Meter and rhyme isn’t much in fashion and hasn’t been for decades. But there are still people who don’t consider a poem a poem unless it presents in rhyme and meter. As a kid I felt — victimized is too strong a word — I felt pressure from people like that. I never experienced much pleasure reading rhyming verse growing up. Sure, there was the occasional poem or song lyric that got in my head in a good way. “Jack jumped over the candlestick …” I did force rhyme and meter under the gun of class assignments. It felt like math, all that counting counting counting. I didn’t always hate the result. But it did not read as fun.
I was much more interested in fiction. You could do anything in fiction. Imagination could run wild. I wanted to get school credit for that! Naturally, including freedom in the school curriculum was frowned upon. But in high school an after school poetry class got offered, I guess as an experiment to see if students would show up. The teachers were poets; their main text was Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams. And what it taught was freedom — poetry was a mind set loose. Even meaning could shake off its chains. I loved it. I wrote tons. Was any of it metered verse?
Once I got hooked on writing poetry I read all over. Most of it was free verse, but one can’t help reading poetry in received forms at least sometimes. I’m a fan of Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger,” and have lines from it memorized. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night.” But metered verse can be painful — exhausted rhymes, contorted syntax, the mind-numbing barking at the fence.
I’m not the only one who felt victimized by the way poetry was taught. “[I]n seventh grade, my English teacher in the public high school was a poet,” Annie Finch says, “and he saw that I was pretty serious about writing poetry and he said, ‘Real poets write free verse.’” Finch wanted to be a real poet, so she ditched rhyme and meter, except for that one versification course in college where the prof passed around Finch’s student poems as exemplary. That wasn’t enough to override the judgment of the seventh grade teacher, apparently, for Finch “hid all those [metered poems] in a drawer and continued to write free verse.”
I have to pause here. What is a “real poet”?
So I’m reading along in this “conversation” with the well-published poet irritated at the way she cloaks herself in victimhood and how she is convinced that what poetry really needs is a renaissance of metered verse, how she is doing her part teaching classes and classes and classes — which everybody totally loves, every student agreeing with her that their desperate thirst is being slaked at last — when I hit the place where suddenly it comes to me that Annie Finch isn’t just a poetry conservative, Annie Finch is crazy. I mean, crazy in a way that cuts through the crap about her meeting the needs of the world.
When she finally shook off the fettering notions of the seventh grade teacher, Finch took to scansion with a will. Making up for lost time, it seems, she became obsessed.
“I scanned all of Whitman, and I scanned all of Dickinson … I learned to start to hear things so much, for years it drove me crazy, because I would be scanning while people were talking, with a headache, and it made me feel alienated, and it was so weird. Finally I got to where I am now, where I do it but it doesn’t interfere with understanding what people are saying.”
Annie Finch learned to meet her own needs! Good for her. I don’t begrudge her the evangelizing — I’m sure there are those like her that need what she needs and need to hear that it’s okay to need that and she is there to help them access it. Do I not need it? I mean, I feel a little sheepish not knowing — or caring — about the difference between an anapest and a trochee, a fritterlil and a poncydue. But I can live with it.
Am I a real poet?
source:
“Conversation Between Annie Finch and Timothy Green”
Rattle #82
v.29 n.4
winter 2023
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