By way of complete contrast, I'd like
to read you a number of more experimental poems,
starting with the one that led me into this area.
I was invited some time ago by little magazine
in England called Ambit to write a prose piece about metre.
I began to put together my stock of ideas about metre.
And they weren't going very far, so I
seized on a very useful property of verse, i.e.
that the lines are shorter than in prose.
So instead of writing a prose piece about metre.
I wrote my verse piece and filled up the four pages
they needed very conveniently.
The piece incidentally was reprinted
in an American textbook on prosody.
So I like to think of it as poisoning
the minds of a generation.
"What Metre Is."
It is a matter of counting, five syllables in the first line,
four in the second, and so on.
Or we can change to seven words in the first line
six in the second.
Is that arbitrary?
Prose is another possibility.
There could be three sentences in the stanza.
This would be an example of that.
Which, on the other hand, we could lay out
by a letter count, as, this by the way
is free verse, without metre.
Pro- se is another possi- bility.
There could be three sen- tences in the s- tanza.
This would be an exam- ple of that.
I mean it is a matter of mathematics.
Intervals between the words, three to a line
is the rule here.
It results in the same as having words, four to a line.
In the mind of the poet, though, it makes a difference.
White spaces, now it is two spaces,
are just articulation, space, words, no it is one.
Mean something.
Now-- it-- is--
words, and no it is not music either.
Internal rhyming, though sometimes
the kernel of new ideas, is a matter of timing.
The same is true for rhythm, the beat, two to a line it is here,
only becomes like a rhythm when as here it
moves with a regular dactyl or two to a line.
If slow now spondees make lines move,
stiff rhythm is metre, in dactyls again,
but rhythm is usually not like this.
In a word it can escalate, drop, do as it pleases,
move freely, look out I'm coming.
Stop at a stop and so on.
Assonance that semblance, except in Owen, a, when it works,
echo of awkwardness is OK.
But not for me, nor is lively alliteration
leaping long, lean, and allusive through low lines.
It becomes a matter of going back to metre.
Ending with-- its most irri-- tating,
perhaps, mani-- festation this inarticulate-- mechanical
stut-- ter.
It is the voice of the type-- writer.
It is the ab-- dication of in-- spiration.
I like-- it.
It is the log-- ical ex-- pression of itself.
[MAKES EXAGGERATED 'F' SOUND]
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'll come again.