Dancing the Line Between Anapests and Cretics....

What makes a syllable tip?

Here’s a little conversation that happened recently in Meter Magic Spiral, about my “Invocation to the South,” with Wisconsin poet Katrina Serwe.

I thought it might be of interest, especially to those who followed Poetry Witchery’s earlier thread about Cretics. That discussion, and our months writing Cretics in the Spiral since then, have led to some wonderful, pioneering poems in this meter of the Dark Goddess. In fact, Cretics evolved from a most obscure meter in which my network could only find four poems in English—by Shakespeare, Blake, myself, and Autumn Newman—into the most popular meter for many in the Spiral!

In this conversation, Katrina is wondering whether my flagship anapestic poem might really be Cretics after all…and, she does have a point!

Her post opens with