“For All / That Struck the Earth”: Verse in Mixed Meters
Brian Brodeur
Heterometrical poetry has fallen out of fashion in recent years. Yet some of the finest lyric poems in English have benefitted from the sonic tension afforded by nonce forms. In this workshop, we’ll discuss examples of mixed meters by luminaries such as Herbert, Hardy, Frost and Hecht, reading right up to the present with younger formalists like Erica Dawson and Ryan Wilson. We’ll also look at examples of unsuccessful pentameters of the past, such as James Thompson’s contorted blank verse and John Greenleaf Whittier’s slack narratives, "revising" ineffective passages of these poems into heterometrical verse to see what we can learn for our own practice. We’ll spend a good deal of our time experimenting with mixed meters in our own work, writing new poems, and discussing strategies for resurrecting old drafts by recasting them into mixed meters.
