[New-Poetry] Questions on form

[Jason Quackenbush]

Bob Grumman wrote:
> if not, then what IS trochaic or iambic--since you can find more than 
> two strengths of stresses in any string of words.
precisely my point. they don't really exist, and you have to do weird 
things to words in order to make them seem to exist. Granted we've 
beaten ourselves over the head with the iamb so much at this point that 
it has a sort of quasi-existence, but trochees spondees dactyls anapests 
choriambs, the whole lot are a bunch of malarkey. Modern science has 
replaced the goofy beliefs of the scholastics in every other aspect of 
our lives, why we cling to the feeble prosody of the sour faced 
grammarians who saddled us with traditional scansion because they 
thought English should be more like the classical languages is beyond me.

> Seems to me the whole point of meter is regularization--and slightly 
> de-prosing a text by boosting certain accented syllables and 
> lightening certain unaccented ones.  (Here, and most of the time.)
I think that precisely the opposite is the point, that we regularize the 
line to get meter. All language has rhythm, but a meter must have a 
regular rhythm to have the effect of creating a pulse that is felt in 
the sound of the words. To do that meter must take into account the 
actual accents of actual language or it doesn't regularize anything and 
the rhythm it's pretending to have doesn't actually exist unless you do 
the weird exaggeration that you're talking about. Which is of course, 
what the problem with most formal verse is. Not that it's bad to write 
in meter, there are plenty of good ways to write in meter that would be 
really interesting. The best English language poets with form all work 
on a more subtle level than traditional bivalent stress, it's just 
unfortunate that most critics haven't noticed that because they're so 
used to misreading the stresses and syllable weights in order to figure 
out how the poems scan in bivalent scansion. It's all received wisdom 
that we'd be better off doing away with and starting over. 
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to both agree with me and care enough 
about the issue to put into practice a thorough four valued scansion set 
of forms, so all we get are ever more complicated versions of analysis. 
I personally quite like the possibilities presented by Derek Attridge's 
book "Poetic Rhythm" as it's the only thing I've found that can fully 
take account of Jackson Mac Low's more rhythmically mannerist work, but 
even the 3 value system that Corn used in the Poem's Heartbeat is 
greatly preferable to classical prosody.