As I said in my last post, the English metrical foot is dead. But the death of the English metrical foot is the unspoken cliché of contemporary modernist or 'postmodernist' American poetry. 'Unspoken', as in addictive denial: that is to say, the contortions of present modernist American metrics are based on the unspeakable fact that we cannot, at any cost, have any semblance of the old foot in our poetics. The result is a 'poetry' worse in its prosody than the most denatured and artificial prose. The 'poet' who can arrange some cryptic suggestion of music without resorting to the straight historical foot now receives the places of honor in the more revered commercial periodicals, and perhaps in the little magazines as well (although I speculate on this last, since I do not read them).
            Eliot allowed - and Pound instructed in - a modified residue of the Elizabethan that persisted into mid-century, so that Lowell could speak of his 'workmanlike prosody'. But that day is done, except for a kind of earth tone or slightly oceanic rhythm in longer narratives - particularly translations. And within the frame of the shrunken prosody of the day, we have had something of a return to lyricism, insofar as we can have 'lyricism' as a kind of magical transference, something like the screen projection of a movie, where the rhythms and harmonies are implied from a great distance through an otherwise dead and disinterred prose.
            The foot is dead: long live the foot. Until we return to the foot, we will not have poetry again. That is, the American language retains the stress factor. In poetry, what changed with modernism is the shift from English to American. The English roots are Anglo-Saxon, although the Norman leavened both the language and the prosody, the French decasyllabic added a foot, and the Italians inculcated an ideal of common speech.
            But American began in plainstyle, and the narrowing prosody became susceptible to influences, perhaps the predominant being African. Plainstyle flattened the prosody. The African gave it a new music.
            Plainstyle - a corollary of the religious revolution of Puritanism and essentially an intellectual 'reduction' of the language - not only shed neoclassical references and the ornately structured, Latinate sentence, it also stepped away from the highly inflected Elizabethan prosody, whether prose or verse. Thus, in the American language, quantity emerged as the rival of stress, not only for determining values in both sound and meaning, but also for determining the basal measure. And the African factor amplified the change.
            Sometimes I think it's the prophecy of Daniel: south and north pushing against each other: times and time and time and a half. Time and again, the uninflected or quantitative values of the Romance languages softened the Nordic slamming of the lance butts. And then, in America, the African broke the rhythmic pattern into a rainbow, a spectrum of rhythmic possibilities unimaginable in Europe.
            The quantitative flexibility of the foot - rising and falling according to meaning as well as sound, expanding and contracting by an indeterminate syllable count - is an essential grounding feature. But the new rhythms still depend, in part, upon the stress factor, and the rhythmic repetition of the stress factor; although now with a variation of subsidiary stresses, a syncopation in which the primary stresses shift from foot to foot, secondary stresses emerging into primary and receding again, or altering suddenly.
            The new prosody reads more softly than the old, as a general rule. A slamming chant always seems 'stronger'. But strength, anger and violence are all of a single chord. The root of trauma is dream. And desire knows a wider field.
            Being a pale northerner, of course, and perhaps the final detritus of legitimate plainstyle forebears, my music tends to the equally pale and narrow. But, once one divests one's self of the modernist and postmodernist artifices, it's not hard to see, not so much the future, as the present reality of poetics. While hip-hop, so-called, bespeaks a certain truth, the liberation of anger, in poetry, can be traced to the most Euro of Euro-American poets. So the hip-hop claims for ghetto origins are ersatz. And the substance is evanescent. Every bright sophomore can find one good throwaway poem in anger. But hip-hop is built on the beat. And the syncopated language is a real poet's anger at the idiocy that passes for poetry in the land of the self-styled sophisticates, who think that Egon Schiele bested Picasso and Pollock and Basquiat bested them both.