The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

Annie Finch: Calendars, Centering and Decentering

Annie Finch Calendars, Centering and Decentering The word rhythm (“flow”) is applied to all the arts and to nature; meter (“measure”) is a more specific term applied only to poetry. Aristotle said, “Meter is sections of rhythm.” Meter, like “time” in music, is exact rhythm. The meter of a poem is determined by the kind of metrical “foot” and by the number of feet in a line. A metrical foot is a unit of measure made up of accented and unaccented syllables. —Jotted down in my childhood S Trochee trips from long to short. From long to long in solemn sort Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! Yet ill able Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable. Iambics march from short to long— With a leap and a bound the swift anapaests throng. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Metrical Feet: Lesson for a Boy” 1. Recently, poet Annie Finch put out a call for “poems in any non-iambic meters—anapests, sapphics, trochees, cretics, dactyls, amphibrachs, alcaics, or others.” Only a short time ago, such a call would have been greeted with bewildered questions about what exactly anapests, sapphics, trochees, cretics, dactyls, amphibrachs (my favorite), and alcaics were. At this point, I’m sure Finch has received a flood of submissions. Her classic book, The Ghost of Meter (1993), is no doubt partly responsible for this situation. Annie Finch’s work on metrics is so interesting, illuminating and complex that it threatens to eclipse her considerable accomplishments as a poet. On 157 158 The Dancer and the Dance the other hand, it is scarcely possible to talk about her poetry without talking about her poetics, which functions as a matrix out of which the poems emerge. In another poet, a poem like “Caribou Kitchen” might pass as somewhat rhythmical free verse—especially since Finch provides us with no end rhymes to guide our understanding of the rhythm: Most things have vanished while we were talking (the dents in a pitcher gleam by the gas lamp), but nothing is lost (cups in far corners). Arms still lean over the table (shadows on the oilcloth). Yet notice the number of dactylic feet (stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) in the poem: “Most things have,” “gleam by the,” “cups in far,” “over the.” The poem, like many others in Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003), is structured around two “voices”1 : one of the voices remarks in a somewhat abstract way, “Most things have vanished / while we were talking / but nothing is lost”; the other voice, in parentheses, notices only particulars (“dents in a pitcher,” “the gas lamp,” “cups in far corners”). The tension between these voices is to some degree resolved when the abstract voice illustrates its point by noting a particular—“Arms still lean / over the table”— while the other voice notes the “shadows” of those arms “on the oilcloth.” Thesis/antithesis/synthesis. The poem’s title probably refers to a kitchen in the Cariboo Mountains, a part of the Rocky Mountains in southwest Canada. Yet “caribou” (reindeer) is by etymology “pawer,” “scratcher,” by virtue of the animal’s digging in the snow to find food. We might dig a little as well. In The Ghost of Meter Finch associates dactyls with “a feminized alternate system . . . something quieter, less established, more authentic”; with a “direct spirituality that is so quiet it is almost inaccessible”; with the “beautiful but inaccessible”; with “vagueness, night and the unspeakable”; with “the archetypal feminine rhythm of the sea” (this last, though prose, is a line that might be scanned). Finch opposes dactyls or triple rhythms to “iambic pentameter,” the English heroic line—the meter of Shakespeare’s plays. An “iamb” is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, a “rising” rhythm; “pentameter” indicates five of these per line. Iambic pentameter, she argues, connotes “traditional literary sanctity,” “traditional patriarchal conventions,” “the normal conventional human supports.” She even goes so far as to refer to “the fatal stupefaction” of iambic pentameter. Finch’s own work involves the search for “a [non-iambic] countermeter that is more oriented toward human experience.” With this in mind, look at the poem again. The first two lines are made up of a dactyl followed by a trochee (stressed syllable followed by unstressed)—a “falling” rhythm. The next line is similar, especially since “the” can be read as an “extra” syllable, and “gleam by the gas lamp” brings us back to a strict dactyl...