Iambic Pentameter

Posted on April 29, 2004 in Poetry

A friend of mine hasn’t heard the news. Iambic pentameter is dead. She thinks we speak Elizabethan English here in America. She’s been educated, evidentally, to “analyze poems” to find the dah-DAH dah-DAH. If it’s not there, she believes, it’s evidentally not a poem.

Last night’s wretched offering to the pink flamingo muse didn’t attempt to work with iambic. The meter’s foreign: people I know don’t talk like that. I listen, I eavesdrop all the time. People use all kinds of poetic devices when they speak to each other, but they don’t talk dah-DAH, dah-DAH. Their words dance around. I’ve detected alliteration, assonance, slant rhyme. I hear iambic but only in spurts. Words dance. People speak raggedly and there is beauty in the hanging threads.

There is a point to be made, using my poem, regarding where the lines stop. A sonnet is a fixed form. I tend to write more in open forms and find myself forcing the rhyme when going to a fixed form, unless it happens to be either a triolet or a lai. Sam Hamill, whose workshop I attended on Sunday, told us that the line should end at a natural pause. Yes, I took my hammer of the poet and inserted the ends in other places. You can get away with that in lais — did you know that no one expected poems to rhyme until after Shakespeare’s time — but in a sonnet it is an abomination.

Were I to write last night’s work in my accustomed free form, it would look like this:

Fractured, dead monuments

inscribed with sepulchral rhyme:

Ill form like this contents few.

Only eroding Time can spare us pain,

overturn the staggered masonry.

Let calloused hunters burn the shards.

Let memory undo that mosséd enmity

that squats in the pale room

where pink-skinned posterity

murmurs, chants to our doom.

From death none shall arise.

Only darkness gleams when we close our eyes.

I’ve killed the sonnet form and released the poem. It can still stand some work, but I dare say that I like it far more when I write it to match the natural candences of language than when I force it to the academicized meter. It sounds more like my voice.