had a pulse

Because a few iambs continued to beat inside the poem the poet was able to bring it back to life.

all beat

You got the meter right but pity there was no poetry to pin to it.

rhythm of my imagination

At that time, I knew only that free verse was ill-suited to my spirit….But I lacked faith in traditional meters….And besides I had parodied them too often to take them seriously now….I knew of course that traditional meters don’t exist in any absolute sense, but are remade according to the interior rhythms of each poet’s imagination. And one day, I found myself muttering a certain jumble of words (which turned into a pair of lines from “South Seas”) in a pronounced cadence that I had used for emphasis ever since I was a child, when I would murmur over and over the phrases that obsessed me most in the novels I was reading. That’s how, without know it, I found my verse, which was of course for “South Seas” and several other poems as well, wholly instinctive….Gradually I discovered the intrinsic laws of this meter…, but I was always careful not to let it tyrannize me and was ready to accept, when it seemed necessary, other stress patterns and line lengths. But I never again strayed far from my scheme, which I consider the rhythm of my imagination.

—Cesare Pavese, from Pavese’s essay “The Poet’s Craft,” quoted by Geoffrey Brock in the introduction to his translations of Cesare Pavese in Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon, 2002)

prose all along

Whether or not cast in meter and/or rhyme, if the lines are readable, then they’re prose.

cadence cascade

Not regular meter but the cadence of a stream passing over stones.

not de-prosed

Adding a metrical lilt to your lines and hanging some rhymes at the line endings, doesn’t de-prose your poetry. The prose remains despite the meter and rhyme.

too much order

There is something about too close attention to metrics that tilts to science and away from art.

nothing irregular here

The meter was regular and the poetry regular too.

meter was his métier

He could scan a line of poetry with his eyes closed.

the poetic vertical

Every real poem, then, contains the element of time-stopped, time which does not obey the meter, time which we shall call vertical to distinguish it from ordinary time which sweeps past horizontally along with the wind and the waters of the stream. Whence this paradox, which we must state quite clearly: whereas prosodic time is horizontal, poetic time is vertical.

—Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetic Moment and the Metaphysical Moment,” The Right to Dream (The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988), translated by J. A. Underwood, 172.

you say tomato

Any two people can scan the same line and disagree on the stresses.

walk this way

It was not just meter, it felt like the poet’s footsteps.

end stop line

Elegy for the formalist: He gave us his last full measure.

seen & unseen

The physical act of sewing, with the seen and unseen thread, feels like composing a line of poetry.

five beats is all

Blank verse can make you believe in any line.

ticking line

Meter is a lateral clock.

light verse poet

Smitten by meter; overly fond of form.

ta-tum-ta-tum...

It takes more than regular meter to give a heartbeat to a poem.

therefore iamb

When people asked if he was a formalist poet, he’d answer: “I amb.”

ta tum ta tum ta tum ta tum ta tum

The line's meter like a street with speed bumps.