Richard Cureton's "Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse" is a crucial book. This is the third time I've checked it out of the library. I'd love to develop a similar approach in Spanish. I would do it if I had the phonological expertise. Cureton applies groupings of weak and strong elements to higher levels of discourse. If you began with the syllable you would go up from there to the clitic phrase, the phonological phrase, the intonational unit, the utterance as a whole; from there larger groupings of sense. The rhythm of the poem is also a rhythm of information, at the higher level. The theory is not without its problems, but I am struck by how little such a book is cited in literary criticism, even though it is now ten years old. I would expect to see references to this book in books like Susan Stewart's "Poetry and the Claim of the Senses" (also a marvelous book by the way).

Two cases of eminent people who make gross misidentifications of meters. I don't want to identify them because the point is not to attack anyone in particular, especially these two whom I happen to respect a great deal. The first, a poet-critic talking at great length about the significance of the fact that a certain kind of third-world poetry is written in "pentameter." The problem is that the actual lines cited are hexameters. A second case: a complaint is made that a certain badly written poem in an anthology is "doggedly iambic." The problem in this case is that the poem cited is anapestic. Has "iambic" become simple shorthand for "metrical"? Of course the anapestic rhythm sounds more dogged, more doggerel-like, than the iambic would in this case! Both misidentified meters were written by African-Americans. Can the white poet/critic even hear what the black poets are doing? The reminded me of Ron Silliman's recent comment about people unable to hear William Carlos Williams. I remember when Thom Gunn read aloud the first poem from "Spring and All" to a class I was taking as an undergraduate. It was clear that he didn't hear the rhythms as I would. You can't read it in that British accent.

I went to an exhibition of Cuban hand made books yesterday at the Spencer Museum. Some translations of poems by Langston Hughes by the Cuban poet Eliseo Diego struck me as quite effective.

I am convinced that this blog is actually the best book I will ever write.