I'd Like to Buy the World a Koch

I started reading David Lehman's The Last of the Avant-Garde mostly for the John Ashbery, but I have to admit that the O’Hara and Koch have been revealing. There’s been some talk about Perloff and pentameter from many usual suspects like the sphere and the meterman and a new guy and whoever and ohyeahhim and an unusual one, (personally I think the formalist reaction has been a bit high schoolish, like catching a much-despised teacher inflagrante delicto) so this section of Koch’s “The Art of Poetry” is I think relevant.

As to whether or not you use rhyme and how “modern” you are
It is something your genius can decide on every morning
When you get out of bed. What a clear day! Good luck at it!
Though meter is probably, and rhyme too, probably, dead
For a while, except in narrative stanzas. You try it out.
The pleasure of the easy inflection between meter and these easy vocable lines
Is a pleasure, if you are able to have it, you are unlikely to renounce.

There’s something for both sides here. But I think it’s significant that Koch uses the word “probably” twice, but I also think those two last lines are perceptive (although I suspect he is tweaking a metrical nose or two with that double your easy pleasure.) I always loved reading Frost, those “easy vocable lines”, but never understood meter myself, until I read Timothy Steele’s book.

I used it as a text book in an adult education class I taught on form and I saw poets write proficiently in meter who had never got it before themselves. If one paragraph in the entire book is key, it is this one: “In this respect we may think of iambic lines as mountain ranges. Peaks and valleys alternate. But every peak is not an Everest, and every valley is not a Grand Canyon.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is I get it now and am unlikely to renounce it (although I’m sure I’ll experiment.) But I’m not a proselytizing fundamentalist. And I’m not going to snicker at someone who tripped over her feet. Like one of my favorite metricists once sang:

I never asked for your crutch.
Now don't ask for mine.