>
>
> To give a concrete example, it's potentially reductive to categorize
> as "unskilled" a use of fixed metre that is guided more by "ear" than
> by an educated awareness of the traditional uses of that metre;;;
...potentially, yes. Of course, there's ear, and then there's ear.
There are various ways to develop a marvelous ear for rhythm/meter;
certainly the kind of education that teaches names of meters and
scansion methods is by no means the only one. I don't think anyone on
this list ever suggested that it was. On the other hand, I don't think
education in meter ever hurt or limited anyone's ear, though fear that
it will is common--just as is fear that reading the work of other poets
will hurt or restrict one's individual "voice" is common among very
young poets. Respect for the rigors and beauties of the art warrants
recognizing (and acknowledging) the difference between an unskilled
attempt at fixed meter that is the result of an ear not yet
sufficiently experienced in any kind of rhythmic poetic knowledge to
attain the desired rhythm, and a variation that is based on a
well-developed, if not formally trained, ear hearing that rhythm's
music in a fresh way.
> It's also reductive to take the verses of someone working out of the
> lineage of American free-versifiers and try to read them back into an
> iambic metrical pattern!
That's as may be. I'd think that those interested enough in the
lineage of American free-versifiers that they feel continually impelled
to take further cheap and uninformed shots at this book might better
spend their energy by taking a look, for example, at its extensive
chapter on that lineage's founder Whitman (one of the key chapters in
the book, which many readers have found and find a useful addition to
ways of reading Whitman) before jumping to any further blind
conclusions on the irrelevance of the metrical code to the free-verse
lineage.
AF
___________________________________
Annie Finch, Director
Stonecoast Brief-Residency MFA in Creative Writing
University of Southern Maine
222 Deering St.
Portland, Maine 04104
Phone: 207-780-5973
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.anniefinch.com
http://www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa/
—THE BODY OF POETRY: ESSAYS ON WOMEN, FORM, AND THE POETIC SELF —just
out in the Poets on Poetry series from University of Michigan Press—
|