Here's what I think's going on: Jonathan Mayhew almost understands the relationship of meter to rhythm, Kasey Mohammad is less clear, and Ron Silliman either doesn't have a clue or pretends he doesn't in the service of his polemics.
Jonathan gets it right when he says iambic verse "can be extraordinarily supple and flexible, almost infinitely variable," and when he remonstrates with Pound that the "metronome is a device for measuring tempo, not rhythm." I suspect he was just being careless when he confused them in the next sentence:
... the tempo of the iambic pentameter is marvelously malleable. It does stiffen up a bit with Dryden and Pope, of course, but is quite free both before and after: from Chaucer to Milton, and from Wordsworth to Browning.
Pope's rhythms are almost absolutely regular, but the canonical example of how tempo can vary in a pentameter line is from Pope's "Essay on Criticism":
When Ajax strives, some Rocks' vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.
Elsewhere Jonathan shows that he knows the difference. But Donne's versification is more regular than he implies, and that of the best metrical poets today (including many of the New Formalists) is more subtle. It's telling that Jonathan doesn't mention, either in his comments here or on his blog (I'm sure he'll tell me if I'm wrong), that the rhythm of pentameter depends on a firmly established meter--just as, in jazz, it's the drummer's steady tap on the high-hat that allows the soloist to play with time, it's speech played across the meter that creates the poem's rhythm. In this sense meter is like a metronome.
Jonathan writes "if [people of the 18th century] were reading John Donne out loud, they would put the stress on syllables that weren't really stressed in ordinary speech ... they had pretty much lost the ability to hear Donne's rhythms." The second part's right, but the first illustrates a confusion Jonathan may share with those 18th century folks: metrical stress is only active within a foot, and a metrically stressed syllable may actually receive less spoken stress than the adjacent metrically unstressed syllable of another foot: "and your / quaint hon/or turn / to dust" (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"). I haven't heard Jonathan read Dana Gioia or Sam Gwynn, but I have heard them read, and I suspect he does to their poems what he rightly tells us people of the 18th century did to Donne's: "stress words unnaturally."
And I'm sure that's what happens when Kasey reads them. I don't know any other way to make sense of this (from an email to me quoted by permission):
Hardy's generation exhausted regular iambic measure, and did us all a
big favor. Later poets who worked effectively in iambs or something
like them--Yeats, Auden, Stevens--had some success because they were
able to make their work *allude* to iambic rhythms rather than beat
them out with mallets. Tate, Ransom, Wilbur, Larkin, etc.: basically
skillful in the old forms, but dry as dust. Irrelevant. Dead-enders.
Actually, there is another way to make sense of it, if it had been written by Ron Silliman, who wrote "Like rhyme or the tub-thumping metrics of iambic pentameter, the form insinuates a vision of unmediated & harmonious existence that is patently a lie," and this:
This is where my impatience with the aesthetic passivity of younger post-avant writers &, in this case, editors just starts to boil over. In 2003, with literally hundreds of interesting & accomplished post-avant poets of all stripes actively publishing & reading, why would any journal--& I do mean any--rely on submissions to shape what it will publish?? It's one thing to accept interesting work that does show up when & as it does, but quite another to depend on it to create your own editorial statement. A journal that hasn't gone out & actively solicited a good portion--75 percent or more--of what appears in its pages can hardly speak of having an "aesthetic vision" beyond opening the mail.
Silliman has an agenda (he calls it a "vision"), and he will do what he needs to do to promote it. I'm not a church-going person, and I don't think I'm going to be reading his sermons anymore. The link will stay.
I've added a link to Jonathan's thoughtful blog. Kasey had some very interesting things to say that I wasn't able to address here. If the creek don't rise, I will do so later this week.
10:29:17 PM 
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