Poetry Articles for Poetry Writers at World of Poets

by Al Rocheleau

One of the toughest things for poets to do is to write comfortably in meter, and yet virtually every new poet attempts this. That makes for two things: an unhappy poet who can't really say what he means, and an even more unhappy reader.

Caught in the straightjacket of iambic pentameter (or tetrameter)-the singsong lines sounding like da DUH, da DUH, da DUH, da DUH (for tetrameter, and one more da DUH for pentameter) that you learned from simple poems in school, you imitated that. Boy did you imitate.

And when you add the challenge of end-rhymes to this equation--forget it! A mess. The concept of the iamb (where a weak syllable precedes a strong, or stressed syllable) is a basic of human speech, at least in English. So is the use of lines or phrases (separated by a breath) that carry four or five stressed syllables, where meanings of words are emphasized.

Pentameter, where five stresses are present, is considered perhaps the most natural means of poetic expression--most of Shakespeare and perhaps 70% of literary poetry is written in pentameter. Open any anthology of poetry--you'll find pentameter, or its shorter, minority cousin tetrameter, with fours stresses to a line instead of five.

Actually it's harder for most poets to write good tetrameter than it is pentameter, simply because you have less room to say what you want to say before the line ends, and less space to vary the line so that it does not sound so symmetrical, predictable, and BORING.

Really, this is the reason most people don't like poetry--it doesn't sound like we talk --which is silly, because if you plot out the stresses of people's speech, they do talk in four and five-stress phrases most of the time, and in iambs a lot of the time. JUST NOT ALL OF THE TIME.

(By the way, when you hear the word FOOT in poetry, it applies to a stressed syllable and its weak connecting syllables, if any. So a pentameter line has FIVE feet, a tetrameter line has FOUR, a trimeter line has THREE, etc.)

While you may be able to take a poem and count out the stresses and feet of iambic pentameter or tetrameter, NOT EVERY FOOT needs to be iambic. There are many ways to shape lines of poetry. Take that last sentence.

There are MAny WAYS to SHAPE LINES of POetry. (The stresses are capitalized.)
- - / - / - / / - / - -
da da DUH da DUH da DUH DUH da DUH da da

In looking at weak and strong (stressed) syllables, weak is a - (dash) or "da" and strong is a / (slash) or "DUH." Now would that line have been acceptable in a poem that was based on iambic pentameter? It's NOT iambic pentameter (it's not da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH)--see the differences in stresses?

There a few more weak syllables thrown in, and two stresses side by side. But would it work in a poem that is primarily based on iambic pentameter? Absolutely YES.

Why??--because it's the way we talk. Some times it's smooth and predictable, sometimes it isn't. So don't make your poems, whether sonnets or blank verse or anything based on five stresses or even four stresses, sound so "da DUH" predictable. WRITE LIKE YOU TALK.

The content of most great poems in English is NOT pristine iambic pentameter, line by line. As time went by, from say, the time of Pope to the Romantics, the iambic content of poems went from about 95% to 75%, then to the current modern approach, which averages about 65%.

Once can suppose that beyond relaxation of academic rules, people talk differently in different periods; therefore they write differently, too. So write like people talk today. You'll still have whatever you planned on, five stresses for pentameter (or four for tetrameter), but based on where the stresses actually are in speech.

Read the lines ALOUD, beat the stresses out with your hand--you'll find them. In the above example, could you have counted "There" as a stressed syllable? Maybe, but if you did, it wouldn't have as perfectly mirrored natural speech. And if you think just in iambs (da DUH-ing every two syllables of the line), you would have had SEVEN feet, not five-- and saying it like that would communicate nothing.

So DON'T look at your lines that way. Don't count phony iambs. Count the ACTUAL STRESSED SYLLABLES of speech. In other words-- write it as you would say it. Also, don't write by counting stresses all the way to the end of the line. Write your phrase in such a way that it sounds natural.

If it falls to the next line--that's fine. Don't add little words (DO, VERY, SO, etc.) to stretch a line out, or ruin a thought by subtracting a stress. If it doesn't come to five stresses, but you like what you said--take a pause there, a comma, a dash, a period--whatever works, and consider starting your next statement or phrase before the end of THAT line, and continue it into the next one.

This is called enjambment--it speeds up a poem when used judiciously, and will tend to keep your pentameter natural rather than forced. The same, again, holds true for tetrameter. One trick that works well for some poets (I use it often)--is to write the poem MY way in free verse, then pour it into a mold of either tetrameter or pentameter, nipping and tucking lines here and there, enjambing some phrases to the next line--just seeing what works.

Sometimes it'll end up in one form, sometimes the other, often neither--then it will either stay in free verse or I'll invent some other fixed form. But let the form come to you--don't bow in subservience to it, to a form. If you do, like so many newcomers to poetry, you will write very bad poems --and that's no fun for anybody.

In sum, meter can be a wonderful underpinning for a poem, since we unconsciously gravitate to those cadences. But in doing so, don't lose your own voice, what you wanted to say. Because if you do, you have wasted your time, and worse, you have wasted the reader's.

PO etry is TOO WON derful and PAIN STAK ing
a PROcess to WASTE in the FUM bles of FIXED ME ter.

Da DUH Da DUH Da DUH Da DUH My FOOT.
Loosen it up, will ya? And have fun.

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