Poetry tips #1, the poetic foot

BULLETIN: In the last week or so we’ve received poems from Liz Korba, Rosalind Adam, Erin McMullen, V. L. Gregory, Melanie Bishop, Reta Stewart, and Genia Gerloch. Nothing yet from our young poets out there but there is still time. The cutoff for January is this Saturday, the 23rd, at midnight CST. Don’t miss a chance to participate!

On with poetry. Let’s start with definitions. For the sake of my upcoming posts about poetry, I’ll divide all poetry into two categories, verse and free verse. Verse is metered language. We can measure it. Verse doesn’t have to rhyme but it does have to be metered into lines that we can recognize by their pattern. Historically, much of the world’s poetry has been told in verse, partly because it’s easier to memorize structured language than prose and poetry was a handy device for remembering and passing on important information or entertainment.

Through common usage verse developed into a number of recognizable patterns, that is, number of lines, length of lines, rhyme schemes and, in modern English, arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables into units called feet. Although the root words in today’s English come from Greek, Latin, and a good many other backgrounds, our modernized derivitives generally fall into a system of stressed and unstressed syllables that can be metered rather easily into lines of verse. I’ll begin with four groupings that have gained recognition by most poets over time.

4 Basic Patterns of Meter

Iambic: da DA – above, below, a boy, a girl, reduce
Anapestic: da da DA – in the night, from the light, from above
Trochaic: DA da – doggie, kitty, morning, teacher
Dactylic: DA da da – following, teaching us, tricycle, Harrison

Iambic: The Farmer in the Dell
da DA da DA da DA
da DA da DA da DA

Anapestic: A Visit from St. Nicholas
da da DA da da DA da
da DA da da DA

Trochaic: Peter, Peter
DA da DA da DA da DA da
DA da DA da DA da DA da

Dactylic: The Cat and the Fiddle
DA da da DA da da DA da da
DA da da DA da da DA da da DA

Iambic line: The English language has a basic beat.
da DA da DA da DA da DA da DA

Anapestic line: You can practice the meter aloud by yourself.
da da DA da da DA da da DA da da DA

Two others should be mentioned. Once in a while a poet needs a foot that has no accent in it: da da. That’s known as a pyrrhus. It’s opposite, a syllable with two accents only, is a spondee: DA DA.

There are other kinds of poetic feet but these six basic arrangements will account for nearly all of what you need to function well when writing verse.

Tomorrow I will present an outline of subjects to come so you’ll have a chance to consider them in advance and, if you wish, add to them.

If you have questions or comments as we go, please let me know.

David

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