Consider this: the accentual signature of the metrical foot
“iamb” is actually a “trochee”: an iamb is stressed as in “today,” but the word
itself is stressed as in “soda,” metrically a trochee.
Margaret raised an interesting point during last week's Wednesdays@One: when writing poetry,
we can sometimes become stuck in iambic meter, the da-DA da-DA da-DA da-Da of
so much English and American poetry we read in school and that our elders
taught us is the “language” and the “rhythm” of poetry. Especially if the "we" we're talking about has limited experience with poetry.
A fellow I know (actually, I’ve heard quite a few writers
say something like this) likes to announce that he’s “old school—it’s not
poetry if it doesn’t rhyme.” But what he really thinks poetry is all about is iambic tetrameter.
What's that? Here’s a famous example:
Whose woods these are I think I
know,
His house is in the village
though.
The whole poem beats exactly like these two lines. Each line
is built upon a series of four iambs. An iamb is a metrical “foot” of two
beats, the first unstressed and the second stressed. What’s more, each line
contains exactly eight syllables. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is,
precisely speaking, an instance of accentual-syllabic
meter in poetry. This system of metrical prosody just means that both the number
of syllables and the number and postition of accents are strictly observed in a
line or a phrase.
English prosodists (specialists who professionally scan
verse for meter and accent) have argued that the iamb is the defining beat of
the language. “How far I’d go to argue this, who knows?” Many have said that
iambic tetrameter or pentameter, despite their rising rhythm, tend to lull the
ear. And in the hands, so to speak, of an unskilled poet, they can be relentless.
So why did Frost choose this meter for his poem?
One answer might be that the rhythmical pattern is recognizable, in fact,
recognizably homespun in a New England way: approachable, friendly, and positive, rising from beginning to end. Another might be that Frost was selling some very deep art to a
reading public that required a familiar vehicle, rather like the peanut butter
pill pocket my wife uses to medicate our dog from time to time, or the
Flintstones Vitamins you might have given your kids when they were little.
“Stopping by Woods” is a poem deeply about the allure of death (or the end of struggle), and its
pull on us, that “I give up” feeling
we all have experienced. And if you stop to consider the language and
images—deep woods, lonely path, silence, snow, darkness, cold, frozen prospect,
stillness—it’s hard to miss the poem’s implication. That relentless
da-DA, da-DA of every line only reinforces the lulling quality of the deep,
dark, cold and snowy woods the poem’s speaker has stopped to contemplate. It’s
all rather inviting!
But as I say, in the hands of an inexperienced writer, this
subtle connection between a poem’s technical form and its psychology is often
not even countenanced, let alone attempted. And so we sometimes wind up
sounding like little Edwardian drummers when we ought to be listening to our own modern usages,
breaths, rhythms, beats, and incorporating these into our poems.
I think all of us at W@1 do listen, more or less to the rhythms and cadences of our everyday speech. I can’t recall anyone’s serious efforts coming off in a strictly
accentual-syllabic format.[†] In
fact, I don’t believe anyone among us is really capable of—or interested
in—writing strictly accentual-syllabic verse, much less in creating iambic
tetrameters or pentameters. We all read more widely than the poetry of the accentual-syllabic, and so we all are
exposed to more contemporary rhythms and beats. If you read living American poets, then you’re familiar with American
phrasing and breaths and pace, you already understand what can be done with
slang, commonplaces, compression, elision, ellipsis, caesura, silence,
syncopated beats, clipped words, conversational tone, as well as you understand
the older conventions of meter, syllable, accent, and so forth.
I’m guessing you, the writers in W@1, struggle not so much
with iambs, dactyls, anapests and trochees as with, to speak less technically,
beats, breaths, pacing, stress, and, if I may extend this idea, with how to
deploy a beat or a breath or tone or speed of a phrase in any unit of meaning.
Should it support the meaning or undermine it? Should it be blunt and visible
or should it remain subtle? And how to know the difference? In a way, it’s
the same problem we sometimes have in choosing outfits to wear: Should the
shoes match the handbag or clash with it? Should my socks match my pants or my
shirt? Should I wear a white belt? Does this tie go with my jacket? How much
color coordination is too much?
These are all good problems to have. It will be fun to try
writing a poem without using any iambs--our project for next week--but don’t expect too much success. Even though we
all tend to write rhythmically rather than metrically, the occasional iamb
will slip in. it will slip in because it is natural to spoken English. Maybe the better challenge for this week will be to try to write
a poem—or at least some lines—with iambs. At the very least, this will
encourage us to pay attention to syllables, stress, and . . . wait for it . . . sound.
[†] A number of poems I have shared with you have approached these stricter
forms. I sometimes try to write this way as a means of practicing “the
numbers,” but the results are invariably weak, in my opinion.
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