[Carol Taylor]

Seriously, I have come to wonder if there are people who can hear nothing but iambs. When the ear is conditioned to expect only one rhythm, everything else seems like a metrical blunder. Take poems like Janet's "The Spy Game" and John's "Finishing" in TDE. One is predominantly anapestic pentameter and the other fairly heavily substituted anapestic/iambic trimeter, and the rhythm of both flows quite smoothly. Yet within the last few minutes both have been called metrically problematic.

Perhaps it's not triple meter itself but the combination of iambs and anapests that confuses a reader who is heavy on his feet. Since combining iambs and anapests is an excellent way of speeding up and slowing down the momentum of a poem and is essential to a well-equipped poetic toolbox, I sometimes feel like saying:

Bend you knees, people!

Carol

[Michael Cantor]

Carol -

Interesting point. That's me you're talking to - Captain Iamb! I have great difficulty identifying any meter beyond vanilla iambic (I recently posted an accentual tetrameter poem on FV because - while I was after a chanting effect - I had no idea it was that regularly metrical.) In almost all cases, however, I feel that my ear tells me what "works" metrically and what doesn't, without detailed parsing. and I'm generally correct, both on my own work and others. Not this time, it seems - or at least not for anybody except myself.

My problem with Janet's poem was not that the meter clanged, but rather that I couldn't pick up the propulsive sense that I normally do unconsciously, even with triple meter or with heavy substitutions. Rereading the poem in the cold light of morning, I can sense the meter, but only if I work at it. The meter is not grabbing me, as it generally does (even with my bad ear), but I find it if I look for it.

I think there is an enormous difference, however, between stating whether a poem works sonically, and whether a technical parsing analysis (as is happening on John's poem) proves that the meter is technically correct.

I simply listen to the poem. In the case of John's poem (which I also critted), I never commented on meter. To be honest, I thought it was a mix of trimeter and tet, I never consciously thought about triple meters, but the poem sounded fine to me - my problem was that I wanted the lines doubled in length to accentuate that meter.

In Janet's poem, I never picked up on that background sound - there seemed to be an absence of meter when i first read it, rather than a jarring meter. I think this was due to a number of factors:

- my own relatively poor ability to discern meter

- by and large, the language lacked a sprinkling of the stronger accents that I think of as metrical "signposts".

- in general, I didn't like the poem. I found it to be overly prosey, and the language un-poetical at times, and suspect this interfered with my ability to "hear" it as intended.

Obviously, a number of people whose opinions I respect (practically every other reader, as a matter of fact) disagree with my problems with the poem, so I'm clearly not going to push anything. I do feel, however, that in our metrical discussions there is often too much empasis on whether the poem is technically correct - how it should be parsed - and not enough on whether or not it "works" sonically. For me, John's poem works and Janet's doesn't, and I don't think I can totally explain - or understand - precisely why. A certain amount of it - of all reaction to poetry - boils down to because.

Michael

[Marcia Karp]

Michael, you might be pleased by Dr. Johnson.

"It is, however, the task of criticism to establish principles; to improve opinion into knowledge; and to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction, from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly to the fancy, from which we feel delight, but know not how they produce it, and which may well be termed the enchantresses of the soul. Criticism reduces those regions of literature under the dominion of science, which have hitherto known only the anarchy of ignorance, the caprices of fancy, and the tyranny of prescription." [from Rambler]

Marcia

[Carol Taylor]

Michael, workable is in the ear of the critic. Both poems are rhythmic to me, whereas John's is rhythmic to you and not rhythmic to Alan, and Janet's is rhythmic to everyone else who commented but not rhythmic to you. Since you admit you have trouble hearing any meter except vanilla iambic, could you be attempting to impose iambic constraints on lines that were never meant to be read in duple meter? Surely "workable" is too subjective a term to define based on an if-it-isn't-iambic-it-doesn't-work criteria. Do you have trouble waltzing?

Carol

[Lightning Bug]

I think for me, it's the number of feet, rather than the type that causes me to lose the meter. Five is where I lose it, I think. Hard to say for sure, because I don't know if one ever runs across anapestic or dactylic meter of five and over. But certainly I lose iambic at pentameter, whereas I'm comfortably aware of it in tet.

[Richard Wakefield]

The triple meters, dactylic and anapestic, seem loud and expressive to me. "A Visit from Saint Nick": "'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

Even something as closely akin to iambic as trochaic usually reveals itself: "Should you ask me, whence these stories? / Whence these legends and taditions, / With the odors of the forest..."

However, all that is lost if I try to read too fast or too perfunctorily. Meter happens in what the children these days call "real time." Lord knows, not much else does anymore.

Richard

[Rose Kelleher]

Carol - I know what you mean. Swinburne routinely mixed iambs and anapests, and he's widely acknowledged to have been a master metrist. But when anyone else does it, it seems to confuse many readers.

[Roger Slater]

I suspect that most everyone here can hear the meters but that sometimes people (no one in particular intended by these comments) either (a) get bogged down by scanning before they catch on the the rhythm, and then elevate their scansion over what they would hear if they just listened, or (b) start the poem expecting a different meter than they ultimately find, and because they get off on the wrong foot, so to speak, they stumble and do not recover. I know that I have encountered poems whose rhythms (and therefore meter) escaped me at first reading, but later, when I finally "get" the rhythm, it all falls into place.

In John's poem, leaving aside the "correctness" of the scansion, I still believe that anyone reading it with the stresses where Carol indicated would find that it's possible to say the poem in a natural tone of voice with a distinct rhythm and trimeter, to boot. Just because it's possible to scan the poem differently, and one doesn't "have to" say the poem the way Carol indicated, doesn't mean that it can't be read the way Carol indicated once it's pointed out, or that it doesn't sound good if you do.

[Maryann Corbett]

I've been back to Janet's poem several times trying to figure out what to say. For me, the triple meter works too well. It's sort of overwhelming. It lulls me so that I don't get the sense of the words, and nothing about any other device makes much of an impact.

On top of that, pentameter--by contrast with tet--makes me stop almost the length of a foot at the end of each line. (The fault of my doing too much hymnody, maybe.)A three-beat pause is long, and sometimes feels awkward.

Maryann

[Janet Kenny]

Thank you Carol and indeed, thank you Michael for this thread.

When I posted the guilty poem I thought: "Someone is going to complain that it thumps too much", because honestly I can caper around to it like a lunatic, just as I can to an Irish jig.

Michael you don't have a tin ear. Your best poems are some of my very favourite poems and I confess that I have often thought that you must have a very strong individual sense of meter because you often write successfully against what I hear as the main current, but always with a positive result. I think that we are locked into our dialects, particularly if we are poets, and stresses which might have given you a nudge, though strong to me, are not the familiar lead stresses in your own speech. I know you are a cosmopolitan and international traveller and thinker but dialect is something we drink with our mother's milk and it's always there leading the dance.

Carol is a musician as am I. We are used to bending in the breeze and responding to the beat. I always wondered where the differences lay between those who love poetry and those who love music, (not necessarily the same people). By music I mean music that stretches back in time. I seriously believe that amplified popular music nowadays has such a coarsely overstressed regular meter it has almost fatally damaged people's ability to hear more subtle meters. I think it's the main reason for the unpopularity of metric poetry.

I haven't answered any of the responses to my poem yet but of course I will.
I got up an hour early this morning (confused by my state's lack of daylight saving time and a national radio program I read the discussion above, then fell back into bed. It is early morning here but I hope to bring my coffee-sharpened brain, such as it is, to responding to the very interesting crits.

My thanks to everybody for a terrific discussion.

Very best,
Janet