Metric integration

Or why I like to try to write in metric forms.

Annie Finch, “In Defense of Meter,” from The Body of Poetry. Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self:

Meter, more than any other linguistic possibility open to us, can play a key role in integrating our two minds by allowing the unconscious tools of physical rhythm an integral role in the development of our most conscious creation, meaningful language. Perhaps the prejudice against meter that shapes so much contemporary literary debate is based, in part, on a fear of opening to these forces, of losing control of the conscious mind. But the unconscious, as we know all too well, will find its way to the surface, and it is safer when it does so in a context of open acceptance. Meter, in the most basic physical way, releases illogical energy and brings it into coaction with the rational part of the mind, creating a synergy that might seem badly needed today—a balance between conscious and unconscious power that perhaps composes what we sense as sanity. [p.156]

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