Arbitrary in the sense that how we decide upon what is rhythm is capricious.
It is true that there are rules within each culture, often laid down by a
major canon of texts, and there are examples which breakaway from those
confines, dance around the canon as it were, but always I suppose keeping an
eye on the same basic laws and rules whether they be prosodic or metric or
whatever, and this new set of texts produces another orthodoxy in reaction
to the canon--one which exerts an influence on the next generation and so
on.
Looking at the three examples provided by Richard, I noticed a problem with
syntax. I mean that the syntactical arrangement of the words stops the
flow --turns off the proverbial tap, it is deliberate -- I hope. In fact it
sounds a little awkward to put it bluntly. In the poem which I wrote at
break-neck speed (without a doughnut I hasten to add) I considered short
range and long range sounds, I mean sounds that can be carried along the
text and picked up later, as one finds in music, I also think of doubling up
sounds as I go along whilst trying in this case to imitate the natural
cadence of a pissed off biology teacher somewhere in the middle of the
atlantic as accents go
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