What is rhythm, exactly? (11.25.22)

I asked this question today during our Wednesdays@One salon. Blank stares all around.

Is it meter -- da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA? Is it "the numbers" in a line? Is rhythm "the line"? The closest anyone could get to an answer to my question is this: rhythm is "flow." 

Given the poem we were discussing when this question came into the conversation, I'd guess that my fellow writers understand rhythm as propulsion: a beat that carries you forward from beginning to end, from the first syllable of a line to the last, from the first line to the last. 

The first poem we discussed today was all about meter, the specific meter of a Protestant hymn (and of course Emily Dickinson came to mind). The strict metrical pattern of this poem--three beat lines, iambic non-stress/stress syllabification, abab rhyme structure.  

The subject matter of the poem involved the chaotic world we must live in, with its contingencies and irregularities baked into our daily lives, designed to be in contrast to the strict regularity of the poem's meter. It's hymnal meter of surety, fulfilled expectation, the opposite of the world described by the poem. That was the writer's point, this tension between our desire for certainty (expressed through art) and our experience of provisionality. 

The second poem we discussed unfolded in long lines, six beats each at a minimum, but not Alexandrine lines; that is, not metrically exact lines. The lines were grouped into quatrains or, more appropriately, four line paragraphs, and while the lines were not tied to any patterned meter, they were rhythmical. What's more, many of the lines of this poem scanned into nearly equal halves, like lines of Anglo Saxon poetry with their left and right verses separated by a caesura.

And so I asked the group, what is rhythm, exactly? What do you mean when you say a poem "has rhythm"? What they felt in the poem was its propulsiveness, how the stressed and unstressed syllables pushed through each line to create a satisfying beginning-middle-end effect. 

So that's one thing we mean by rhythm: propulsion, movement, forward movement. In the poem in question, this "flow" or propulsive effect was created by series of stressed syllables separated by unstressed. No line scanned to the iambic, or to any formal meter for that matter. Nor did any of the lines scan to everyday speech--there was more architecture to each line than the jumble of ordinary speech.

Another thing we can mean by rhythm is pacing, or how quickly or deliberately a line pushes forward. pacing depends on syntax and the aural function of a syllable in a sequence. pacing can be anything from ponderous to staccato, crashing wave to tide, so to speak, involving ebb and flow. There's that word flow, again. Pacing depends on word order which itself produces syllables that come together fast or slow. We sometimes tend to think of "small" words like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions as having less importance to a poem or to a line, which we think of as its nouns, adjectives and verbs. But these smaller words, aside from their function of directing the action (near/far, intense/relaxed, ordinate/subordinate), provide for faster or slower pacing or, more importantly, for changes in the pace of a reading, variable pacing.