Axon: Creative Explorations

This collaborative essay is adapted from a conference presentation by poets Emilie Collyer and Miriam Wei Wei Lo. There are two anchoring texts under discussion: poems by Lo and Collyer that are in close conversation with each other (Collyer’s poem is about gendered violence, Lo’s is about domestic violence). Collyer and Lo explore the unique ways in which poetry, as a form of creative writing, can bear witness to suffering. They pay particular attention to the strategies available in poetry that make it possible to enter into the paradox of speaking about what is rendered unspeakable by trauma. Collyer focuses on the poetic line, double poetic voice, and the possibilities for use of space on the page. Lo focuses on the fragment, sequential constraint (like the numbered stanza), and figurative language. The writers draw on a range of theories that connect poetry to ways of bearing witness to human suffering: including poetic inquiry as social justice, poetry as a practice of sacred lament, and broader feminist approaches to writing.

How do you scan a line of poetry? This creative-critical essay explores the faultlines opened up by this simple, but dangerous, question from the perspective of a poetry-writing practice and pedagogy. It argues for a distinction between metre and rhythm, then proposes that quarrels over scansion often come down to different assumptions about which metrical system is in use. The paper demonstrates this by examining the contradictory positions of canonical heavyweights Robert Hass and Gerard Manley Hopkins on the matter of the dactyllic foot. This paper goes on to outline a few challenges and strategies in teaching poetic metre to beginner poets. It considers the difficult task of discerning what ‘sounds right’ in a poem, using Annie Finch’s theories of metre and meaning to prompt reflective questions for the practicing poet. While an app or digital tool that could scan oral readings of poetry would be useful (both for pedagogy and practice), this essay contends that attentiveness to metre and rhythm is primarily a discipline of the body.