I would be the first to admit it: my rote memory skills are abysmal. As Achilles’ heels go, this may seem a trivial defect. Nonetheless, my inept memory forms a tripwire, stretching across every scholastic threshold I long to cross.
In the literary context, I chaff against that tripwire when I attempt to apply the technique of scansion to poetry. No exaggeration; the penciled meter markings floating above the verses in my college anthology embody mis-scansion. On the best of days, I could identify the iambic, anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic. But if you would have asked me to tell a cretic from a amphibrach, the game was up.
As a remedy, I bought Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (1965). If Paul Fussell, author of the The Great War and Modern Memory and Class: A Guide to the American Status System, couldn’t enlighten me to the close reading of poetic form, who could? (Admittedly, Fussell has written more than these works but those I mentioned are the two upon which I tend to construct his identity as a scholar/thinker.)
The book doesn’t disappoint. Although hewn from a narrowly new critical mode, Fussell’s work dissected poetic meter and form with such thought and precision that I ended the book with my own appreciation of poetry transformed. I am disproportionately pleased to find my taste in verse more intimately aligning with an appreciation for the intricate texture and artistic conventions under-girding the lines I read.
My fondest “ah-ha” moment arose from the chapter entitled “Free Verse,” where Fussell announces:
…usually the free-verse poet’s ambition is less to exhibit meter than to keep it from showing. He has numerous methods for reinforcing sense, methods resembling those by which a writer in traditional meter “syncopates” by executing significant variations on established patterns.
I am not a poet nor do I spend hours expressing myself in poetry. But I identified with this fight against meter as (don’t laugh) a runner. I’ve never been one to run with music, and rhythm has everything to do with my aversion to the habit. When I run I do have a consistent tempo I maintain, unless I have particular plan to do otherwise. But if I listen to music while running, I end up fighting the tempo of the music and spending the entire run trying to overcome the natural temptation to physically respond to the music by matching the tempo of whatever song plays in my mp3 player. The result? I am unable to sustain any tempo and my run disintegrates into a fast-then-slow, long-then-short stride game. Alright: this may seem like an insignificant connection, but it gave me a tangible way to appreciate the measured effort of those poets who write masterful free verse.
In spite of my cheesy applications of Fussell’s work, if you want to brush up on your poetry, Fussell’s a great source for a thorough introduction to traditional boundaries and artistic expectations that can help you learn to appreciate the poetry you read to a greater degree.
And this wasn’t going to be a review, but somehow it ended like one…
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Another good book about meter is Timothy Steele’s “All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=A8LrGQAACAAJ
From a (not-that-great) poet’s perspective, good free verse is excruciatingly hard to write. With rhymes and/or meter, the form can carry the content and actually sometimes liberates ideas. But with free verse, the poet has to make up the form that carries the content and then ensure that the form doesn’t overpower or contradict the content. Thus, more thought has to go into not only the words but also the placement within the line, the lines themselves, and their overall effect. With structured verse, certainly the poet needs to think about the placement of his words, but he knows that certain words or sounds can go only certain places, so he doesn’t have to build the skeleton–he just has to put the meat on it, so to speak.
I completely agree with the idea of hiding the meter rather than eliminating it. The primary well-known example of hiding meter or using less conventional metrical patterns to support meaning is Ezra Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro,” which is a masterpiece of free verse.
To some extent, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is responsible for my shift to literary studies. I remember the day, sandwiched between my junior and senior years of college, I found that raw, muscular poem in my mother’s old, college textbook. After absorbing those lines, my vague expectations for an academic future crystallized. In a letter to John Hollander in 1958, Ginsberg recalled the struggle from which Howl’s free verse construction arose:
“After sick and tired of short line free verse as not expressionistic enough, not swinging enough, can’t develop a powerful enough rhythm, I simply turned aside, accidentally to writing part I of Howl, in solitude, diddling around with the form, thinking it couldn’t be published anyway (queer content my parents shouldn’t see etc.) also it was out of my short-line line. But what I did thought my theory, I changed my mind about ‘measure’ while writing it. Part one uses repeated base who, as a sort of kithara BLANG, Homeric (in my imagination) to mark off each statement, each rhythmic unit. So that’s experiment with longer and shorter variations on a fixed base–the principle being, that each line has to be contained within the elastic of one breath–with suitable punctuatory expressions where the rhythm has built up enough so that I have to let off steam by building a longer climactic line in which there is a jazzy ride. All the ear I’ve ever developed goes into the balancing of those lines. The interesting moments when the rhythm is sufficiently powerfully pushing ahead so I can ride out free and drop the who key that holds it together. The method of keeping a long line still all poetic and not prosey is the concentration and compression of basically imagistic notations into surrealist and cubist phrasing, like hydrogen jukeboxes. Ideally anyway.”