Last year I happened to be sitting next to the young poet Jericho Brown at a reading in Los Angeles. Jericho noticed me counting on my fingers and scribbling down some marks on a piece of paper. He nearly leaped out of his seat with delight (anyone who knows Jericho will not be surprised at this exuberance). “Are you scanning??!’ he asked me. I nodded, feeling somewhat embarrassed—particularly because the book the poet was reading from was in free verse.
But the fact is, this book of free verse was laced generously with lines and passages in meter. This is not uncommon; probably about half the free verse readings I hear are full of meter. After reading and scanning metrical poetry for so many years—about 30 years now—when I am confronted with meter, I hear and notice its rhythmic pattern—in short, I scan it. It would be nice to be able to turn off this capacity when I’m at a free verse reading, since noticing the intermittent metrical patterns can distract me from the meaning of the words. But at this point—it really kicked in after I had spent some months scanning all of Leaves of Grass (which has a lot of meter mixed into the free verse) and all of Dickinson for a book on the metrical code, The Ghost of Meter– it has become impossible for me to stop.
It’s as if I have four ears: a set of language ears and a set of meter ears. When I am listening to prose or to free verse, there’s no problem. My meter ears take a rest, and I use my language ears, paying attention primarily to the words in sentences: their meaning, emotional connotations, imagery, tone, and so on. And when I am listening to metrical poetry, there’s no problem either; all four ears get working at the same time. As the language ears and the meter ears listen together, as if in stereo, I notice both the meaning of the language and its rhythm, savoring both the symmetry and the variations and more-or-less skillful counterpointing between them.
It’s when poems go back and forth, shifting between bits of meter and bits of free verse, that the curse of the metrical code kicks in. During a reading, such moments wreak havoc with my meter-ears and my prose ears; I move back and forth between them and keep missing bits of the poem’s meaning while trying to get a groove going. And while I’m at it, I notice the times when the meter and the meaning seem to be commenting on each other. That’s really what I can’t help noticing. It’s a very odd feeling, like a hall of mirrors in the brain…..
It happened today in three poems I came across, by Kay Ryan, Robert Hass, and Kevin Young. They were all iambic pentameters, single ones in the middle of free-verse poems, and the meanings of those particular lines were all very hall-of-mirrorsy. I jotted them down; I couldn’t help it. If I ever do find that piece of paper, I’ll add them here.
Annie,
When I am listening to prose or to free verse, there’s no problem. My meter ears take a rest,
Curious. Change the word “meter” to “rhythmic strings” and my response is the exact opposite: IMHO, detecting and analyzing the rhythms in good free verse is no curse, it’s one of the greatest pleasures the form offers. To me, a fun exercise is in trying to carbon date 20th century free verse poems by the lengths, qualities (e.g. perfect versus substituted), frequency and quantity of rhythm strings, as well as by the transitions between them. Even when one is wrong, it can be extremely gratifying to find a throwback.
I find it’s also a fairly reliable indicator as to whether or not the poet is capable of writing competent metrical work.
-o-
Posted By: Colin Ward on June 27, 2009 at 11:24 pmReport this comment
I’m glad for the “if I can only find that piece of paper” comment.
Actually — and I think this is pretty common — I almost always scan my free verse poems at some point in writing / revision. I gives me another measure of control.
Posted By: Catherine Daly on June 28, 2009 at 10:47 amReport this comment
interesting, Catherine. I wonder if that is common among free verse poets? Do you divide them into feet, or just mark the accents and unaccents? (I like to call them wands and cups…)
Posted By: Annie Finch on June 29, 2009 at 11:50 pmReport this comment
It is fun, Colin, and that’s why I spent years writing a book about it–The Ghost of Meter, which describes the metrical code. The curse I was describing (slightly tongue-in-cheek) is that in the social setting of a poetry reading it makes it hard to feel on the same “page” as everyone else as the poem flies by and people around me chuckle and gasp and sigh about the meaning whlle I’m still drumming my fingers in time with the line I heard 30 seconds ago and hearing it talking to itself in the metrical code…That’s what I was trying to convey. Sometimes one wishes one could turn it off. But of course, it does enrich the experience, adding another dimension to free verse, especially when a poem is fully awere of its rhythms–
Posted By: Annie FInch on June 29, 2009 at 9:21 amReport this comment
FOUR EARS
a poem by Annie Finch
Sitting next to the young poet Jericho Brown
at a reading in Los Angeles,
Jericho noticed
me counting on my fingers
and scribbling down
some marks on paper.
He nearly leaped
out of his seat
with delight
“Are you scanning??!’
This book of free
verse was laced
generously
with lines and passages
in meter.
This is not
uncommon.
The free verse readings I hear are full of meter.
After reading and scanning metrical poetry
for so many years,
confronted with meter,
I hear and notice its rhythmic pattern—
in short,
I scan it.
Intermittent metrical patterns
can distract me
from the meaning of the words.
After months scanning all of Leaves of Grass
it has become
impossible for me to stop.
It’s as if I have four ears:
a set of language ears
and a set of meter ears.
When I am listening to prose
or to free verse,
there’s no problem.
My meter ears take a rest,
and I use my language ears,
paying attention primarily
to the words in sentences:
their meaning, emotional connotations,
imagery, tone, and so on.
And when I am listening to metrical poetry,
there’s no problem either; all four ears
get working at the same time.
As the language ears and the meter ears
listen together,
as if in stereo,
I notice both the meaning of the language
and its rhythm, savoring both the symmetry
and the variations
counterpointing between them.
It’s when poems go back and forth,
shifting between bits of meter
and bits of free verse,
that the curse of the metrical code kicks in.
During a reading,
such moments wreak havoc
with my meter-ears
and my prose ears;
I move back
and forth
missing bits
of the poem’s meaning
while trying to get a groove
going, and while I’m at it,
I notice the times
when the meter and the meaning
seem to be commenting
on each other.
It’s a very odd feeling,
like a hall of mirrors in the brain…..
It happened today
in three poems
by Kay Ryan, Robert Hass, and Kevin Young.
They were all iambic pentameters,
single ones in the middle
of free-verse poems,
and the meanings
of those particular lines
were all very
hall-of-mirrorsy.
I jotted them down;
Posted By: thomas brady on June 28, 2009 at 1:26 pmI couldn’t help it.
If I ever do find that piece of paper,
I’ll add them here.
Report this comment
Nobody has ever done this to me before, Thomas. More mirrors in the hall!
Metrical code wise, the most completely metrical line I find is this iambic pentameter (with an anapestic variation in the third foot). The meter is very appropriate for the meaning in this case since the meter the readings are full of is, 9 times out of 10, you guessed it: iambic pentameter.
The free verse readings I hear are full of meter.
I also like how Jericho leaps out of his seat in anapests. A full metrical code reading, as in The Ghost of Meter, might find some overall pattern/meaning to it, but I’ll stop because it gives me a dizzy-headache to do it to this particular text. I’ve done metrical-code readings to my own free-verse poems before with no adverse affects on the head, so I’m thinking it’s the fact that it’s prose, especially my own prose, that does it.
Your editing and breaking of lines does improve the text–and if it were by someone else I could appreciate it somewhat as a poetic text, primarily an intellectual experience with the visual sensation of linebreaks creating structure and containment–but I would never never never have written that as a poem, even one of my rare free verse poems–it has none of the aural, physical pressure at the ends of lines that makes a poem a poem, and it does not interact with my midbrain/right brain/meter brain at all–instead it irritates the space between my meter brain and my language brain–so maybe that’s why it gives me a headache.
Thanks for a fascinating exercise. Your poem on the Why I am a Women Poet thread was fascinating also in a different way, btw.
Posted By: Annie FInch on June 29, 2009 at 9:40 amReport this comment
metrical meter…
I seem stuck in iambic pentameter…help! lol
What do you do with ten poems like this?
I submitted three here, and am doing the 6 to 8 month wait, but I still have ten more (recent ones). Anyway here’s yesterdays four ears attempt written right before a storm came through and thunder was rumbling…
………………………………………………
“Make it rain”
come back home, come back home again
love me now, and always be my friend
I have to say, I just can’t be the same
anyway, come home and make it rain
thunder your storm, they stay by me,
where I’ll be warm, and always free
yes you can go, but first take my hand
I love you so, so make it rain again
and again and again
oh come back home, come back home again
love me now, and always be my friend
I have to say, it just isn’t the same
anyway, so come home and make it rain
thunder your storm, then stay by me
Posted By: duane sosseur on June 28, 2009 at 1:47 pmwhere we’ll be warm, and you can see
and always know, just take my hand
I love you so, please make it rain again
and again and again
(fading)
and again
………………………………………………..
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should read “thunder your storm, then stay by me”
“they” was a typo, sorry
Posted By: duane sosseur on June 28, 2009 at 1:53 pm..duane
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Duane, you came to the right place for a metrical-code diagnosis. I do this all the time. You’ll see it’s very simple. I agree that this poem feels stuck in iambic pentameter, and most of it has, to me, a somewhat stuck or mechanical feeling. However, there is one really powerful exciting moment: “Thunder your storm, then stay by me.” Here is a compelling rhythm, wonderful word-music, and a daring syntactical leap.
One basic principle of metrical-code diagnosis is that you go with your rhythmic strength because that is the channel where the truth of the poem wants to come out. Unusual rhythmic strength in a poem also usually coincides with strong language and imagery and a sense of immediacy, honesty. In your case, this single rhythmically strong and linguistically exciting line is your clue, your key.
My recommendation is that you make this your first line and rhythmic touchstone, and that you rewrite the poem (or write a new one) honoring and carrying through the rhythm of this line.
The key is to allow the part of you that gave you that line to come out and be heard. You could start off by getting a tape-recorder or pad of paper and stand up and move around or sit quietly and chant that line aloud to yourself, “Thunder your storm, then stay by me,” until you have your mind “entrained” (a term invented by a student of mine, Patricia Hagge) with its rhythm, and then allow more words to come out in that rhythm. I sometimes use drums in my workshops to speed the entraining–you might find it helpful to drum the rhythm until you are used to it and it has a life of its own.
Don’t censor anything you write this way. I’ve found that the inner censor is especially unreliable at times like this, perhaps because you are getting into deeper material, which is why it was confined to only one line of your original poem in the first place, and your censor wants you to stay high and dry with iambic pentameter. So your censor might tell you that what you are writing or chanting is sentimental crap or drivel or nonsense. But don’t stop–if you do you may cut off a thread of language that you may really wish later that you had kept following. The time for editing and revising and censoring will be much later. For now, just see what comes up and write it or tape it. see if you get something you like.
Your touchstone line also happens to be scannable as dactyls (dactylic tetrameter with very common variations–(dactyl, trochee, trochee, footless dactyl (ie a dactyl missing its two unstressed syllables):
/ u u / u / u / (uu)
THUNDer your / STORM, then / STAY by / ME
So a shortcut you can use, once you are comfortable with the various rhythms, is to keep in mind that if your lines feel stale and used up in iambics, you can always switch to dactyls and see if that helps.
Have fun!
Posted By: Annie FInch on June 29, 2009 at 10:13 amReport this comment
Duane’s poem feels like tetrameter to me, mostly, with a few, mostly needless, extra syllables sometimes pushing toward a fifth beat. It also feels like a song. Do you have music to this one, Duabe?
John
Posted By: John Oliver Simon on June 29, 2009 at 11:33 amReport this comment
Yes, thanks John, absolutely–iambics, but mostly tetrameter–I must have been swept up by the drama of Duane’s original plea.
Posted By: Annie FInch on June 29, 2009 at 3:50 pmReport this comment
Thank you for the metrical code help annie, theres a lot to this stuff of pentameters, possibly perimiters to pentameters…and confusing.
john its only music in my head, it creates its own music to me..
heres another example
“Under the stars and under the sun”
lights in the darkness
and somewhere inside
a meaningful life
a wonderful ride
dreams of sweet love
can always come true
perfect or not
it’s all about you
the judge in the end
is what you have done
under the stars
and under the sun
………….
or this
“To be friends”
Posted By: duane sosseur on June 29, 2009 at 1:18 pmembracing safety
she turns
the clock again
embracing love
she yearns
for pretend
embracing feelings
she burns
without end
embracing hope
she learns
to be friends
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Annie,
He NEAR/ -ly leapt OUT/ of his SEAT/ with de-LIGHT
That’s a nice one.
The metrical phrase that jumped out at me was:
that the CURSE/ of the MET/ -ri-cal CODE/ kicks IN.
“Your poem” demonstrates, I think, what you are saying: individual lines in prose or verse WILL scan, and for a developed ear, MANY lines will independently scan in all sorts of interesting ways, but without the WHOLE ever cohering into a recognizable and harmonious rhythm. (and thus the acute listener’s ‘headache.’)
This phenomenon lends a great deal of confusion to the whole issue for many, and the phenomenon was a distant glittering of Holy Grail for the early Modernists, who thought it could be exploited in producing “new” music.
Even now, in the wake of all that heady, Modernist manifesto-ism, much confusion reigns, and T.S. Eliot’s positive declaration of a “revolt against old form” is still a siren call for would-be rebels and revolutionaries who would murder the gilt-edged anthologies of ‘old verse’ once and for all.
But “revolt against old form” is an empty phrase, because “old form” is not oppressing anyone—we rather need to “revolt against misguided criticism that calls on us to revolt against old form,” since harmony makes interesting things out of form as it exists in all its semi-hidden guises, and the harmonizing agent is never cognizant of whether the form is old or new, for only after the harmonizing agent does its work does the form become new; this was true when the first verse was written and will be true at the last.
Thomas
Posted By: thomas brady on June 29, 2009 at 3:10 pmReport this comment
Beautifully put, Thomas.
“harmony makes interesting things out of form as it exists in all its semi-hidden guises, and the harmonizing agent is never cognizant of whether the form is old or new, for only after the harmonizing agent does its work does the form become new”
Thank you.
This is also the point and impetus of the Multiformalisms book: http://www.textos-books.com/finch-schultz.html
Posted By: Annie FInch on June 29, 2009 at 3:56 pmReport this comment
“Your poem” demonstrates, I think, what you are saying: individual lines in prose or verse WILL scan, and for a developed ear, MANY lines will independently scan in all sorts of interesting ways, but without the WHOLE ever cohering into a recognizable and harmonious rhythm. . .”
Yes, that’s a good part what I’m saying, but to clarify about the metrical code, it’s about more than that — it’s a kind of holistic body/mind psychoanalysis of a such a poem’s rhythm that explores WHY a particular poem uses a particular rhythm at a particular place, and what the meaning of that rhythm right there is. Or maybe that is what you mean by “in all sorts of interesting ways.”
Anyway, that third level, the level of the unspoken coded meanings of the metrical passages where they appear, added on to the referential level and the scanning level, makes it even more distracting when listening to a poetry reading!
Posted By: Annie Finch on June 29, 2009 at 4:10 pmReport this comment
I couldn’t get the why of the rhythm here, it’s like a description of love…but I think it’s bricklike and doesn’t flow. Not as iambic as the other one
“They fall…”
they fall
Posted By: duane sosseur on June 29, 2009 at 8:25 pminto the abyss of love
they fly
balanced
because they can
they kiss
until the dawn
shines it’s brilliant light
they love
and
are complete
again
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wands and cups haha.
I was a ham radio operator before I was a poet so I do “dots and dashes.”
Posted By: Jilly on June 30, 2009 at 11:02 amReport this comment
.. / -.. .. -.. -. .—-. – / -.- -. — .– / -.– — ..- / .– . .-. . / .- / …. .- — / -.– .-..
Posted By: Don Share on June 30, 2009 at 1:32 pmReport this comment
sweet!
Posted By: Annie Finch on June 30, 2009 at 2:32 pmReport this comment
yep I’m a big nerd – I’m whiskey alpha four charlie zulu delta – wa4czd.
Posted By: Jilly on June 30, 2009 at 4:40 pmReport this comment