I'm finally, after a year, able to do work at work, so I've been missing a lot of blogging, both good and bad. One example of each on the same subject has been the discussion between Greg Perry and Jonathan Mayhew on English prosody. Jonathan just doesn't get it, and if Clark Coolidge thought he was writing metrical poetry, neither did he: Greg was right from the beginning and had no need for even the slight backtracking that he did.
In English accentual-syllabic poetry, three unstressed syllables in a row cannot occur. If you read a line that way, you're reading it wrong — and you're on opiates. It's not a matter of "saving" the meter by counting secondary stresses: that is the way English speakers naturally speak, and you can see it on an oscilloscope ( you can see elision on a scope, too). On the other hand, while in a metrical poem those secondary stresses sometimes have slightly more emphasis than in ordinary speech, it's just as unnatural to elevate them to the level of the primary stresses, which is where I think Silliman's preposterous "tub-thumping" comes in.
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"Veritably unimpressive" has at least three and probably four stresses and two possible elisions ("Veri" and "bly un") for a maximum of 2 countable unstressed syllables in a row. There's no need to invent chimerical scansions for the phrase. In a strongly iambic poem it could occur at the beginning of a line or after a caesura as a trochaic substitution with elision (dactylic if you must) in the first position :
VERita / bly UN / imPRES / sive (XXXX or feminine ending)
Although medial iambs are rare in English trochaic verse, if strongly supported by the rest of the poem it might be possible to scan it like this:
VERi / taBLY / UNim / PRESsive.
But the mere fact that we can apply a scansion to the words is not enough. While it is often useful to make up scannable lines as examples, no group of words, however regularly its stresses are spaced, is metrical except in the context of a metrical poem.
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In one extraordinary poem, Tennyson, perhaps the most skilled metrist ever to write in English, managed (twice, but with the same line both times) to write three successive metrically stressed syllables. But notice how much he does to make it work:
First, the line's three words are all the same monosyllable ("break," of course), beginning with a voiced plosive into a long vowel and ending with unvoiced glottal stop. There really aren't many options in reading that line.
He used short lines, which are more metrically stable and can handle more variation than the pentameter. In this poem, though no two adjacent lines are metrically identical (I was wrong), all but two are three-stressed: the third lines of stanzas three and four (the last) are tetrameter. That last stanza begins with the opening line of the poem.
That makes the last stanza a kind of prosodic miniature of the whole poem: mollosus, trimeter, tetrameter, trimeter.
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While Tennyson's poem is wonderfully managed het-met, only Procrustes could make Clark Coolidge's "Light As Mica Broken" metrical. It's difficult to write much English without occasionally producing mostly iambic-feeling sentences, and the preponderance of iamb-like syllable groups in the piece is evidence only that Coolidge wrote in English, or, at any rate, a simulacrum thereof. But "Light As Mica Broken" is no more metrical than it is sense-making or evocative or anything but crap — fodder for bad dissertations, perhaps, but not poetry.
Update, July 13: I shouldn't blog after bedtime. Neither dactyl to iamb nor trochee to anapest are possible combinations in English metrical verse, and the only way to fit "veritably umimpresssive" into an iambic line is with elision. In this case, even that's ugly.
9:58:12 PM 
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