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Meter mania
The lovely Saskatchewan-born neo-formalist Elizabeth Bachinsky shared her passion for sonnets with Kate Braid’s form class in Nanaimo last night. She is very fond of palindromes and Sapphic stanzas as well, and her first book, Curio, included a translation into anagrams of part of The Wasteland. She has done some wild things with Google search results too.
There was a preliminary discussion of meter, and while reading the chapter on Iambic meter from the excellent text, An Exaltation of Forms, we ran into diverging opinions on how to scan the line, which I now learn is “oft-debated” in scansion: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” (–Shakespeare, Sonnet 30).
Kate said that Keith Maillard had once told her that it was important not to confuse rhythm with meter and that this had made sense of the metrical world for her. If I’m paraphrasing her correctly, she said that rhythm has more to do with the emphasis we might put on a line when we read it, and meter is the more abstract “unreal” template we put over that line to measure it, within the context of the rest of the poem.
I’m still puzzling on that, but I found something that supports Maillard’s view, if music and poetry are this strongly connected, on a page about music theory. It says:
Many modern conceptions of rhythm and meter place them in opposition. Rhythm is often defined to consist of the actually sounding durations of music, while meter is the alternation of strong and weak beats, or the interaction of pulse strata, that are inferred from the rhythm. Rhythm is thus conceived as emerging and active— a “concrete” patterning that is measured by, and heard to work with or against the “abstract,” deterministic, rigid metrical grid.
Does that make sense to anyone? A couple of us thought the line (see second paragraph above) could be scanned as more or less straight dactylic tetrameter (quibbles over whether “silent” could be read without an initial stress, in context), but others wanted to put it into iambic pentameter with a double ionic (unstressed/unstressed/stressed/stressed) foot in the middle and a trochaic substitution in the first foot.
Ok, any [other] prosody geeks out there? For the rest of us, I like this page for a nice basic summary of meter. And I was having a little fun today with this one that has some online quizzes and tutorials on prosody.
And for those of you who prefer food, here’s what I had for supper last night (Rich Leek Tart, it’s called). Obviously I have a long way to go as both a cook and a food photographer, but it was pretty tasty. The leeks were sweated for about half an hour, with minced shallots and a couple of sliced mushrooms, before being mixed with strained yogurt, swiss cheese and eggs, and the result was sweet and dense; it almost tasted like I’d added sugar.
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Texas on my horizon
Having returned from the land of snow, chickadees and Benedictines, my thoughts are now turning to the lone star state, where I’ll be next week. My stress levels are rising in anticipation: having reviewed the schedule of the AWP conference in Austin, it seems there are far too many sessions to attend all at once, and far too much going on in Austin to cover in the three days we have to be tourists before the conference starts.
Such heart-rending choices: one particularly cruel morning’s simultaneous sessions include (among others):
Crazy Women: Writers Defying Diagnosis;
That’s So Funny: Irony and Meaning in Contemporary American Poetry;
From Rejection to Publication: Becoming A Resilient Writer;
Women Small Press Publishers on Publishing;
Blogs, Boards & Online Journals: Salons for the 21st Century; and
Symbol, Glyph, or Gimmick?: Repunctuating Contemporary Fiction and Poetry.An interesting debate on TripAdviser’s Austin forum, about where in Austin do you find the best barbecue? A matter I intend to give serious thought to, my curiosity having been whetted by “The Whole Hog”, Jeffrey Steingarten’s account of judging a bbq competition in Memphis, in one of my favourite food books ever, The Man Who Ate Everything.
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Call of the coulibiac
Cooked my first proper meal since my return last night: salmon coulibiac, which reminded me of my childhood favourite, kedgeree (my mother’s super simple version: mix hot cooked rice, chopped hard-boiled eggs, canned or leftover salmon, parsley and a good spoonful of butter). This grown-up puff-pastried incarnation tasted even better – with lemon, dill and mushrooms to zip it up a bit. It was easy to make but it took me a long time, here in the land of a thousand distractions. Apparently the beauty of it is you can make it ahead and then put it in the oven when your guests arrive.We had it with an aubergine/eggplant pasta casserole I’d hidden in my freezer, and followed with leftover chocolate mousse cake from Thrifty’s.
Ok, so it was starch night at the hacienda, but on the other hand it was cold, wet and miserable outside. Starch keeps the rain out, I always think.
Here’s what the source of the mystery bark looked like before Tracy turned it into art.
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
