[Mike Alexander]

Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing & Reading Metrical Verse (Houghton Mifflin, 1998 ) is as far from the best approach to metrics as possible. At a glance I could tell that nearly all of the examples given of metrical verse (helpfully printed in the book's final chapter) were from the distant past. "Metrical poetry belongs to a certain era," Oliver says in her intro, "a few centuries, & with every passing year that contained time grows more distant, its methods more estranged from our own." What message does this send about Strong Measures, Rebel Angels, or any of the other formal work done in the last twenty-five years? What anti-formal assumptions, what shared conventions of the mid-twentieth century is she passing on like spyware with her examples? If she shows little newer than Frost & Millay, isn't she saying that the canon is fixed & unassailable? We know this to be a false assumption, & certainly not encouraging to the beginning student of form. (Actually, there's one tiny scrap of Wilbur & the one hideously-done villanelle everyone quotes from Bishop, but they are given scant attention. The slant toward Tradition is blinding.)

I'm not saying I want anyone to avoid reading Keats & Shakespeare & Milton & Pope... one of my greatest pleasures in reading this book through was to re-whet my blade on "Ode to a Nightingale" & "So, We'll Go No More A-Roving." We can all dine well with the ghosts of the past. But if such are the only examples you can find for your models, you have not been paying attention to a great many fine works, voices which bring the modern world into their poetry. Oliver laments not including Browning & Dryden. She should apologize for not including metrical work by Kunitz, Wright, Thomas, Snodgrass, Kennedy, Jarmen, Carruth, Hecht, Sissman, & the quasi-metrical work of Merwin, Walcott, etc., etc., so on & so forth. Several anthologies available to Oliver go unnoticed, & there is no bibliography given.

I understand the relative difficulty in using the living. You have to attain rights. Except for Wilbur, everyone in the book is dead. (She could've called it The Dead Dance.) I'm surprised the Frost estate granted the use of his work, since I know that others have had no luck getting similar permission. But publishers go through as much trouble everyday. How does the Norton anthology do it? How did the Penguin Book of the Sonnet include so many recent works? Isn't Houghton Mifflin as longarmed as Penguin? Isn't Mary Oliver better placed to get a few favors than Phillis Levin? Whatever her reasons, I know I would've gone the other way.

Oliver starts the book with a conceit that metric poetry is about breath. This closely echoes an assertion Allen Ginsberg popularized in the late seventies & early eighties that poetry was based on the breath unit. He called one of his books Mind Breaths, & you can find his essays in Allen Verbatim on quantitative poetics being an extension of breath. Only he's not talking about metrics, & Oliver's explanation doesn't make the distinction very clear, either. Yes, breath can be expressive, but it's misleading to drawn too close a parallel to inhalation/exhalation & the use of regular meter. Later, she calls iambic pentameter "the closest to the breathing capacity of our lungs -- we have just enough breath on one uninterrupted reach to say it through." Really? Whether one is a long-distance swimmer or an asthmatic, the same? No. Do we always stop & take a breath at the beginning of each line, so that we can be sure of saying it through in one uninterrupted breath? No, we do not. I think Ms. Oliver is trying to get to the same place as those studies that posited the length of a line of poetry as matching the time it takes the human mind to grasp one detail. Three point four seconds, give or take a blink. Just about pi. But can we workably use that? Is it practical? Or is it filler?

She makes other assertions about iambics which I find dubious. The pentameter line "is less a thrust or a fling than it is a natural gesture, a sweet force, vigorous but not too vigorous." She calls it "the reasonable meter," as opposed to the extra energy involved in anapests or dactyls. She says "iambic meter seems to carry upon its broad & unexcitable back the cadence of sensible speech." I don't know about you, but I've read enough IP to see that it can do almost anything, adopt almost any nuance, fake an unaffected pose or be glazed with an ethereal artificiality. Individual choices, as to pacing, diction, imagery, transition, & such make a difference. Iambics are simply pliable enough to do whatever the skillful poet desires. Oliver does stop short of saying that English speech is naturally iambic -- an untruth that has stopped a lot of people from being able to appreciate how much art goes into writing good verse.

Oliver sticks to four basic metric feet at first, iambic, trochaic, anapestic, & dactylic, of course. Then she grudgingly adds the spondee. A chapter later, she adds the pyrrhic, & even drops in the double ionic, while denying that either is really a proper foot. It's not made clear what differentiates the double ionic from an anapest followed by a lame foot. Her discussion of lame or catalectic (aka headless) feet is but two pages away from her example of the double ionic foot (paeon, really,) yet she doesn't address the problem. How is the double stress of "the BLUE SHARD" different from "like a BEACHED FISH" (both from Millay)? -- in the first she takes "shard" as a lame foot; in the second "fish" is but half a spondee. This is tricky ground, easily confusing for someone trying to grasp all this. Oliver claims it's rare to see these kind of feet, but what is the reader to think now, that these names are interchangeable, that they mean different things in different critic's hands?

She also says at one point that "any one of the four patterns" (this is back before she goes on to add others) "may at any time by substituted for any other." Isn't this too expansive? For one thing, a trochee popped into the first foot of an iambic line is welcome; it even strengthens the iambic flow. In place of the second foot, the same sub is monstrous, hard to recover from. A third foot trochee is almost as awkward. A fourth foot is tricky. A fifth? Well, in skillful hands almost anything is workable. But "at any time" makes it sound like the results are interchangeable. They're not.

It's not all this bad. I'm just disappointed that there aren't more of the surprisingly apt reveries that pop up here & there in this book. "As the pattern is discoverable to the reader by faith & intelligence, so it is put down on the page by the writer through faith & intelligence." That's wisdom, there. "Inflection helps to release the meaning of language." Another subtle point a good student could meditate on for years. All in all, though, this book fills out the basics onto in the most conventional way, by pointing at long accepted examples from THE GREATS, & many of the assertions, while not exactly untrue, are not exactly helpful, either.

[Richard Wakefield]

Mike:
Thanks for posting this. You've gone into plenty of relevant detail, and you're made your reason for writing clear.
I'm curious whether Oliver gives any reason for writing the book in the first place. Is the study of metrics now a branch of anthropology, like the study of the apotropaic rituals of the Minoans? Mere exercises in estorica?
RPW

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Richard Wakefield:

"I'm curious whether Oliver gives any reason for writing the book in the first place."

Yes, Richard, she does. Her very first sentence is, "I had three reasons for writing this book on metrical poetry."

Her second sentence is, "The first was to create for myself the opportunity to think about metrical prosody, which is an endlessly fertile subject for any working poet. By 'working poet' I include those who write the modern non-rhyming, non-metrical form of lyric (which includes myself) --- for the foundation of every poem is not only its words but its formality of motion, whether it be metrical altogether, or only at the occasional rhapsodic moment."

"My second purpose was to develop an informational and thoughtful text giving the basic rules of scansion, along with a collection of metrical poems for immediate example and pleasure, to writers who actually want to write metrical verse."

"My third purpose---and this is by no means the least of the three---was to offer to readers of poetry a text and a commentary which {sic} would help them understand the metrical process: that is, not only how the metrical poem should be written, but how it should be read, or received, by the reader. "

I hope this helps establish the context of her book.

Bob


[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited July 03, 2005).]

[Mike Alexander]

& to bury the competition along the way

[oliver murray]

I would not regard “Rules of the Dance” as the last word on meter, Mike, and it has some of the faults you mention, particularly lack of contemporary examples, but, on the credit side, Mary Oliver has a wide popular readership among beginners as a result of her “Poetry Handbook” – people who are unlikely to be ready for Tim Steele’s or Derek Attridge’s books and I would consider it a valuable “in between” work. I would probably agree with you that it is too expansive to say that "any one of the four patterns" may be substituted anywhere, or at least give the wrong impression. I think the trochee DOES fit anywhere, subject to context and skill of use.
You say:

“For one thing, a trochee popped into the first foot of an iambic line is welcome; it even strengthens the iambic flow. In place of the second foot, the same sub is monstrous, hard to recover from. A third foot trochee is almost as awkward. A fourth foot is tricky. A fifth? Well, in skillful hands almost anything is workable. But "at any time" makes it sound like the results are interchangeable.

I don’t think Ms Oliver means they are interchangeable, regardless of context. The word “the” can be used anywhere in a line but this doesn’t mean without thought or reason. I would not call this second foot substitution by Milton “monstrous” for example:

“A mind not to be changed by place of time.”

There are many fine examples of fine third, fourth and fifth foot substitutions to be found in good verse.

“With whom Alcemna played but naught witting.” (Wm Morris)

for example, is an effective fifth foot sub
and there are many examples of third and fourth foot subs in Shakespeare and Wyatt, for example. You know all this, I am sure, and you are right about this sort of thing needing skilful hands, of course, but I do not think Ms Oliver’s book purports to be an intensive “how to” primer on metrics and also think that a little more boldness regarding metric substitution might not be out of place, as timidity is a much more noticeable characteristic of metric beginners.
That is why I am against dire warnings of what can not be done, or attempted.

[Rose Kelleher]

but, on the credit side, Mary Oliver has a wide popular readership among beginners as a result of her “Poetry Handbook”

Yes, but I think that's part of Mike's point. She's telling aspiring poets that "metrical poetry belongs to a certain era." Saying it outright in her intro, and reinforcing it with her choice of examples. It does seem odd that she'd write a book on meter, if that's her view.

I bought Ted Kooser's "The Poetry Home Repair Manual," and haven't had time to read it all yet, but I opened it up at random yesterday, and saw:

"Here, for example, is a contemporary sonnet by Kim Addonizio:"

And there's "Aquarium." Kooser goes on for a few paragraphs talking about how the meter in sonnets doesn't have to go da DUM da DUM all the way through.

"that PASSes FOR the SUN. BLINDly, the BLANK

She could have written something like:

that PASSes FOR the SUN. so BLIND, the BLANK

but that wouldn't have sounded natural, would it? She wants this poem to sound like something that somebody living today would say. She doesn't want it to sound as if somebody in the 1600s were saying it." (emphasis mine)

He then points out the imperfect rhymes, and explains that "she doesn't hesitate to get away from perfect rhymes when the language feels more conversational without them..."

Then he says -- and remember he's talking about a sonnet here -- "If more poems were written like this, to mimic real contemporary speech, there'd be a bigger audience for poetry."

What a contrast! Here's Mary Oliver, effectively telling readers that metrical poetry is something people used to write, and Ted Kooser, using words like "natural," "conversational," "contemporary" and "living today" in connection with sonnets.

[Richard Wakefield]

Rose:
Thanks for bringing up Kooser's book, which I've been wanting to read but, alas, have had to keep putting off in favor of various assignments.
While the emphasis on what sounds natural and conversational can be overdone -- and what can't? -- it's always the touchstone. Good dance looks natural, even though most of us can't do it and even though it certainly ain't spontaneous. A lot of times good art is exaggerated nature. Ordinary speech, especially when it's emotionally charged, often takes on strong meter. For me the use of meter is one signal that something strongly felt is being said, or is being attempted. Then the nuances of emphasis convey what other prose requires line after line of context to establish: I love you, I LOVE you, I love YOU. Lots of free verse works very well, but to my ear it does so only after overcoming a sort of inherent flatness.
RPW

[oliver murray]

Rose,

I agree with you, of course. The main point of what I wrote was that substitutions could be made in any foot, (probably, in fact, more succesfully after a caesura that in the first foot where there is a run-on) Where did this ridiculous idea grown up that they were something to be wary of anywhere else? And the Addonizio example Kooser quotes has an inversion in the fifth foot, to prove my point.

I think he is living in cloud cuckoo-land if he thinks there will ever be a bigger audience for poetry though, no matter how "natural" the style of metric verse becomes, but if more natural diction produces better poetry that will be good enough for me. I am all for it

[Mike Alexander]

"Where did this ridiculous idea grown up that they were something to be wary of anywhere else?"

That would be me, Oliver. Thank you for dismissing my point, which you've gone the long way around to miss. I did not say substitutions could not be done. I said the effect varied widely depending on their placement in the line. Oliver's statement was that any foot could substitute at any time. To make a blanket statement like that in an introductory book encourages insensititity to meter, not the cultivating of a careful, sensitive ear.

Why is a trochee at second base a "monstrous" substitution? Please allow me a modicum of hyperbole, but please also take a listen to the substitutions you've cited in other positions. Each rocks the boat in a different way, & to a different degree challenges the iambic signature of the IP line. The second foot sub wreaks havoc with the iambic pattern far more than a first foot sub. I never said that such challenges to IP weren't useful in skilled hands. But to a beginner, I would recommend getting the heft of first syllable substitution before changing up the meter, willy-nilly, anywhere it might be easier for the poet. To say "at any time" is saying chuck the whole idea of metrical verse. If you don't sit well with the idea of regular meter, being told when & where to stick to a consistant format, well...

[oliver murray]

No, Mike, this idea exists, unfortunately, independently of you, though not usually among the writers on metrics that I am aware of.

"Trochees may also come in later positions than the first foot of a line."

"Trocheees often substitute for the second foot of an iambic pentameter line":

Alfred Corn "The Poem's Heartbeat

Mr Corn does say something most writers on this subject seem to overlook, that "the general rule (not always observed) is that irregular feet should not outnumber regular feet in a line" and quotes several passages with two trochaic substitutions per line, and examples of lines with single substitutions in each of the five feet.

I would presume that by "at any time" Ms Oliver means "in any place in the line" (she could hardly mean anything else) and I do not see this as any different to what Alfred Corn writes,in essence, although some might see her words as advocating a more slapdash approach. I don't. Plainly she does not intend the use of such substitutions be understood as "in a purposeless, random and tin-eared fashion"