Date: Wed, 15 Feb 1995 11:14:21 EST From: burning midnight oils Subject: TECH: That old time free verse (ah, please don't hang that horsehair tie on me, it looks as if it would pinch something fierce...when it comes to poetry, I am a little teapot, waiting for boiling water...or something like that, anyway!) bill (our own "W. F. Lantry" ) quoth: - I don't know what you said, - or what others said, but I can say - most of the 'free verse' being written - has no rhythm, no sense of time, - no 'flow'... - It's bad prose hacked into arbtrary line-lengths - by people who can't manage even tetrameter. - the default mode is 'chop it up, and hope - it sounds good' - le vers-libre, cela n'existe plus... lacking sleep, I pondered weak and weary, over many a... well, I looked it up! "called _vers libre_ by the French, free verse lacks regular meter and line length, relying upon the natural speech rhythms of the language, the cadences which result from the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Though free verse has had its vogue particularly in this century, it was employed by French poets of the 19th century trying to free themselves from the metrical regularity of the _alexandrine_ and by English and American poets seeking greater liberty in verse structure. Earlier, free verse had been used in the King James translation of the Bible...Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ is, perhaps, the most notable example of the organization of speech patterns into verse cadences..." (p. 94, Literary Terms: A Dictionary, Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz). tetrameter...a line of four metrical feet... (and this is the example!) Fe,/ Fi,/ Fo,/ Fum! I smell/the blood/of an Eng/lishman; Be he/alive/or be/he dead, I'll grind/his bones/to make/my bread. (same book, p. 279) meter refers to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. for example: Iambic: control (u') unstressed, stressed (unaccented, accented) Trochaic: stupid ('u) Anapestic: contradict (uu') Dactylic: clumsiness ('uu) Spondaic: snow storm ('') Trochee trips from long to short. ('u'u'u') From long to long in solemn sort ('u'u'u') Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able ('''''') Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable ('uu'uu'uu'uu) Iambics march from short to long. (u'u'u'u') WIth a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng. (uu'uu'uu'uu') Coleridge! (extracted from p. 159 on meter) (caesura! a pause in the line dictated not by metrics but by the natural rhythm! aha! rapture, I just figured out what we were talking about...a year or so ago!) so... I goofed - [seriously? I thought free verse was anything -- ANYTHING? YES!! -- - not bound to classic formulae. a sonnet with foot limping, or - concrete poetry dropped on your toes, even a leap of faith in the - gaping mouth of hell...but not just beat, though sweet, tis sadly - incomplete...] I am well offbase, here. free verse was a reaction to the metric excesses of the past, attempting to free poetry from the overdone use of meter and return to natural cadences... imagine the beat generation and the King James bible having something in common! free verse! poking around under other entries, I think the beats were largely defined by their philosophy (although most beat poets did use free verse). If I get this right, first came the metric forms (let me have a line of iambic pentameter, please? hold the spondees.) then came a reaction to that, and the attempt to do something with natural cadences (one free verse, broken out of the iron maiden of metric conformity...) think of metric poetry as black leather shoes. free verse was the birkenstock answer... not sure this helps, but at least there are some more words to play with... (and back to thumpity-thump with the fingers...I got rhythm, I got snapping fingers, I got your words, who could ask for anything more...:-) *student in drag* tink