Wednesdays@One discussion of line led to this follow-up on prosody and metrics. Contributors wanted to explore the idea of measure in the types of free-verse they write. Are there rules? Are there movements or fashions? They were asking, essentially, whether any rules apply at all in contemporary poetry. So we looked at a famous instance of measure in modern (American) poetry: the variable foot.
What is a “variable foot”?
- A structural concept “invented” by William Carlos Williams in the 1920s, then coined as a term by him in 1949.
- A literary response to tradition, that is, the perceived tyranny of traditional formal metrics (iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapests) and “required” line lengths (e.g., pentameter) that are somewhat mathematical, notational and mechanical.
- An effort to measure (and foreground) the “American voice,” and thus a kind of literary Declaration of Independence. The metrical foot in traditional English prosody copies the syllabic structure of ancient prosodies in other languages (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, Latin, ancient Greek). Williams wanted to emphasize breath over math.
- An emphasis on spacing in terms of “triads” (“Americans speak in beats of three.”) both visually and rhythmically—though not necessarily aurally.
The variable foot is variable in that it can contain one syllable or
ten or twenty and still be “counted” (i.e., breathed) as one unit. (See Levertov below.) The variable foot can contain two/three/five
accented or stressed syllables along with one, two or more unaccented syllables—even
a dozen unaccented or lightly accented syllables. The variable foot emphasizes RELATION between
and among uttered syllables/sounds (in other words, BEATS) that is “open,”
meaning, not tied to iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic meters. In other
words: more like natural speech.
What distinguishes, then, “poem” from “natural speech”? LINE.
For Williams, one line = one foot.
Denise Levertov on “Line-Breaks, Stanza-Spaces and the Inner Voice”
“Yes, and the line-end pause is a very important one; I regard it as
equal to half a comma, but the pauses between stanzas come into it too, and
they are much harder to evaluate, to measure.
I think that what the idea of the variable foot, which is so difficult
to understand, really depends on is a sense of pulse, a pulse in behind the
words, a pulse that is actually sort of tapped out by a drum in the poem. Yes, there’s an implied beat, as in music;
there is such a beat and you can have in one bar just two notes, and in another
bar ten notes, and yet the bar length is the same. I suppose this is what Williams was talking
about, that you don’t measure a foot in the old way by its syllables but by its
beat.”
Charles Olson, in “Projective Verse”
“The trouble with most work . . . since the breaking away from
traditional lines and stanzas . . . is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE
WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.”
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH to the LINE
Common metrical feet of English language prosody[1]
iamb: a×WAY (two
syllables, rising)
anapest: in×ter×VENE (three
syllables, rising)
trochee: O×nly (two
syllables, falling)
dactyl: HA×pi×ly (two syllables, falling)
spondee: BIG×MAC, GET×BACK×JACK (two or more syllables, all
stressed)
[1] In the sphere of
prosody, there’s a nearly inexhaustible variety of measure—in Chinese, for
instance, in ancient Greek—that is inapplicable to modern English.
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