Four Ears: the Curse of the Metrical Code

Last year I happened to be sitting next to the young poet Jericho Brown at a reading in Los Angeles. Jericho noticed me counting on my fingers and scribbling down some marks on a piece of paper. He nearly leaped out of his seat with delight (anyone who knows Jericho will not be surprised at this exuberance). “Are you scanning??!’ he asked me. I nodded, feeling somewhat embarrassed—particularly because the book the poet was reading from was in free verse.

But the fact is, this book of free verse was laced generously with lines and passages in meter. This is not uncommon; probably about half the free verse readings I hear are full of meter. After reading and scanning metrical poetry for so many years—about 30 years now—when I am confronted with meter (even in conversation, which is REALLY distracting!) I hear and notice its rhythmic pattern—in short, I scan it.

It would be nice to be able to turn off this capacity when I’m at a free verse reading, since noticing the intermittent metrical patterns can distract me from the meaning of the words. But at this point—it really kicked in after I had spent some months scanning all of Leaves of Grass (which has a lot of meter mixed into the free verse) and all of Dickinson for a book on the metrical code, The Ghost of Meter-- it has become impossible for me to stop.

It’s as if I have four ears: a set of language ears and a set of meter ears. When I am listening to prose or to free verse, there’s no problem. My meter ears take a rest, and I use my language ears, paying attention primarily to the words in sentences: their meaning, emotional connotations, imagery, tone, and so on. And when I am listening to metrical poetry, there’s no problem either; all four ears get working at the same time. As the language ears and the meter ears listen together, as if in stereo, I notice both the meaning of the language and its rhythm, savoring both the symmetry and the variations and more-or-less skillful counterpointing between them.

It’s when poems go back and forth, shifting between bits of meter and bits of free verse, that the curse of the metrical code kicks in. During a reading, such moments wreak havoc with my meter-ears and my prose ears; I move back and forth between them and keep missing bits of the poem’s meaning while trying to get a groove going. And while I’m at it, I notice the times when the meter and the meaning seem to be commenting on each other. That’s really what I can’t help noticing. It’s a very odd feeling, like a hall of mirrors in the brain…..

It happened today in three poems I came across, by Kay Ryan, Robert Hass, and Kevin Young. They were all iambic pentameters, single ones in the middle of free-verse poems, and the meanings of those particular lines were all very hall-of-mirrorsy. I jotted them down; I couldn't help it. If I ever do find that piece of paper, I'll add them here.