[New-Poetry] Questions on form

[Michael Snider]

On Jan 2, 2008, at 4:12 PM, jfq at myuw.net wrote:

> well, not wanting to overstate the case, obviously they matter. but  
> i think only as a tertiary concern when compared to the relative  
> pattern of weights and stresses and also the fact of various forms  
> of silence and pauses that are generally unaccounted for, but hugely  
> influential in the rhythm of verse. account for that, and if there  
> are no irregularities there, then sure, you might turn to syllable  
> count to smooth wrinkles.


All that goes on--silences, dipthongs, rhetorical stress, and much  
more--but the rhthm of a metrical poem is neither those things it  
inherits from natural speech nor its meter, but is instead a product  
of the interaction of meter and speech. It's not shoe-horning, though  
Bob G is correct that meter results in what you miight call "nudges"  
either up or down on the natural speech stress of a phrase. Those  
nudges come from a more-or-less strict pattern of stressed and  
unstressed syllables within the feet of the poem--and only contrasting  
stress within a foot, not between feet, counts for the meter.

BTW, the terms of traditional English prosody are Greek in origin but  
they don't even pretend to refer to the same phenomena, though Sidney  
and a few others were a might confused early on.

And hiya, folks. Been mostly off-net for a while, and the several  
thousand unread New Poetry emails were a little intimidating.  I  
finally decided to just jump over the lot.