When I was in graduate school--my MA is in TESOL (Teaching English to
Speakers of Other Languages), but it was essentially an MA in applied
linguistics--I took a course that I believe was called "Stylistics," and, if
I remember correctly, it was at the time recognized as a subfield of
linguistics in much the same way that pragmatics of sociolinguistics is. I
have no idea if the subject is still studied under this name, but, as I
remember it, the proposition put forward by the professor teaching the class
was that subjecting the text of a piece of literature to linguistic analysis
(syntactic, phonological, semantic, etc.)--and we focused on poetry because
of space and time constraints--would reveal the fact that the poem's meaning
was somehow embodied in its linguistic characteristics. 

Sometimes, this resulted in what seemed to me, even at the time, really,
really silly statements. I vaguely remember, for example, a discussion of
how sentence fragments in a poem--I don't remember which one or whom it was
by--embodied the fragmented nature of the speaker's mind. On the other hand,
some of the arguments were intriguing, as, for example, the discussion of
whether certain kinds of ungrammaticality in a poem--again, I don't remember
anything but the conversation itself--embodied the boundary-breaking that
was part of the poem's concern.

What intrigued me about this second analysis was what seemed to me to be the
connection it made between a poem's emotional/intellectual concerns--I don't
even want to limit it by saying "content"--and the choices, conscious or
unconscious, made by a poet in giving those concerns form in language. It's
very hard to articulate this without making it sound really reductive, as if
a poet's choice of subject matter dictates certain kind of formal choices in
the way, say, that the choice of a plural subject in a sentence dictates a
properly conjugated verb--and what interested me was nothing so
deterministic. Rather, I was intrigued by the notion that linguistic
features I had been studying in my other classes--syntax, morphemes,
phonemes, etc.--ultimately could not be separated from their context--as
they were when we studied them in other classes--and, in their context, took
on, or maybe worked against, that context's emotional and intellectual
concerns.

At this point in my life, this strikes me as a not particularly profound
insight, but, at the time, it meant a lot to me.

Annie's theories about meter seem to me to be taking this notion of
stylistics one step further. I have not read her book and so I hope I am not
doing her argument here an injustice, but from what she has written in this
discussion, I think what she's done is to take poetic meter, see it as a
thread that runs throughout the poetry written in English over however many
hundreds of years and then, because meter is a cultural construct--which
means it cannot be without cultural meaning--try to read the meaning of that
meter, of that thread, as it weaves its way through forms of poetry that are
in fact the product of the breaking of formal meter(s) as the only
appropriate infrastructure on which to build a poem.

Any given reading she comes up with will, of course, always be partial and
biased and have as much to do with her as with the poem she is reading; this
is true of any analysis that is also an argument for a particular way of
reading; but that does not mean that the way of reading being argued for is
therefore less than valid. Feminist readings, structuralist readings,
Marxist readings are all always contingent and are all always only one way
of reading. In a separate conversation, Annie pointed out to me that my
poems are heavily iambic, and this is largely true, I think, and I have no
doubt it has something to do with how I come and what I bring to the writing
of poetry, and I have no doubt as well that there is a connection, an
overdetermined one, but a connection nonetheless between whatever my poems
have to say--in all the myriad ways that poems "have something to say--and
the iambs that are a formal element in the music they make. Personally, I am
not so interested in the specifics of the analysis--what it means in this or
that poem that certain lines are iambic tetrameter or pentameter or dimeter
while others are not, but it does seem to me that, on a cultural level, the
question is an entirely valid one.

There was more I wanted to say, but it has slipped away from me because I
have suddenly realized I need to think about dinner.

Richard