Mark, huff huff, I will confine myself to your remarks on scansion.
Though you have learned to write ip by osmosis, your conscious
knowledge of how scanning works is such that you might want to think
twice before making sweeping pronouncements about what does and doesn't
scan. You seem to think that an iambic pentameter has to consist of 5
iambs. It doesn't. Most people familiar with scansion would hear all
of these lines scanning easily as iambic pentameters, if they appeared
in an i.p. poem.
"Horrible stories from the homeland, and" is what is known as a
"headless" or "acephalous" i.p.. (skipping the first unstressed
syllable) line, with an anapest in the second foot. A standard
variation on the meter.
"Civilization and its discontents" is another headless line with an
anapest in the second foot.
"one would have thought it painful, but the stance" I think you didn't
mention, because it is five iambs so even you recognized it.
"Places named for the words first heard there. So" is another headless
iambic pentameter, with the anapest in the third foot this time, maybe
a spondee in the last foot, otherwise completely regular iambs.
"She spoke the gestures/of her native land" is regular, of course.
For a discussion of headless iambic lines, you might want to look at
Paul Fussell's book, or, online, there's a thorough discussion under
the header "Standard Substitutions in Strict Iambic Pentametter" on the
Poetry X Forum discussion site.
This was not at all supposed to be a complete reading of your poem or
all the themes in it, simply an admittedly hasty illustration of the
idea of the metrical code & how it might work to point out the
connotations of metrical lines in a free verse poem and the development
of those connotations. Such readings are meant to work along with other
kinds of readings, imagistic, thematic, historical, etc..
Huff, huff.
Annie, huffily
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