In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

A Rock in the River Maxine Kumin’s Rhythmic Countercurrents Clearly, Maxine Kumin stands out among poets of her generation in her facility with iambic pentameter. Less obviously, she is also rare among contemporary poets—of any generation—because of the strength and eloquence of the passages in triple meter that also occur consistently in her work. Important passages in Kumin’s poetry are enriched, lulled, or counterpointed by a dactylic rhythm embodying a highly charged cluster of themes and images.1 Kumin’s dactylic passages often express appreciation for female power, and sometimes a generalized sense of nature’s raw mystery. While iambic pentameter is still important in Kumin’s poetry, in the years from The Privilege (1965) to Looking for Luck (1992), the dactylic passages—and occasional lines of trochaic and anapestic meter—have come to occupy a more and more central place in her work. Trochees and dactyls—the “falling” meters—have served as the alter ego, the underbelly, of iambic meter throughout the history of accentual-syllabic verse in English. As early as the Arst century after the establishment of iambic meter as the English poetic norm, the trochaic beat of the witches’ song counterpoints the iambic pentameter of Macbeth: “Double, bubble, toil and trouble, / Are burn and cauldron bubble.” The meter of the witches’ song, like the meter of much noniambic verse from Blake’s “The Tyger” to Poe’s “The Raven,” embodies powerful energies alien to the dominant meter and the dominant worldview (the anomalous or prescient American epic “Evangeline” 135 Originally appeared in Telling the Barn Swallow: Essays and Poems in Honor of Maxine Kumin, ed. Emily Grosholz (University Press of New England, 1996). may be one of the exceptions that proves this rule). But metrical connotations are not static. In my book The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, I describe the metrical code, a way to read metrical patterns in free verse—where they can be seen interacting with other metrical patterns—as encoding changing attitudes toward literature and culture. When read in terms of the metrical code, Kumin’s dactylic passages show an acceptance of the some of the very connotations that were so threatening to free-verse poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: spontaneity, nature, the irrational, and at times the feminine. Of course, free verse from Whitman on has often incorporated dactylic rhythms; indeed, it is my opinion that an intense hunger for the dactylic rhythm, incompatible with the dominance of iambic meter, was a major factor in the development of free verse. But Kumin’s achievement of a consistent and nonambivalent iambic meter, especially in her poems to women, contributes, along with Carolyn Kizer’s dactylic passages and those of younger poets like Audre Lorde, to a signiAcant shift in the sound of American poetry. If the metrical code is any indication , this rhythmic shift also embodies a shift in sensibility. Kumin’s noniambic rhythms occur sometimes alone but often, especially in the earlier books, in counterpoint or opposition to an iambic rhythm. The lyric “Morning Swim,” which opens the 1965 collection The Privilege, describes a transcendent experience in iambic meter tempered only once by a trochaic beat: And in the rhythm of the swim I hummed a two-four time slow hymn. I hummed Abide With Me. The beat Rose in the Ane thrash of my feet, Rose in the bubbles I put out Slantwise, trailing through my mouth. The passage is purely iambic except for the trochaic substitutions in the Arst and third feet of the line “Rose in the Ane thrash of my feet,” which lay the ground for the fully trochaic line, “Slantwise, trailing through my mouth.” The “slantwise” trochaic meter in this line hints at a metrical possibility that, 136 perhaps, offers more of a chance for authentic self-expression than the iambic meter. Perhaps these trochaic bubbles are closer to the speaker’s real voice than the iambic meter she has appropriated from the hymn she sings; certainly the physical description of the process of breathing, as the speaker “puts out” bubbles through her mouth, is more direct and immediate than the rest of the account of hymn-singing in the poem. The Privilege carries the disturbing epigraph, “But you are afraid of yourself; of the inseparable being forever at your side—master and slave, victim and executioner.” On one level, the quote suggests that the iambic meter of poems like “Morning Swim” is not...

Share