inversions in poetry

[Caleb Murdock]

Less meter, more cadence. Probably. There is a difference between inverting the meter and a syntactical inversion. It is not uncommon if writing in iambic free verse to throw in a foot of trochee. Tom did this neat poem where he would switch back and forth between several lines of trochee and iambs. The way he did it was so smooth that unless you were scanning it, you would probably never realize it. My main criterion is does it disturb the reading of the poem. There are poets who can break most of the rules and the reader would never know it unless specifically looking for that. However, when starting, it is better to learn what the rules are before you break them. Plus, this is also true, but not a cliche, after doing so much reading and writing of poetry, one develops an intuition about how to use words that defies any kind of rational approach, or explanation. I think in terms of specific forms, such as sonnet, it is usually pretty obvious when there is a foot, or several, of trochee substituted for iambs. This is generally obvious to a poet, and will disrupt the reading of a non-poet. Unconscious disruption in a poem is what usually makes or breaks a poem for the non-poet reader. They will probably not be able to say why the poem is not good, but they will generally recognize something is amiss.

Sorry to be brief, but I have to run.

Dale

This isn't the right thread to talk about meter, but since you mentioned it ... substituting a row of trochees for iambs is usually the kind of thing that no one notices. In fact, if your previous line ended with an unstressed syllable, that syllable can turn that line of trochees into iambs (as far as the sound is concerned). You can always scan a row of trochees as beginning with a headless iamb and ending with a hanging unaccented syllable (or whatever the correct term is). I've been intending to start a thread on scansion to examine metrical anomalies, and I'll do that soon.