Linguist Mark Liberman makes an eloquent point here: that the idea of a perfect, elegant, and correct language is always displaced unto a past, but that this past is always imaginary. That is to say, people never have spoken in this *perfect* language, and nobody seriously thinks that we should return to 18th century, or 17th century, norms--or to the norms of whatever period is considered the golden age of language usage. It's a fundamentally dishonest argument, because the norms of usage, whatever they are, must always necessarily be those of the present, never those of the past. [I hope my paraphrase does some justice to Liberman's post]

And so it is too with the norms of the "poetry language" (Kenneth Koch). We can't seriously propose to bring back Victorian ideals, or Elizabethan ideas, because we wouldn't be happy with the result even if we could actually bring back those ideals. We are stuck in the present, and that present is more lively and interesting because it is *our* time. "As if you would never leave me and were / the inexorable product of my own time."

Part of time is the way in which time is *felt*. I'm thinking of the "feel" of a musician or poet for time itself. Think of how Charlie Parker changed the way we perceive the passage of time from one second to the next! (Cortázar wrote about this in his story "El perseguidor.") Creeley felt and understood Parker's innovation.

Time to teach grammar!

Never begin an essay or a talk by quoting the dictionary definition of a word, unless you are a high-school student or want to be mistaken for a high-school student.

... "prosody... 'the science of versification; that part of the study of language which deals with the forms of metrical composition,' to cite the OED's definition--has largely disappeared from English-language poetry."

Wouldn't that be like saying that herpetology has disappeared from snakes? I speak a language, but I am not a linguist. Would it make sense to say that linguistics has largely disappeared from my speech? Prosody is the branch of linguistics which deals with rhythm and intonation and the like, and also with the specific applications of phonology in literature: poetic meter and rhythm, for example. Most poets have never been theoretical linguists. It is possible that they have held mistaken theories of prosody but still produced excellent verse. I am really scratching my head to figure out what the assertion that "prosody ... has disappeared from poetry" might possibly mean.

He then goes on to make specific comments about the prosody of recent poetry, arguing that there is a prevalence of rhythm over meter. In other words, he is talking about something that, according to his initial premise, does not exist in the first place! isn't the relation between meter and rhythm in poetry a matter for prosodists to discuss?