In a message dated 5/27/2007 4:09:38 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Dude, you could at least ask her *why she switched metre. Who knows?
Laura may have an answer mapped out.
Ah, that's how people are taught to be boring. Always wondered.
Not "boring" and the questions would not have been answerable even if they
had been asked. Unfortunately, I write poetry by the seat of my pants and by
the sounds in my head and I could no more tell you why I sometimes choose to
add an extra foot or subtract a beat than I could tell you why domestic
turkeys have wings but cannot fly. Because they don't need to, I suppose. It's
not that I'm unaware that I'm doing it - or even that I'm unaware that it's
somehow "wrong" of me to do so - it's just that sometimes I want them there
whether they're technically correct or not. Sometimes I'll use them because
they deliberately slow a reader down or sometimes because they deliberately
speed a reader up and because of that, I find it one more useful tool in the
shed. In this case, I believe Tad was right and I was wrong. Instead of being
helpful the extra feet were bogging things down. I'd already taken more
than a few liberties with the "sonnet" form (such as adding two extra lines)
and I'd played hell with a made-up rhyme scheme and that was more than enough
for one almost-sonnet to handle. Adding to the meter or subtracting from it
is "ok" when you haven't changed much else. If nothing else, I consider it a
sort of "signature" variation on form. This, though, this was too much. I
actually like the revision with Tad's suggestions much better -- and coming
from a stubborn ole wench, that's high praise. :)
Lo
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