One note: I only agree with some the opinions about poetic meters
expressed by the narrator of this poem.

          A Metrical Manifesto

                    Peter Shor


I am sick of iambic pentameter,
And of dactyls and anapests, too.
But modern free verse doesn’t move me, either.
How I long to find a poetic meter that is entirely new!

Long ago, we liked alliterative verse:
The consonants chorusing, creating a link
Between the words within each line.
But nowadays it’s neglected: nobody writes in it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins notably
Invented a brand-new meter for his poetry:
Sprung rhythm. His poems are so beautiful that they
Are still remembered and recited to this day,
But he never explained what the rules were;
I must surely be doing it wrong here.
Even his friend Robert got it wrong, although
I like that poem where he tried it: London Snow.

Dipodic feet that gallop, but are devilish hard to write,
Might make a good alternative, though somehow they seem slight.
The syllables form groups of four; each group contains two feet:
Iambic with some extra stress on every other beat.

I could try haiku,
Delicate little flowers —
In English they wilt.

Then there’s the octosyllable,
From the French: you count up to eight,
Letting the stress fall where it will.
The French believe iambs sound great
Between lines that anapests fill.
This gives their verse variety:
The meter is always in flux.
Try this in English poetry,
And you might discover it sucks.

I think what I need to do
Is borrow from the French
The idea of rhythmic variety,
And write something a bit
Like free verse used to be
When Amy Lowell and T.S. Eliot
Were writing it,

Before it became
prose that is broken
irregularly into
lines at points
that I often don’t see
the reasons for, and where
the only poetic
elements remaining
are striking images
and creative metaphors.