Jamie, yes, it’s a pity that the basics have been forgotten. I’m in two minds about it all. I think poets should be free to “be free”, but have at least some basic understanding of what they are being free from.
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Jamie McKendrick wrote:
Just messing, Tim – but, whatever grain of truth could be found in it, at least I’m being even-handedly dismissive! (I’ve been reprimanded on the list before for that too.)
Still, I think there might be a topic here. Even as regards CW, I’ve come across students struggling with advanced concepts of avant-garde poetics who haven’t a clue about the traditional basics, concepts of meter and rhythm that have informed more than 500 years of poetry in English, not to mention other languages. I realise that the vocabulary of scansion, imported from classical literature, is off-putting and essentially inaccurate for the stress-based patterns of English (rather than vowel-length etc.), but it’s useful knowledge to have. Peter’s lucid point as to why the metronome is a misleading image – Ez of course knows this and is being rhetorical – would then be more easily understood by students who encounter Pound’s polemics. It’s stuff that used to be taught in school, and one or two US professors in writing courses I’ve heard of apparently taught metrics quite rigorously. Now I guess it’s considered as irrelevant as life drawing in most art colleges.
Jamie
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