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)

poetry's way

“though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the tempo, the aura of associations of the words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sudden arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or of familiar fact by sudden fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved in a long-awaited key-word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm.”

—Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942)

cadence cascade

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

no pulse

Every line he wrote was a flatline.

sonic mechanics

The gears of rhythm driving the chain of thought.

no beat

Meter was not his métier.

muybridge rhythms

One can learn poetic rhythms from Muybridge’s photographic sequences.

trammel of time

To be constrained by rhythm is to be trammeled by time.