Hayden Carruth's "Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey," which I posted Sunday, is a jazz poem not just because it centers on a jazz session but because syncopation is its primary rhythmic effect.
The loose 3-beater (if you want 4 beats in line 12 or 2 in line 19 I won't argue much, but it's not free verse) begins with 3 strong trochees, the drummer clicking it off, and immediately mixes things up, shifting the beat along the line but never losing it. The full stops in line 4 help hold that "And" at the end, a kind of metrical promotion, setting up line 5's trochaic return and the shift to the "limping / treble roll" that even manages to make "the" work as a line ending. In a free-verse poem, this is usually a way to force emphasis onto the remainder of the noun-phrase; in a metrical poem it's almost unthinkable except in strict syllabics and comic poems; but here it's part of a continuing rhythmic surge, bringing the beat back to the one in the next line for the session finish on the first punctuation internal to the line since Hank started going. The rest of the poem relaxes, like the players, with many internal pauses until the rush of the penultimate line (I really don't mind 2 beats here) and the perfect final iambic line, ending, as the poem began, on a strongly stressed syllable. That "tonight" is made even stronger by the near rhymes (never/were fine/tonight) closing things out.
It's really hard to work like this, and Carruth does it over and over, seemingly effortlessly.
4:24:26 PM
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