Mike Snider's Formal Blog is quite puzzling to me. He often sounds quite articulate and knowledgeable when he talks about meter and rhythm, but undermines himself (in my eyes) with the actual poetry he quotes. I cannot connect his theoretical positions with the near doggerel of which he seems to approve. He's gotten me to think more about prosody, however, which is always a good thing.

I might have mentioned before on this blog the essay, "The Poetics of the Americas," in which Charles Bernstein goes on and on about the significance of the fact that Claude McKay's dialect verse is written in pentameters. The punch line: it isn't pentameter at all. I'm sure anyone could make this mistake. What's puzzling is that noone else ever caught it before the article was published. The same article was published previously in another book, in a journal. It was given as a talk, etc... Many people offered their comments on it before it was published, but noone actually looked at lines like this

"Just to view de homeland England, in de streets of London walk...."

McKay's iambic HEXameters have a much different feel, and meaning, than the "pentameter" which, in Bernstein's view, "is made the metrical mark of colonialism." Whatever happened to close listening? Of course, these six-feet lines sound more monotonous, more "thumping," more "dogged," than pentameters would. The frequent use of anapests in the line Bernstein quotes, furthermore, make the verse sound quite a bit different than neoclassical heroic couplets that the poet is supposedly referencing. I'm sure the effect is deliberate, but it is not a parody of neo-classical British poetic meter; it is, rather, a sort of deliberately "naive," doggerel-like effect. It is also troubling that Bernstein cannot hear this as a rhythm native to the Caribbean. If a colonial poet writes in meter, it must mean that he is adopting a British form, right? "the acoustic trappings of 'Old England.'" This begs the question of what metrical form McKay would "naturally" use. Free verse? I doubt it.