Annie:

> 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.

Are you thinking of the New Formalists, Annie, who published +Rebel Angels+
(25 of them) in 1996?  This (at least from this distance) seems to have been
a turning-point.  I confess I don't go a bundle on them (with the exception
of R.S.Gwynn, whose work I like) -- I *especially* don't go a bundle on the
poetry of the grandaddy of the movement, Dana Gioia, who seems to me simply
Auden and water.

Some of the Rebel Angels (Sam Gwynn and Paul Lake, for example)  hang out on
New Poetry.  (There's also the Versification list, specifically what its
name suggests, which is heavy guns but seems to be moribund at the moment.)

> 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.

Linguists, ah ...  --  see below.

> I recently struggled with a 12-line poem in
> amphibrachs (a bear of a meter that I got really hooked on),

Isn't the amphibrach a foot rather than a metre? -- X  /  X.  If you write a
line composed simply of amphibrachs, you get:

        X / X X / X X / X X / X X / X X / X

... which is anapaestic with an iambic foot tucked on at the beginning and
an extra syllable at the end.

Joseph Malof, in +A Manual of English Meters+ argued (rightly, I think) that
there are only five possible feet in syllable-accent English metre -- 
iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, dactylic, and the Lesser Ionic Ascending Foot.
The logic behind this goes back to Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Concept of
Meter: an exercise in abstraction", and turns on the concept of contrastive
rather than absolute stress.

> 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,

"Prosody" in linguistics means something utterly different from "prosody" in
metrics.

> 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).

That's nothing new.  Trager and Smith tried to "correct" us dumb metricists
with the idea of four levels of stress in the early fifties.  Didn't work,
and I doubt (though I speak tentatively not knowing what's happening at the
moment) that any current linguistic approach will work any better.
Different ball game.

> In that poem she found three syllables that by her
> definition proved that amphibrachs exist.  Something to do with
> phrasing.

Could you post the poem, Annie?

>  Then there's Derek Attridge, who has a new footless system
> based on expected accent, demotions and promotions.

I'd see Attridge as a metricist who's drawing on linguistics (in +The
Rhythms of English Poetry+).  REP is fascinating, but I'm not sure it's
acceptable as descriptive system -- over-complicated.

The other name in the frame of busting traditional scansion is Marina
Tarlinskaja, +EnglishVerse: Theory and History+ (tr. 1976), but I've never
managed to find a copy of this to read.

> 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 think it will last my time.  It has the benefit of simplicity, and it
works.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> 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)

I don't get this.  Seems over-complicated.  What's wrong with the
traditional distinction between speech-stress and metrical stress (ictus),
with rhythm emerging from the interaction between the two?

        [SNIP]

> There are
> so many odd systems proposed by poets and others--Sidney Lanier,

I mentioned Lanier to Joanna Boulter recently (the musical connection) but I
don't know his work.  Wouldn't mind a quick run-down if you'd be willing to
provide it.

     [SNIP]

Robin