A Search for Cretics—Meter of the Dark Goddess

How I came to need poems in a mysterious meter that flies deep under the radar...

Please Note: This search for cretics has been successfully completed; I am no longer actively seeking cretics. That said, it’s always great to see good poems in any meter. Subscribers to Poetry Witchery are always welcome to post!

Auden once wrote, “Every poet has his [sic] dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.” For the next ten days, my dream Substack reader will keep an eye out for a prosodic entity even more (yes!) rare than these: good poems in cretic meter, written anywhere, anytime, by anyone.

And we only have a week or so to find them.

The deep, mysterious cretic meter is the newest, and I think likely the last, addition to the Metrical Compass. It’s so new I have not yet added its image to the graphic. When added, the cretic shares the Center direction with the amphibrach ( u / u) and looks like the inverse of it: a wand surrounded by two cups instead of the other way around (/ u /):

I have come to find cretics the meter of the Dark Goddess. I will save discussion of all these witchier, goddess-thealogical aspects for a future post, because the situation is time-sensitive and I want to get this post out. What’s the urgency?

Meter Magic Spiral, my meter-learning space within Poetry Witchery Community, focuses on reading, discussing, scanning, and writing a different meter each month for five months. In the past, each sixth month used to be devoted to something new and different—what I called a “stretch meter.” For March 2024, at the suggestion of the brilliant poet Autumn Newman who was acting as a mentor to members of the Spiral, we committed to cretics as the stretch meter. Only problem: when I hastily agreed to the idea months before, in the middle of many other things, I assumed Autumn knew of a cache of poems in cretics.

And guess what, she must have assumed that I knew of such a cache also . . .

In fact, I knew of only one poem in the world in cretics, “Lammas Chant,” which I wrote decades ago as part of my Wheel of the Year series, and later included as the lone example of the meter in Measure for Measure. The only reason I had tackled cretics in the first place was that I had committed myself to using a different meter for each poem in the Wheel of the Year series, and the witches among us will know that that meant I needed eight. So I wrote my Lammas poem in cretics — and turned out to be so glad I did, because it’s a glorious, compelling, deep meter that seems to pull me down into a whole new aspect of Spirit!)

And now twenty years later, after I had agreed to Autumn’s exciting suggestion to use cretics as our meter for the month of March in Meter Magic Spiral. I wote to ask her to send me the cretic poems she had in mind. She said that “Lammas Chant” had inspired her to write a poem in cretics of her own — and that was the only other cretic poem she knew.

Luckily Autumn’s cretic poem was kickass, but that meant I only had two poems in cretics for the Seed Poems that form the backbone and inspiration for each month’s beautiful meter adventure in the Spiral. Then another meter expert in the Spiral, poet Diane Lee Moomey, told me about a couple of other classic examples. Amazing! But still not enough.

So I put out a call for cretics. I reached out to my network via this substack and asked you all to help me build the cretic canon. I announcd that any metrically fluent cretics (regular meter, with few or no metrical substitutions) that any of you found or wrote would be considered for inclusion among our Seed Poems. You all came through and I received some wonderful poems in addition to those we had already (in addition to Autumn Newman’s which is still unpublished): Blake , Shakespeare (first four lines only), and Finch.

Thanks to all supporters of Poetry Witchery! The metrical adventure continues!

Yours in love, meter, and magic,