The central argument about poetic meter and rhythm is that poets have been hearing patterns of stress, timing, and intonation since infancy. I have struggled with this idea for many years. If a non-native speaker’s primary reference for the English language is written rather than spoken, the iambic rhythm embedded in English does not manifest as a sonic reality. Many poets have investigated the relationship between poetry and sound for millennia, like Ezra Pound’s melopoeia (where words are charged with meaning beyond their ordinary semantic meaning through sound and tone), or William Carlos Williams’s interest in idiomatic speech. The dissonance between acquiring language visually and sonically wrenched how my mouth reproduced what my eyes or ears originally mapped.
I was born at General Hospital. There was always drama! I grew up in Southeast Los Angeles where the Spanish of Latin America reigned. I didn’t interact with a native English speaker daily until I started public school. Two months before turning five, I enrolled in kindergarten. This fenced-in section of Woodlawn Elementary was only for a handful of kindergarten classrooms, away from the older kids. I met people that school year who I am still in contact with.
My year in kindergarten is a collage of memories about arts & crafts for holidays like Father’s Day, and I remember it was the first and only time I celebrated my birthday at school. It was a plain rectangular cake with white frosting and wavy piping all the way around. Its sides and top were smooth, and a big blue candle shaped like the number five sat in the middle. My classmates and teachers are at the outdoor tables next to the sandbox. There is singing, but I can’t remember hearing anything. My eyes tear up. The sun bakes my plain black hair and shines into my eyes. Just as the candle smoke fills my nose, my mom yells for me to stop crying. I close my eyes and blow out the candle.
In school, the appeal and meaning of poetic forms didn’t match my reality of sound and structure. My family is Costa Rican, and like most inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, we speak Spanish. Ticos, like other regions of the Americas, have idiomatic phrases like diay, pura vida, mae, or tuanis that carry colloquial meanings and connotations. I am a heritage Spanish speaker. English, or the sounds of poetry, contains an iambic meter that I could not fully grasp when I began writing; poetic forms imposed an unfamiliar rhythm and structure.
Identifying a poetic form requires quantifying the consistent, measurable patterns within a poem. Many types of poetic forms exist. Free verse is poetic writing with no consistent, measurable pattern to scan for accent and meter. Even native English speakers have shared that they still don’t understand how to “scan” a poem. Scanning poetry for stressed and unstressed syllables to find patterns within a work of literature can be particularly confusing for a non-native speaker of English, especially when their primary experience with the language is reading rather than hearing it spoken or performed. Although I have been taught scansion many times, the practice never clicked with me.
Often taught as the gold standard of iambic pentameter are Shakespeare’s works, whose sonnets and plays are written consistently in iambic pentameter: da-DUM. da-DUM. da-DUM. da-DUM. da-DUM. For years, I forced the rhythm of iambs across pages only to learn that many works were considered in form but contained minor variations. For instance, the penultimate foot in the opening line of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” is “of love.” The line is “If music be the food of love, play on.” The adjacent, unstressed paired syllables in the penultimate foot alter the expected iambic pattern into a pyrrhic foot, or two unstressed syllables. The pyrrhic foot offers a playful pause before the declarative “play on.” The speaker sets the tone for the unexpected, and that’s what we should take from scansion.
In school, we learned about poetic meter by reading and scanning writing by Milton, Frost, or Poe because curricula favored the iambic rhythm, explained as a rising meter, a syllable that begins unstressed and rises to a stressed syllable. Iambic meter is often described as resembling the sound of a beating heart. Thus, written as da-DUM, an unstressed sound (breve) followed by a stressed sound (macron) to form one iamb. But this visual map of Sonnet XIV by John Donne, offering the syllabic patterns in each line, reveals metrical variations that can occur throughout a poem.
Source: Patrick Gillespie, Vermont Poet Blog.
To scan a poem, you must identify a consistent, measurable pattern. Yet even in Donne’s poem, two or three lines have consistent iambic patterns. Two or three lines out of fourteen is more than enough to be inconsistent.
When I got stuck and encountered a deviation in a poem’s rhythm and meter, I would exhaust myself, unable to tame my wild tongue. In those classrooms, the forms felt like an act of erasure, and no one could explain them to me on my terms. Our education on the subject has been flawed. The patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are inherent to English and other stress-timed languages like German, Russian, or Dutch, where sounds are divided into syllables of varying duration. In contrast, syllable-timed languages like Spanish maintain more equal syllable lengths.
A few years ago, I taught a poetic forms class online for the first time. I agreed to teach this type of workshop only if I were given enough time to read anything I could find about language and form to understand what had kept me from writing poetic forms all these years. Like most of us, I learned about language and its many forms from three or four canonical texts: Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Shakespearean sonnets and plays (which first autocorrected to slays—and it was correct), Beowulf. It took getting to graduate school to learn that Old English is considered a foreign language with its own spelling and pronunciation. That’s incredible!
When I teach my students about poetic forms, we first explore the nuances of overlapping sounds and dialects before analyzing any poem. Of course, we manipulate these sounds through elision, slurring, or mumbling, which is where the incongruity begins. But we begin with the schwa. The schwa is the most common vowel sound in English: an unstressed sound represented by what looks like an upside-down “e”: /ə/. When you read it, the schwa makes an “uh” sound, as in about, brother, family, and cotton. Through the process of elimination, the schwa, distinct from a stressed sound, can serve to unlock a line’s rhythm and meter.
The schwa felt like a forced silence, and it led me to focus on the inherent rhythm of language, shifting my attention from prescriptive rules to how meaning is conveyed through sound and silence. I understand language with more precision, and every time I teach, I learn something more about it. Many of the formal works my students have written in class have been published, which makes me proud and confident that I am doing something right.
Ruben Quesada is a poet, translator, and editor. He edited the landmark anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, which received the Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. His poetry collections, including Next Extinct Mammal, and Brutal Companion, have garnered widespread critical acclaim. His writing and criticism have been featured in prestigious publications such as The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Guernica, Seneca Review, and Harvard Review. Ruben is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago.