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Annie Finch

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Meter’s Heartbeat: It’s Not Just Iambic Pentameter

landing-under-water-scansion

Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a panel called “Endangered Music: Formal Poetry in the 21st Century,” moderated by Larissa Shmailo, at the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) conference in LA.  I spoke to the audience about my journey to writing metrical poetry and the deep and satisfying complexity of my relationship with meter.  On returning home, I was surprised to discover I had been criticized in the Kenyon Review online by Derek Mong, who accused me of privileging iambic pentameter.  Here is my reply:

I am perturbed to learn that somehow I gave Dr. Mong the idea at the “Endangered Music” panel that I think of iambic pentameter “as a birthright” and want to relegate the world’s other meters to some place “less natural or pure.” What I said was that, as far as I know, lines of poetry the world over, whether based in accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic, tonal, or other prosodies, tend to come out about the same length—the length of a breath. There may be exceptions, but I’ve never found one after decades of asking people from a myriad of cultures about poetry in their languages.

A related point is that it takes a human body about 4-5 heartbeats to breathe a breath.  The average person typically breathes 12-20 breaths a minute and has an average resting heartbeat of 60-100 heartbeats a minute, a 1:5 ratio. This doesn’t seem to be culturally determined, but the way the bodies of our species work.

Given the wonderful diversity of meters across the world and even within English itself, I could not agree with Dr. Mong more about the crucial importance of making space for a great range of meters on an equal “foot”ing, without privileging any meter as superior or more natural than another. In fact, as others have pointed out in comments responding to his post, metrical diversity has been a central concern of my critical work— I think it is fair to say the central concern—from the scansions of triple meters and other patterns in free verse in The Ghost of Meter (1993) to the discussions of a wide range of meters in An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (2002); from essays such as “Metrical Diversity: In Defense of the Noniambic Meters” in The Body of Poetry (2005) to A Poet’s Ear (2012), the first form handbook to detail how to vary the rhythm of non-iambic meters; and on up through Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Metrical Poetry (2015), the first anthology based on the concept of metrical diversity.

I have devoted much of my writing and teaching to encouraging the knowledge, practice, and appreciation of a diversity of meters. I focus on teaching what I call “the metrical compass”—trochaic, anapestic, dactylic, and sometimes amphibrachic meter as well as iambic, balancing out the dominance of iambic meter to allow all meters their voice.  My own poetry is known for metrical diversity as well, from the goddess sequence in Eve (1997), in which each poem is written in a meter appropriate to the culture of the Goddess being written about, to Calendars (2005), a collection of poems whose Readers Guide includes scansions of 15 metrical patterns, to the epic Among the Goddesses (2010), written entirely in dactyls.

As Dr. Mong points out, some languages have accentual meter, some accentual-syllabic meter, some syllabic meter, some tonal meter, and so on. But if the language does have stresses, there will likely be between 4-6 of them per lines—and the lines (or sometimes pairs of lines, as in ballad stanza) in any kind of culturally traditional poetry will tend to be about the length of a breath. For example, a line of my own current favorite meter in English, dactylic tetrameter, takes about the length of a breath to say and has four accents. A line of iambic pentameter takes about the length of a breath to say and has five. I consider both of these meters equally natural and equally akin to the heart/breath rhythms of the body, as are the other accentual-syllabic English meters (interestingly, one study of heart surgery patients concluded that “the recitation of hexameter verse produced a strong cardiorespiratory synchronization.”)

The point of the pulse exercise I led at the AWP conference panel was not to say that any one meter is biologically determined, but to counter the popular misconception that meter is a strictly mental construct.  I was and am not trying to claim any superiority for iambic pentameter, which I have spent much of my career trying to put in its rightful place as just one metrical pattern among a wide range of equally important and “natural” ways of making language memorable, beautiful, and authentic.

On Desire, and Sending Poems Out
How to Create a Poetic Tradition
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5 Comments Category: All

Comments

  1. Annie FinchDerek Mong says

    May 6, 2016 at 10:05 pm

    I want to thank Annie Finch for taking the time to respond to my essay. I’ve posted my response to her claims above at Kenyon Review Online. You can read that essay here: http://www.kenyonreview.org/2016/05/im-still-not-convinced-meter-physiological-reply-annie-finch/

    Reply
    • Annie FinchAnnieFinch_Admin says

      May 10, 2016 at 7:36 pm

      Thank you Derek! I appreciate your eloquent defense of the variability of breath, meter, and poetry, linked above. By the way, I don’t have any particular axe to grind here; I’m just noting what I’ve uncovered in a lifetime of observing poetry, and postulating a connection to the body that has worked in a liberatory fashion to make meter alive and intimate to me and a thousand plus students over three decades of teaching. As for the relation between metrical poetry and poetry in free verse, it is highly complex and I’ve written about it elsewhere, so I’ll just say that they are completely different animals; when they’re done well, each fulfills a completely different and necessary aesthetic need; one would never want to replace one with the other. . .

      Reply
      • Annie FinchMary Ann Taylor says

        September 19, 2019 at 9:00 pm

        Since I am going to use your discussion on Tuesday to a group of freshmen who will swear they hate poetry, I want to let you know how pleased I am to find this.

        Reply
  2. Annie FinchTodd Tolson says

    June 18, 2019 at 6:56 am

    I appreciate this post. To chime in, though unfortunately to slightly disagree, I have a moderate predilection toward iambic verse, rather than any sort of triple meter in English. I think that it can work, but the poetry I love most has a double feel, rather than triple. Good iambic pentameter and good free verse share many things in common, one being the compactness the meter (or non-meter) allows. I’ve yet to come across English triple verse which avoids a sort of garrulousness. If you have any recommendations, let me know!

    I don’t think iambic pentameter is, in the scope of all language, the one meter worthy of using. Classical poetry was often dactylic (Greek and Latin, I’m thinking), and the Romance languages, sans French, which has a rather unique metrical system, have their own sort of metrical system.

    Reply
    • Annie FinchAnnieFinch_Admin says

      October 13, 2019 at 10:46 pm

      Hi Todd,

      Thanks for sharing your perspective. If you’re interested in triple meters, you might want to check out the triple meter sections of Measure for Measure. They have some poems I really like. And I’ve published quite a few poems in dactyls (such as “Elegy for My Father” and “Wild Yeasts,” both in dactyls and both in my book Calendars ). Calendars also has a poem in amphibrachs (“A Carol for Carolyn”). By the way, if you’re interested in the scansion of the 15 meters in the book, those are provided in the Readers Guide downloadable from the publisher… I don’t know if you’ll find them garrulous or not 🙂

      Reply

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