free verse

I’m still reading John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, A Guide to English Verse.

It was tough going through the accentual, syllabic, and accentual-syllabic section. Something about counting units, either accented or syllabic, and memorizing and applying terms for meters and structures does not mesh easily with my poetic inclinations. He does explain it well enough, and I have a feeling I should own this book as a good reference.

But today, I broke into the free verse section. He talks about different kinds of free verse, the whole discussion itself in free verse. Some lines:

“each line a grammatical unit”
“line length/ can provide a visual ‘music’ of its own”
“can direct our attention… to what our language is made up of”
“graphic patterns… that suggest / the barely-seen but silent ghost of a /
classical verse form”
“contain more / Measured kinds of line, hidden”
“can build up various / stanzalike units”

And more.

A quote: “A Renaissance version of an ancient adage characterized poetry as speaking picture, and art as mute poesy.”

Nice. Liked it very much. I also liked this example of a witty line break:

“(like someone talking in winter of a whole hiber-
nation of bears)”

And his Concrete Poem,” “too heavy for these light pages.”

When I saw Hollander speaking at Yale during the Bollingen Award celebration, I thought he seemed a little overly excitable about the idea of free verse actually having structure and form. Now I’m beginning to see what he meant.

I’m only on page 32. This book has 52 pages, but it’s slow going.