I'd very much like to hear what those other problems were, Subbu, variations in scanning a line are worth discussing and very interesting. As for the first line, I forgot to add the last "te" (as I did in one other line) but in this particular kind of case it is usually considered a "grace" syllable not directly relevant to the metre after the last beat in the line has fallen.
Metre, it ought to be said, was never a precise science but it does help us to observe-- and sharpen-- what we are doing, and to engage with English poetic history. One of Ezra Pound's (I think) comments about much of the emerging free verse when it first started to go flat was that it did in fact reproduce iambic rhythms (which had come in unconsciously in the poet's mind from her/his reading, poetry being imbibed primarily by the ear) but in a way that was more often than not unaware and quite rhythmically boring. This is in fact what has happened, not only to Indian English poetry, but also much English poetry around the world, where a very rich set of traditions in sound patterning and performance are nearly lost-- and being recovered by a whole new generation of poets. The comment, "I want my rhythmic effects to be unconscious" is premature, because a certain level of consciousness allows a more sophisticated level of unconsciousness to develop... if you know what I mean. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a really major poet alive who hasn't at some time practiced listening to and engaging with metre. Agha Shahid Ali? Absolutely. It's worth paying attention to what one is doing on a rhythmic level because one can then learn to do it better and more frequently. Oddly enough, I got interested in metre because I listen to a lot of rap music, which even in the artists where it's thematically narrow, is always very rhythmically rich, far more than much current literary poetry. Rap does not break down in iambs, but in metrical patterns that are both "rougher" and more complex-- think Swinburne, Milton, Tennyson, Thomas Wyatt; obviously rappers do not study metrics, but they attune themselves with much practice to percussion and other instruments. So metre is, first of all, a way of paying attention. There are several issues that come up-- the methods of scansion that have fallen into place in the English language (invented traditions, to be sure) are worth looking at and transfiguring; there ought to be more experiments with transposing metrics from the Indian languages, then we could really set about transforming the sound of poetry in the English language, rather than merely imitating/reproducing mid-20th century British rhythms as most Indian English poets end up doing! But to get there, in the future, one needs to first go back and master the classical systems already in place, yes, to eventually explode those very systems out of the sky. About the question of whether where one places the stress in a word varies from dialect to dialect or accent to accent, yes it does-- but in fact, not very much. English organises sense around stress, as other languages organise quantity (syllable length), so if the way stress is patterned changes very drastically it becomes hard to understand what a person is saying. So although I used to agree with Kamau Braithwaite on this one, I don't anymore, and I can say this because I spend a lot of time mentally scanning when people talk these days, especially if I've lost interest in what they're saying! And as for the question of what Indian English poets should or should not be doing, I have little patience for that kind of nativist blather. If one doesn't want to draw from English poetic history, why does one bother to write in English at all? And then again, the types who reply saying, yes, Indians should not write in English, are often those who are ignoring metrical traditions in their own languages and writing free verse in the Indian languages that is itself a form borrowed from Europeans! Hate to say it, but what it often comes down to is that people are rebelling, but they know nothing or very little about what it is they're rebelling against! And they end up in unconscious slavery. Vivek ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/S.QlOD/3MnJAA/Zx0JAA/yqIolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Did you get this mail as a forward? Subscribe by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/join. Members are encouraged to post poetry, their own and others', respond critically to the poems circulated, and participate in discussions. Post via email at [email protected] OR online at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/post. ---theZESTcommunity-------------- [1] ZESTCurrent: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCurrent/ [2] ZESTEconomics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTEconomics/ [3] ZESTGlobal: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ [4] ZESTMedia: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/ [5] ZESTPoets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/ [6] ZESTCaste: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/ [7] ZESTAlternative: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTAlternative/ [8] TalkZEST: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TalkZEST/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
