Tackling Metrics #4 – Controlling Line Speed

again, from Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean? Common Metrical Ways to Control the Speed of the Line 1. the more unstressed syllables are brought together between accents, the faster the line will tend to move 2. the more caesuras and the more stressed syllables that occur in a given passage, the slower the pace [...]

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Tackling Metrics #2 – getting the basics – line lengths

Numbers of Feet in a Line 1 monometer 2 dimeter 3 trimeter 4 tetrameter 5 pentameter 6 hexameter 7 septameter 8 octameter beyond here there be dragons

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All poetry is fragment

All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page, toward the unsung, toward the vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which our words are couched. Its lines insistently defy their own medium by averting themselves from the [...]

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It’s all about the line

More syntax. And more and more. “I see dead people using syntax.” from chapter 2 of The Art of Syntax, “The Sentence and the Line” …poetry likewise makes use of two often competing rhythmic systems: the rhythm of syntax I have been discussing, which poetry shares with well-made prose, and the rhythm of the line. [...]

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