Thanks all for fascinating nuggets--that Jennifer Moxley read Spenser
aloud is just perfect--and I really enjoyed Richard's description of
writing blank verse. I've heard great things about the In Fine Form
anthology but haven't seen a copy yet..the renewed interest in form in
the air in the US now is pretty clear--the feeling and reaction of
people is much more sympathetic than it was 12 years ago when I
published my first anthology, of formal poetry (A Formal Feeling Comes:
Poems in Form by Contemporary Women)--at that time there was clearly a
thrill of the illicit taboo about form (especially feminists writing in
form) and now everyone seems more used to the idea. My understanding
is that In Fine Form is more like an anthology showcasing contemporary
formal poetry, whereas An Exaltation of Forms is a textbook put
together by 50 different poets, each taking a different form or meter &
discussing it & choosing examples, and it includes poetry from all
centuries, not just contemporary...
Randolph, I think you are right--though I also think that most people
who are into scansion easily accept that there are different and
equally good ways of hearing the scansion of many lines. That's why
it's so interesting to me that there are, in fact, just a few "rules"
that linguists have settled on, which do tip a line over the edge and
out of a meter. I recently struggled with a 12-line poem in
amphibrachs (a bear of a meter that I got really hooked on), taking
months to get it right. I showed it to a friend who is a professor of
linguistics at Berkeley, a true "prosodist" (linguists, by the way, are
the real prosodists, and most of the ones I know have hearty contempt
for the clumsy way poets talk about scansion! they use Chomskian trees
and things like that, which I personally find pretty much
incomprehensible). In that poem she found three syllables that by her
definition proved that amphibrachs exist. Something to do with
phrasing. Then there's Derek Attridge, who has a new footless system
based on expected accent, demotions and promotions. There is a lot of
good in that system, and some real problems. The old-fashioned system
of feet seems to stand up pretty well when it comes to teaching people
how to write lines recognizable as particular meters.
I've recently begun distinguishing explicitly between three kinds of
accent when I scan a line (as when teaching), and it's helped:
lexical stress (dictionary syllable-stress on words of more than one
syllable)
phrasal stress (common customs of stressing nouns more than articles,
etc.)
performative stress (emphasis by an individual person or situation)
there's not much point arguing over the first kind of stress and very
little in arguing over the third, as far as stresses go. It's the
middle ground between fact and opinion where people like to argue.
And then there is the way the stresses configure into systems--fertile
ground for crackpots to come up with their own "better way"-=There are
so many odd systems proposed by poets and others--Sidney Lanier, Edgar
Allen Poe, & Shelley were among those to propose their own
systems--some are timers, some are stressers--That kind of tempest in a
prosodic teapot isn't to my taste, personally.
Basically it seems to me that meter is one of those things that people
recognize when they hear it...I just like to look at individual lines.
Here are three of my favorite lines of blank verse from Hart Crane:
inevitable, the body of the world
weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus
that winks above it, bluet in your breasts.
to me, awareness of how each of these lines is based in the same meter
accentuates exquisitely the differences between them. They scan quite
differently, and the way they stretch sounds limits is magnificently
varied (by assonance, consonance, caesura, enjambment, phrasal stress),
yet each of them scans perfectly without breaking any of the basic
prosodic rules of iambic pentameter. The meter is like a face on which
these amazing expressions move.
peace & poetry,
Annie
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