Formal fascist? Me? I ought to apologize to everyone on the list. I've been going about this completely the wrong way; and I'm sure things have been made worse by unintended readings of my email tone. I haven't been trying to start a scrap or point out any potential inadequacies. Honestly, sorry.
"Confluence" is right. I'm not suggesting that we all go and root in mounds of theory and come out, as countless texts do, squabbling about "substitutions". The "classical system" is the crudest of ways to try and describe what is anyway impossible to describe beyond a point, and perhaps the crisis in English metre at the end of the 19th century was that it got heavy-chained to its own supposedly iron rules. I'm just talking about "metre" as the ebb and flow of volume in English as a second audio track to the meaning of the words: nothing more, nothing less. Controlling the flow of this volume embedded in speech ought to be instinctively learned from hearing and not contrived in any way; except, perhaps, when you're just practising. Any description is always after the fact and maybe even alienates one to the most important thing, hearing it, doing it. It is indeed the bongos + your voice. And it can be other instruments-- even a cello with a flute, in the superior mouth of a Tennyson, or well, a speaking voice below the speaking voice for Robert Frost. (Incidentally, W.H. Auden apparently said in his introduction to Tennyson that T. "had perhaps the finest ear of any poet in the English language, but was also the stupidest." T.S. Eliot countered by saying that if Auden was a better scholar he would have realised that English had had many, far stupider poets. Someone else plunged the last knife by saying that Tennyson may not have been so stupid because he could at least figure out enough to hang out with the intelligent crowd on campus.) I don't think metrical effects are constructed-- I think they're just the opposite: an instinct for lulling your mind into unconscious poetic thoughts, making you say unexpected things(bathroom floor????) A very childlike thing. In fact, children learn to hear it pretty easy and at some point are herded, ironically, into not hearing it by various forms of "literary criticism". It's probably how a baby hears us talk before it has grasped that there's a word for water-- the first inkling for child of deeper, darker patterns in the language of the adults. Limericks and nursery rhymes help you to start hearing it. So does William Blake. Writing in it, practising it, in my experience definitely helps you to hear it more clearly, the way writing rhymed verse helps you to better hear even slyly hidden rhymes in free verse. By now most of you will I think agree that you have been hearing it all along. It's mesmerising. About my "poem"-- I don't think it was quite a poem, as Subuhi's below is certainly a poem. In my defence, I could say that I never intended it to be a poem; when I was pulling into office it came to me as a prose response. When I started to type it into the message view it looked a bit compressed, so I idly started to lineate it to make it clearer. To my surprise it started to break into two quartrains and a couplet, had a rhyme scheme buried in it, and a "loose" metre. I fixed one rhyme, adding "in space", but it seemed pointless to fix the last line. Such are the follies. But as I say, in my defence, you will notice that I did not sign it. (Speaking of which, did everyone catch the lovely rhymes and near-rhymes in Subuhi's?) Thanks for Subuhi's and Subba's (!) very cool versified responses, I think we all have a point and you're right, in the end, there's nothing else but the thing! And yes, ejaculate was a noun. Limericks are the BOMB. Vivek. > > Dear Vivek and Anand, > > > > We are in agreement here, Vivek. It�s not about choice. It�s about a ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? 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