Do you like to sing? Hum along with your favorite song? Tap your toes or clap your hands when you hear a particularly upbeat, bouncy tune?

Then you have all the skills you need to recognize the different types of rhythm in poetry. It’s simply a matter of paying attention to the beat (accented syllable), and counting the unaccented syllables.

I will give the traditional names for the different types of meter, but memorizing the words “iambic” or “anapestic” isn’t nearly as important as learning how to scan a line, which means to analyze the line and mark the syllables as accented or unaccented.

When you begin reading a poem with the purpose of scansion, or determining the meter, it is important that you first note what kind of poem it is and what mood, emotion, or idea the poet is trying to convey. In most poems, syllables within a word are pronounced as they normally are, but the words which are accented may be different according to the poet’s intent.

For example, let’s take a simple sentence which you might say during an ordinary conversation. The situation: you are at a restaurant with a close friend or your significant other, who has finished eating but there is still food remaining on his or her plate. You might say, “Do you want that?”

Now, think of the various ways you might emphasize words in that sentence. You could point at the food in question and say, “Do you want that?” Or, if you’re not entirely sure the other person is finished, you might say, “Do you want that?”

Language is fluid and adapts itself to the situation. Therefore it is important to know whether you are reading a light-hearted limerick, which might have a more sing-song rhythm, or an ode or dirge, which would likely have a stately, formal sound.

Time to get down to the actual names of the poetic feet and the meter. Please read the example lines aloud if possible, although if your coworkers might look at you askance, by all means wait until you get home. Poetry is primarily a medium of sound, and is best heard with the ears as well as read with the eyes. (Yes, there is concrete poetry which is meant to be seen. We’ll get to that later.)

An iamb, as discussed previously, has one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable. I will bold/italic the accented syllables or words in the examples. For iamb, a familiar line:

Whose woods | these are | I think | I know

A trochee is the opposite of the iamb: one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable.

Once up | on a | midnight | dreary, | while I | pondered, | weak and | weary

An anapest has two unaccented syllables followed by one accented one. Sort of like an iamb with an extra syllable at the beginning.

From his saw- | pit of mouth, | from his char | nel of maw

A dactyl has an accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones – like a trochee with an extra syllable at the end. For your amusement, here is a poem by M. M. De Voe in a form called double-dactyl. I don’t think I need to mark the accented syllables.

Bouncity-Flouncity
Pamela Anderson
Flirting with silicon
Under her top.

Diving for volleyballs
Hyper-frenetically.
Flashing a breast to a
Day-player cop.

Very few poems have “perfect meter.” Generally, a poem that is primarily anapestic will have iambic feet as well, and one that is dactylic will have trochaic feet. Occasionally there are syllables within a poem which don’t fit into any of the four categories above, in which case they may have a foot which is spondaic, or has two accented syllables in a row; or one which is pyrrhic, or has two unaccented syllables in a row.

Taking all of that into consideration, how do you determine what a poetic foot is? Well, as I stated before, poetry is an art, and therefore scansion cannot be reduced to an exact science. Once you determine whether a poem is basically iambic/anapestic or dactylic/trochaic, you can sort out the feet which fit those forms perfectly and then see what you have left. There may be a single accented or unaccented syllable. For example, take the fourth line in the poem immediately above:

Under her | top.

In this case, you have an accented syllable on the end, and another accented syllable at the beginning of the next line:

Diving for | volleyballs

Since this is a light-hearted poem that is meant to be funny, you can see how, in reading this poem aloud, the speaker would naturally pause between the two accented syllables, giving the listener time to react to the humor before going on to the next line.

You can also see that the above line, “diving for volleyballs,” has two feet, as shown by the dividing line. Therefore the line is dactylic dimeter. Here are the names of the various poetic feet length:

1 – monometer
2 – dimeter
3 – trimeter
4 – tetrameter
5 – pentameter
6 – hexameter
7 – heptameter
8 – octameter
9 – nonameter

As I said in the beginning, it isn’t as important to remember the exact names as to understand the concept. If you want to write metered poetry, you might want to study rhythm and meter in more depth than this brief introduction. If your goal is to have poetry that “sings,” that reads smoothly and rhythmically, and you can’t figure out why a particular line isn’t working, use scansion to determine the primary metric form. Chances are, you may have mixed an iamb in with your dactyls. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

As promised, this week I will post a poll here on Multiply so that you may choose the next topic you would like to discuss. Poll ends at midnight Central Standard Time on Thursday, December 6.

What is poetry? That is the question, isn’t it? Is it the way that words are arranged on the page? Yes, but not always; look at Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Many of the lines in his poems look more like prose than poetry. Is it rhythm and rhyme? Yes, but not always; much of modern poetry does not incorporate rhyme or strict rhythmic forms.

Lewis Turco, author of The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, says poetry is “the art of language… …what differentiates the poet from other writers is the focus on mode, on language itself. The poet focuses upon the literary resources of language in the same way a musician concentrates upon sound, the painter upon form, or the dancer upon movement.”

I like that. I like even better the definition given by American poet Gwendolyn Brooks: “Poetry is life distilled.” And better still, our own Honor74 says, “Poetry is the language of the soul. It's a language anyone can decipher, anyone can speak. It is universal as it encompasses all of the human experience while wrapping it up in feeling.”

While I do not possess the education, experience, nor expertise of either Turco or Brooks, I also have a definition for poetry. I would say simply, “Poetry is art.” And, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I would say poetry is defined by the intent of the writer.

However, as with any art, the more you learn about poetry, the better you become at writing it. And the more you read poetry, the more inspired you become to write your own. So the first thing I would encourage anyone who aspires to write poetry to do is to read poetry – all kinds of poetry, from ancient to modern. And don’t just read casually. Analyze the poems you read. Why do you think the poet used that particular form to express the idea or emotion he/she is trying to convey? Was it simply the convention of the time in which he/she lived, or a deliberate choice? Do you find that one type or form of poetry resonates more with you than another?

Poetry Archive is a good site for finding different types of poems, if you don’t have other resources available to you.

The second thing I would recommend is to increase your vocabulary. The better your vocabulary, the more precisely you will be able to express yourself in your poetry. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” If you have a My Yahoo! page, you might add “Word of the Day” from TheFreeDictionary and/or Dictionary.com. Or simply bookmark those two websites and peruse them when you have a free moment.

The third thing I would encourage you to do is to try to become more observant. It is easy to become so accustomed to our surroundings that we don’t really see or hear what is going on around us any more. Stop for a moment and look around. What objects do you see? What colors? What textures? Listen for a moment. What do you hear? The hum of your computer fan? The sound of others in your household or your workplace? Traffic in the distance? Music or a TV program?

What sensations are you feeling? Is your chair comfortable? Do you feel pain or discomfort anywhere? Are you hungry, or have you just eaten? What about emotionally? Are you happy, content, bored, tired, angry? What are the circumstances that brought about these emotions?

Try to make a habit of being more “in the moment” as often as possible. Notice the little details. Pay attention to how people relate to each other. Look for small flaws or aberrations – a tiny crack in an otherwise perfect tile floor, one green leaf left on a blazing red maple tree, an all-black cat with one splotch of white fur on its back.

M. Romeo suggests reading How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb to learn how to live more in the moment and increase your awareness.

It is a good idea to carry some kind of notebook with you so that whenever you see something that you find interesting or think of a particularly fine turn of phrase, you can write it down immediately. Those fleeting thoughts are soon forgotten if not recorded.

Many thanks to Honor74 and M. Romeo for their assistance and encouragement.

Please note that although there is a poll on Yahoo 360 for this workshop, since it closes in approximately 51 minutes, I am not including it here. There will be a poll on Multiply on the next entry, which will be posted on Tuesday, December 4.