"from felony to felony to crime" only has three stresses the way I read it,
& 10 feet in all. how can it be iambic?
KS
On 23/01/07, Roger Collett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Joanna found this yesterday while searching the web, and passed it on:
>
> http://jason-gray.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html
> <quote>
> Jason Gray:
> I began to read through Fenton's new Selected Poems (Penguin-Britain,
> forthcoming FSG in the
> States) to become more familiar with him. In a standout poem in the
> collection, "The Ballad of
> the Imam and the Shah," Fenton employs a dipodic meter, a term I was
> happily familiarized with
> at the reading - where a line can be read metrically two ways accurately.
> For example,
>
> From felony to felony to crime
> From robbery to robbery to loss
> From calumny to calumny to spite
> From rivalry to rivalry to zeal
>
>
> These are perfect iambic pentameter lines. However, especially when read
> aloud, they are
> trimeter lines as well, since the second and fourth beats of each line are
> weaker, and when read
> with the rhythmic emphasis the song-like nature of the poem intends, the
> trimeter nature of the
> line comes out.
> <unquote>
>
> Roger Collett
> Arrowhead Press
> http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality."
> Jules de Gaultier
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Janet Jackson" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:01 AM
> Subject: Re: hammerpoem
>
>
> >I love that "the expressionless / stencils of chance"
> > It sounds so good,
> > and can be as full or empty of meaning as the reader likes.
> >
> > Like I said, no rules.
> >
> > Janet
> >
> >> hammer
> >>
> >> on a whim, in the middle
> >> of the night, the white world
> >> calls for me
> >> because it is cold
> >> with a sleek weight of delight
> >> & full of a mask¯
> >> I hear a call only as I translate
> >> the light insisting this darkness,
> >> counterweight apple to the moon,
> >> pale-raw without promise
> >> of a thaw.
> >>
> >> from my window I see how
> >> the altar-street calls for pattern¯
> >> physics longs to be a riddle!
> >> I throw a hammer & it careens,
> >> heavy-blunt as a gunshot,
> >> down to where ice hardens under powder.
> >>
> >> never have I loved the expressionless
> >> stencils of chance as much as now¯
> >> snow inches its gaps but there
> >> where this new hammer
> >> fell & danced
> >> like a dropped skull
> >>
> >> are hieroglyphs
> >> filling them with rules.
> >>
> >> KS
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------
> > Janet Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
> > Poems at Proximity:
> > http://www.proximity.webhop.net
> >
> > The choice is between nonviolence and nonexistence.
> > Martin Luther King Jr.
> > -------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > --
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> >
>
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