My bad. I read that once, but it is a myth according to Google. Nevertheless, ordinary speech is closer to iambic than any other meter. However, who wants to be ordinary?
I heard this myth about ordinary speech and decided to get to the bottom of it during my time as a graduate student at Stanford. Over a period of two years I had extensive conversations with some of the eminent prosodists in the linguistics department there, including Paul Kiparsky, Kristin Hanson, and others in the Linguistics Colloquium, about the question of whether iambic meter is more "natural" to the English language--spoken or written--than any other meter.
The answer that emerged was a conclusive "no." According to these experts, there is nothing in the structure, lexicon, or grammar of English that makes iambic meter more natural than any other. This finding made sense given my own experience reading and writing poems in English--and it became key to my book The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse and to my poetry and criticism ever since, as many posts on Poetry Witchery make clear.
I see from your substack that you write often in noniambic meters, so I guess that will not be a surprise to you either.
My bad. I read that once, but it is a myth according to Google. Nevertheless, ordinary speech is closer to iambic than any other meter. However, who wants to be ordinary?
Hello Ryan,
I heard this myth about ordinary speech and decided to get to the bottom of it during my time as a graduate student at Stanford. Over a period of two years I had extensive conversations with some of the eminent prosodists in the linguistics department there, including Paul Kiparsky, Kristin Hanson, and others in the Linguistics Colloquium, about the question of whether iambic meter is more "natural" to the English language--spoken or written--than any other meter.
The answer that emerged was a conclusive "no." According to these experts, there is nothing in the structure, lexicon, or grammar of English that makes iambic meter more natural than any other. This finding made sense given my own experience reading and writing poems in English--and it became key to my book The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse and to my poetry and criticism ever since, as many posts on Poetry Witchery make clear.
I see from your substack that you write often in noniambic meters, so I guess that will not be a surprise to you either.
Best wishes, Annie
Hi Ryan, Thanks for your comment! I'm curious whence the idea that "60 percent of English speech is iambic." Do you have a citation for this? Annie