(Normally I cross post the full post from substack, but in this case substack has significantly better poetry formatting, so just quoting the introduction)

During my Christmas break, I found a doorway into the structure and intricacies of english poetry: the book "Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry" by Brad Leithauser.

I had read english verse before, and skimmed a couple of books about poetry. But Rhyme's Rooms entranced me by its focus on methodological questions: what are poets aiming for, which issues and constraints do they run into, what tricks and setups and techniques have they developed to handle these challenges.

Here's a sure sign that this book unlocked some new shards of understanding: before, whenever I read a formal english poem, I liked it or I didn’t, but I couldn't start making sense of how it worked, or mine some greater depth; now I see inklings of patterns I've heard about, sometimes catching a structure or an effect that would have escaped me beforehand. And where I had a vague feeling that poetry was interesting and worth digging into, I now own a rudimentary and high-level map delineating vast swaths of methods and their relations to other methods in various fields.

So I'm sharing some of these methodological reflections here, in a couple of posts. This is the first one, centered on meter (the formal structure of lines of poetry) and its role for empowering the poet.