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Jun 24
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William Collen's avatar

Thank you! I'm not familiar with Timothy Steele, but a scansion with more than two levels of stress seems quite a reasonable thing. I've encountered many, many words or lines which can be scanned any of a number of ways. Of course it is already hard to be dogmatic about scansion, and four levels of stresses would only make it harder.

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Joseph Teti's avatar

Yes! I follow Steele specifically on 4 levels of stress. It takes a sensitive, musical ear to hear, but is very clearly a real effect true to language, and also prevents there being spondees all over the place where there shouldn’t. Line 13 of my sonnet [-ples and build praise whole] was my attempt to do a *five*-level “build!”]! Happy to list other examples from famous poems.

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Grace Hamman's avatar

Really enjoyed reading this--learning how to read poetry line by line is one of my favorite memories of being an English major back in the day. And thanks for the shout-out too!

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William Collen's avatar

Scansion is SO MUCH FUN, and asking "why" of just about everything in a poem is always rewarding when done to the good ones.

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Grace Hamman's avatar

Amen

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Brett Alan Dewing's avatar

This is my bailiwick. As a formal poet, I have so many thoughts about it all. But, yes, they are not welcome thoughts. Even in grad school of my Creative Writing MFA, I had to fight for the honor of form. Is poetry a craft, people, or is it a diary?

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William Collen's avatar

Right!

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J.Z Schafer's avatar

William, this was wonderful.

Do you read George Steiner?

Also, I think "the right words in the right places" may have been Shelley.

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Joseph Teti's avatar

It’s Coleridge!

William, thank you. It’s humbling, and an honor. No poem is a poem until it’s remembered kindly.

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Mark Rico's avatar

Joseph, I'll be sitting with your poem for a while. It's capital-R Rich.

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William Collen's avatar

I haven't read Steiner. Where should I start?

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J.Z Schafer's avatar

My brother! Read Real Presences. I think you'll have a lot to say, after.

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Chen Rafaeli's avatar

very interesting-immensely so

I've so much to learn-I know next to nothing, so it appears. Saving to re-read and ponder

I disagree though about "This Is Just to Say"

I heard it first in my youth, in a different country-it was almost painful, the connection I felt..to me, it spoke of many, many things. I never forgot it.

Thank you for the great post

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Mark Rico's avatar

William, I am honored! Thank you for the time and attention you've devoted to structure and meaning. It's incredible how much freedom can be found within defined boundaries.

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Adrian P Conway's avatar

Fine reflection, William. The Book of Apocalypse chiastic really amazed.

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James Hart's avatar

"it really seems to me that the new crop of poets are doing so because they believe formalist poetry is the right thing to do, the correct way to be a poet in the world"

This is how I see it, and what I attempt to do with my own work here on Substack.

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M. E. Rothwell's avatar

Yes William! Have felt all this myself but you have put it into better words than I could have

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William Collen's avatar

Thank you!

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Huck's avatar

I increasingly think - and it's not a fun thought - that the problem with the contemporary poetry world is a kind of demographic change: once the preserve of serious-minded people, poetry is now a cult of midwits and amateurs; such that it's not just that they aren't willing to admit the emperor has no clothes - they aren't *able*. I'm not sure how we overcome that, or make people inside the bubble see sense when they have virtually no incentive to do so as long as their fellow delusionals are patting them on the back.

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William Collen's avatar

Same situation prevails in the visual arts, I'm afraid.

The only way forward that I can see is to promote good poems like crazy, to print them off and distribute them all over the place, to be "that guy at parties who is always talking about poetry." When enough people see that it is indeed possible to write, read, and enjoy formalist poems which delve deep into serious matters while also being fun to read, the cultural environment will change.

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Steven Searcy's avatar

Regarding scansion, I would join the other commenters in recommending Timothy Steele's book All the Fun's In How You Say a Thing. He offers really good historical background and practical perspective on meter.

I think there has always been a fairly steady stream of active poets working within the longer tradition and attuned to form, though in the last 100 years since the rise of the modernist poets, this has been the minority - and sometimes a very small one. Within the poetry publishing world there was a major dip in openness to formal work, I think particularly in the 70s-80s-90s (though I'm not as clear on all this history, not having lived through it myself). But even within the more "conventional"/mainstream journals there seems to be a bit more openness to formal work in recent decades. A. E. Stallings, arguably the top formalist poet working today, was elected last year to the prestigious post of Oxford Professor of Poetry. There is also a new MFA program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, co-founded by the excellent formalist poet James Matthew Wilson, that is fully invested in teaching the tradition of metrical verse.

For more of the kind of detailed scansion and analysis you are doing here applied to top-notch contemporary poets working within the metrical tradition, I would recommend the podcast Versecraft hosted by Elijah Blumov.

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William Collen's avatar

Those are very encouraging developments. Thanks for attuning me to them; I will most definitely look into Stallings, Wilson, and the podcast.

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Clintavo's avatar

The banal, non-rhyming, non-metered, say nothing "poetry" as the poetry world version of what happened in visual art - classic form and depictions of beauty were shunned for a sort of "anything goes and is art" attitude. The art world had its psyop start about a hundred years ago as well. More and more I'm starting to think there was an actual effort to drive out the good and the beautiful and the truthful from any place that gives humans soul nourishment and hope. Same thing happened to architecture.

I am praying for an awakening in all the arts and a return to beauty. If we had kept to the beautiful, imagine the incredible society we could be living in today. Just thinking of grand statues and architecture that we should have inspires me and saddens me (that we don't have such things).

Thank you for writing this.

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William Collen's avatar

Oh it'll happen, I've felt the rumblings, the sleepers are beginning to wake up. Glad you enjoyed it!

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erniet's avatar

Thanks for this! So much of modern poetry is dismal in tone, impenetrable in its symbolism, and looks like someone took a run on sentence and broke it into two-word lines. It's not fun to read! Give me Kipling, Keats, Frost, Poe, TS Eliot, even Ogden Nash! As an aspiring poet who's come back to it late in life, I'm dismayed that there are no places to publish my type of verse which isn't self-absorbed trauma therapy! Plus, reading this I learned a lot more on how to improve my own poetry. Again, thanks!

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Johanna Polus's avatar

Thanks, William, this was a real revelation for me and now you have me interested in learning about poetic structure.

Most of the modern poetry I encounter that manages to cross over into pop culture consciousness sounds very therapeutic, like self-help affirmations or the kind of "uplifting" phrases that get made into signs and hung in kitchens (the Amanda Gorman effect, maybe?).

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Ryan Brady's avatar

Very very interesting. I’m very much average/amateur in the poetry world but I’ve had similarly dissatisfied thoughts about modern verse for a while. It’s good to hear there are people who understand the situation better and are able to put it into words.

I’m interested to show to this to my girlfriend, who has always been a free verse poet and toes the line writing from her own emotional life but often saying something about the world. No doubt there’ll be some disagreement with your essay here, but we’ve wrestled with these problems in poetry a bit before

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Not My Real Name Either's avatar

Very helpful and insightful

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