A Moment for Meter is a craft talk I was given the opportunity to present at the Pheonix Reading Series awards ceremony on November 18th, 2016 at High Point University.
A Moment for Meter
By: Taylor Tedford
In the poem Exploding the Spring Mystique Eileen Myles reveals a fear that at 35 they’ll, “be standing on a stage reading a fucking sonnet”. Unfortunately that day has come early for me.
I’m going to ask everyone to tiptoe into the depths of hell by writing a couplet, which is two lines of poetry.
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I’m sorry. Disclaimer: it’s going to get worse.
I have studied and attempted to write poetry for about two years now, which is about 10% percent of my lifetime, so while it’s not actually a long time; it feels like it is, and I have never consciously considered meter while writing. I discovered that meter is all about the combination of stressed and unstressed syllables within a line. When reading about the value of meter in poetry, I felt reprimanded and foolish. As if I’d been walking out of the front door of my house and neglecting to put my pants on.
It gave me a moment of panic to think that I had poems walking about in the world half naked. I realized that I’ve only been thinking about my poem’s shirts, and I’ve failed to fully dress them. While I have always valued rhythm, I considered meter to be an archaic and complicated aspect of poetry which was unnecessary.
I was wrong.
As Timothy Steele claims in his article, Prosody for 21st-Century Poets, “The trick remains to square and combine the two elements, so that meter gives rhythm memorable shape and stability while, at the same time, rhythm animates meter with spirit and variety.”
Today I’m going to turn your nightmares into reality and we are going to experiment with the sonnet form in order to experience the effect meter can have on our writing. Meter is the heartbeat of the sonnet, which is 14 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. To me, initially, and I’m sure to many of you, that sentence sounds like something which you need Google to translate.
So I’ll impersonate Google for just a moment.
Iambic pentameter is a line of poetry with five metrical feet. A metrical foot, that’s a unit of meter, is the combination of an unstressed and stressed syllable. An iambic foot, that is a metrical foot within a poem written in iambic pentameter, has the rhythm bah-BAH. An example of iambic pentameter would be Shakespeare’s line, “no LON-ger MOURN for ME when I am DEAD.” When reading aloud it is easier to detect which syllables are stressed/unstressed and the rhythm that this pattern produces.
There are two two traditional sonnet forms which determine the rhyme scheme and structure of your sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet either has a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDECDE or ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. The Shakespearean sonnet has a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
For today’s purposes, with the hopes that at least a few of you haven’t tuned me out yet, we will not be examining the differences between these two forms further.
In order to complete our experiment, you are going to take a few moments to write an opening couplet for a sonnet written in iambic pentameter. I know you probably don’t want to, but unfortunately for you I’m the dictator here. Use the couplet you wrote at the beginning of this talk as a starting point. You can choose from either forms’ rhyme schemes. Remember that rhyme is not the purpose of this experiment. Instead we are testing the hypothesis that meter, combined with rhyme, strengthens writing.
I’ll read the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 to get your creative juices flowing. It reads:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
You’ll notice that Shakespeare breaks his own rules in the third line with the extra unstressed syllable “cries”. Because Shakespeare is following the rules of iambic pentameter up until this point, we pay attention when he breaks them. Shakespeare breaks the rules to direct our attention and, I’d argue, to admit that his form doesn’t need to be strictly followed.
I’ll give you a few moments now to attempt the experiment.
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Compare the couplet you composed before the talk with the one which incorporates both meter and rhyme. The first may be better than the second or vice versa, what I want you to take away from this conversation is not that you should begin writing in iambic pentameter.
That would make me a hypocrite and I promise you my next poem isn’t going to be a sonnet.
However, it is worth taking a moment when writing to consider the way that meter is working within the line and how you can use meter to clarify your message.
Thank you.