco's discussion of dipodics, by the way, is totally wrong.

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, I think one perhaps COULD read "Neutral Tones" with a a sort of two-major-beat swing to the tetrameter lines--"stood"/"winter"; "sun"/"chidden"; "few"/"starving" (and very interesting word pairs too, going through the poem). I'd agree, though, that it is a stretch to call the poem dipodic.

That the effect works best with a longer line makes sense to me--otherwise the line tends to want to break up into two shorter lines. (Maybe it is just a matter of the length of the human breath.)

For those listening in who may be a bit confused about what we are talking about, these are lines that can, in effect, be scanned two different ways--and perhaps both are working at once. (It's a LITTLE writing the same tune in both 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures...) It tends to happen in seven- and eight-beat lines, which then tend to telescope into four strong beats. It's a wonderful rhythmic effect. Another favorite of mine is Housman's "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?" (modelled after Kipling's "Danny Deever"). You CAN scan it as perfect iambs, but the pressure of the long line, along with the fact that many of the stressed syllables are rather promoted ("that" "with" "on") and can easily slip from the foreground, produces this effect

oh WHO is that young SIN ner with the HAND cuffs on his WRISTS

(These meters ARE cases where you regularly get three relatively "unstressed" syllables in a row, even though individual syllables may receive word-stress)

It feels like a folksy, ballad-y meter to me, and does show up a fair bit in Country music.

One example I like to give is "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"...

[robert mezey]

There's a little confusion on the dipodic meters.
Maybe Ransom did hear "Neutral Tones" that way,
but I'm very surprised---his ear always seemed
flawless. He spent quite a lot of time on dipods
(maybe the only prof in the country who did). Yes,
Lew Turco is wrong, and so too is Miller Williams,
though they're both very knowledgeable. Let me
try to explain dipods briefly. They're most common
in the long lines, fourteeners or trochaic octameters
("A Toccata of Galuppi's"), but can be found in short
lines too. In the line you quote, Alicia, I'd say
that that's not so much a run of unaccented syllables
as part of the foot, which consists of two accents,
one strong, one weak. E.g.

BAH Bah BLACK Sheep
HAVE you An-y WOOL
YES Sir YES Sir
THREE Bags FULL

(I've put an initial capital on the weaker of the
accented syllables; the strong accents are all caps.)

The KING is In the COUNTing House
COUNTING Out his MONey
The QUEEN is In the PAR-Lor
EATing Bread and HON-ey

Interestingly, the weak accent may fall on a syllable
that gets hardly any speech stress and skip over a
more important syllable. Frost has a wonderful dipodic
poem called "The Leaf Treader"---the last stanza (about the leaves) begins:

They SPOKE to the Fug-itive IN my Heart as IF it were
Leaf to LEAF
They TAPPED at my Eye-lids and TOUCHED my Lips with an
IN-vi-Ta-tion to GRIEF

I hope the alternation of strong/weak syllables is
clear there. One effect I especially like is where
the dipodic movement is ambiguous, as in Hardy's
"Wessex Heights" in which some lines sound like
heptameters and others fall readily into dipodic.

Enough. Sorry to be pedantic about all this.

[Paddy]

Thanks you for a most interesting read, much of which I agree with. I am also grateful that it inspired a silly little piece that I might share with you. The message may well be clear but I'm not so sure that the position of my tongue is. Enjoy or tear it up. Oh, and advice needed. Should it go for critique?

Ummm! The varying meter is deliberate but I'm not 100% certain it is placed exactly. I'd love to hear, either here or there, but thought to share here before there.

Wretchid Mis-pelling

Some write their poems with various meter
While some might find iambic sweeter
And toss in a little anapest
Hyper-metric'ly blessed
To imitate a sound to be guessed
Or the pulse of the tired old egg beater

And then there are those
Who will use beats like this
Mixed with beats not found in prose
Dactyls trochees might seem on the nose
Where some you might swear had been on the piss
Logaoedic’s the name from the Latin; Logaoedicus

You know you guys to spell is a breeze
If only you’d use your diction’ries

© Paddy Randell


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I guess one becomes content with one’s poetry when one opens the book ten years hence and does NOT exclaim, “Did I really write this?” © Paddy Randell