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19 February 2005: More discussion on meter, direct from New-Poetry:
I started with a post to Sam Gwynne in which I said, "I perceive five values of meter, beyond just its ability to sound
nice to
most people: (1) its ability to announce the presence of art; (2) its
ability to refer to and tie into the poem under way other poems with the
same
of similar meter; (3) its ability to help express appropriate emotions
(though I think this limited); (4) its ability to counter difficulty with
a
simple pleasurabilty; and (5) its ability to suggest a certain dexterity
on
the part of a poet who has mastered it (also a minor value, but there).
I'm sure I've left some out. Any others you or anyone else can think
of,
Sam?"
He added "(t)he so-called "heuristic" function in that the writer commits himself
to a
pattern and must shape his thoughts into words that fit the pattern.
This
process often leads the writer in directions he/she might not have
thought of
before. It gets more complex with more complex forms. For example, a
writer
may begin a poem with a certain idea. Then he sees that the idea is
beginning to shape itself into a sonnet. But as he writes the sonnet,
the
demands of the meter, rhyme scheme, and structure begin to affect the
shape
of the original thought. And when he finishes the sonnet, he may find
that
it succeeds, but it doesn't conform to the idea he originally conceived.
I
think of some of Michelangelo's unfinished statues--the Rondanini Pieta,
for
example. The sculptor (and sonneteer) finds that his conception won't
fit
the block of stone he started with. He either revises the sculpture or
abandons it. The first poem I ever published was about the Rondanini
Pieta.
And it was a sonnet too.
"Yes, definitely," said I. "And the way it forces one to consider more
possibilities
than free verse would in order to satisfy the metric requirement. So the
poet might surprise himself by using some word in a new way to get the
meter
right, or find a new word. He might also fill a line with something
effective--that is, find padding the make the line the proper length that
improves the poem. Might even drop the unpadded part!"
I left out the downside, the padding that meter can also result in--as Sam said in his response to my paragraph above.
Michael Peverett had "(a)nother to add, the mnemonic feature of regular meter. In illiterate
cultures
fundamental, now not, but it still has its value. I've never had so
detailed
an engagement with any poetry as with Shakespeare's sonnets, just because
I
amused myself by learning a few by heart. The mnemonic power, in this
case, of
combining syllable counting, accentual pattern, and rhyme, is very
powerful.
"And even today those few poets whose lines have made it into my portable
mental
library - small scraps of Larkin, Hill, Lowell, e.g. - invariably they're
metrical - occupy a disproportionate part of my attention compared to
writers
who I might think greater but can't bring to mind in the same way when I'm
idling in a traffic queue. While it's possible to learn non-metrical text
by
heart it's difficult to get it back once the memory goes hazy, whereas by
sitting there going "When yellow leaves, or none or few, do hang / and
dum-de
dum-de shake against the cold.." you can often bring the words back. So I
possess the poetry, and it possesses me, in a way that isn't possible for
other
poetries.
"As I say, now a minor value, perhaps atavistic, and no doubt one that is
chiefly relevant in situations out of the reach of books. But of course
this is
still the predominant way of life of most people on earth. People who
never
read poetry or anything else continue to know bits of metrical poetry
because
it washes around like plankton in the ocean of common speech."
I'd forgotten about meter's mneomonic value, maybe because I'm
biased against memorability--from my experience that the easier a piece of
music is to remember, the more trivial it generally is. My kind of poets
try to make their works hard to remember the details of-- Except for
minimalistic poems, which are very easy to remember. So I'm inconsistent.
So, seven values of meter. Can anyone think of an eighth?
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