Finding the Goddess in Patriarchal Meter

Meter Magic Journey Continues in Iambics

Sarasvati, Goddess of Wisdom and Poetry, painting by Ania Aldrich

Your forest goes as green as love.
Your night is sadness well-contained,
and oceans, lost because they are vast,
make tides with your evaporate rain.

This is the last stanza of a poem dear to my heart, which I wrote for my husband Glen before we were married about 40 years ago (and which I have felt at various times is also addressed to the earth, to the Goddess, and to my mother!). It will have a place of honor in my newly finished book of poems, in the iambic section of the book.

It is no coincidence that is in iambs.

Of all the six meters that I teach in my Meter Magic Journey class and Meter Magic Spiral community, iambs were the trickiest for me to reclaim (not to learn--that honor goes to anapests!). So many of us find this meter particularly tricky for precisely the reason that it is so familiar to every speaker of English (and once you develop an ear for meter, you will be shocked by how prevalent it is in free verse). This has nothing to do with iambic meter being “natural,” as so many of us mistakenly believe. Iambic is the dominant meter for historical-cultural reasons, and if you know my work on “the metrical code” in The Ghost of Meter, you know that I have even called iambic pentameter the “patriarchal meter.”

But that doesn't mean we can ignore it. Iambic is one of the Five Goddess Languages, the meter of the Mind. The Five Goddess Languages are all parts of our sacred Whole and it's impossible to just skip over one of them and decide we don't need it. So how can we take this meter which has been such a tool of oppression and silencing of women, workers, and people of color, and honor the necessary Goddess powers that lie hidden within it?

On this Sunday May 18, at 11 am PT/2 pm ET, we will find out. We will look at iambic meter as a site of unconscious domination and as a site of conscious liberation. We will learn to hear, feel, and scan this all-important English meter in poems from John Milton to Gwendolyn Brooks, to awaken its hidden Goddess glories, and to write in ways that will free our minds into their most sacred clarity. Each participant will also have the option to workshop a poem in this meter. For those interested to attend, here is the registration link.

And either way, I will look forward to sharing some of our discoveries with you here in Poetry Witchery!