The Shelter Series: Maurice Manning, Meter and the Hinterlands Confession
Confession: I cannot write free verse poetry. I’m too attached to the sound of language. All my life, especially in the younger years, I’ve been the listener, so perhaps my draw to meter is unavoidable. One of the books I’ve spent time with lately is The Founding of English Metre by John Thompson. Alan Shapiro gave me this book a few years ago and I’ve just recently sat down with it. The aim of this book is to demonstrate how English language poetry developed, just before Shakespeare came along. Poetry of the era came to bring “speech-patterns” as naturally as possible into agreement with metrical pattern. I’ve annotated this book with comments like, “the line must be audible as a line” and “prosody is not simply an arrangement of sound and rhythm, it also shapes meaning.” Here’s a good quote from Thompson: “the tension is greatest when the metrical pattern is strict and the language is colloquial.” That’s smart-talk that’s right up my alley.
My own interest as a poet is to set the language I hear into a metrical context. I have this interest because the local language I hear and have always relished is almost singing. There is a great difference between speech and thought, and, as a lifelong listener, I lean toward speech and all of its features. It’s like hand-jive with the voice.
Of course, like most of us, I began from instinct and reading a book like Thompson’s offers an academic framework to think about a matter that is perfectly natural and common. But there has always been something in the air. Recently I heard from my neighbor a story about a long gone neighbor whose name was Poot Smalley. I marveled that anyone would go through the world with such a name. Then, just a few days ago my eye spied the name of Poot Smalley in our weekly newspaper. Our local paper reprints articles from earlier days on a page called “Looking Back.” In this recent edition I found this headline: “Fire destroys blind man’s house.” This was Mr. Smalley’s misfortune. The reprinted article quotes him saying about his house, “There ain’t a sprig of nothing left but tin.” Apparently Poot Smalley was fluent in blank verse!
