Anecdotal Evidence: `Metre Is a Brain-Altering Drug'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Metre Is a Brain-Altering Drug'
Excerpt:

`Metre Is a Brain-Altering Drug'

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant.”

One outgrows such thinking, usually by age sixteen, about the time we start feeling guilty for having fallen for the flummery of Dylan Thomas. The poet who wrote the lines above, P.K. Page, died last year at age ninety-six. She wrote them, in “Falling in Love with Poetry” (collected in The Filled Pen: Selected Non-fiction), in 2005. Some of us mature more slowly than others.

In the best, most memorable poems, sound and sense are inseparable. It’s not surprising that among the first poems to excite me as a boy were Poe’s “The Bells” and "Annabel Lee,” the usual well-oiled suspects. Today, I can’t read Poe on a bet, and for diametrically opposite reasons I can’t read Allen Ginsberg. At the start of her essay, Page suggests an explanation for our early, faulty infatuations:

“I fell in love with poetry before I knew what poetry was. I loved the rhythms and the rhymes.”

Bad poetry can be very powerful and seductive, whether transparently bad like Poe’s or “skillfully obscure” like Hart Crane’s, in the words of Yvor Winters. Too much emphasis on sound results in nonsense; too much on sense, propaganda that might as well be prose. One reason we can’t fall in love with contemporary poetry is that most of it possesses too much sound and too little sense, or vice versa. Good poems dwell in a taut equilibrium. Formlessness invites self-indulgent senselessness. We need something to chafe against, in literature as in life. Free verse, in most hands, is slavery. Sonnets liberate. In another essay, “A Writer’s Life,” Page says:

“I suspect that metre is a brain-altering drug – one we ignore at our peril. Just consider what we know, but take for granted: that iambic is the lub-dub of the heart, and iambic pentameter that lub-dub repeated five times – roughly the number of heartbeats to a breath. It is difficult for me to believe this is accidental.”...........