I was a ham radio operator before I was a poet so I do “dots and dashes.”
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“They fall…”

they fall
into 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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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!
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“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
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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
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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”
embracing 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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John
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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!
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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.
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“they” was a typo, sorry
..duane
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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
where 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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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;
I couldn’t help it.
If I ever do find that piece of paper,
I’ll add them here.
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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.
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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-
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