One more paragraph from Mary Kinzie's "The Rhapsodic Fallacy" :
Free verse has been the great equalizer, the great democratizer of poetic speech, liberating it to utter the small impression in homely language, but at the same time creating its own built-in obstacle to the registering of leisurely and complex idea, and that obstacle is the ad hoc proscription on rhythm—the requirement that prosody, and the arguments that the prosody might bear, need to be recreated spontaneously and energetically at every point.
Poets and students of poetry have naturally focused on those rhythmic tools peculiar to the art, which can create the impression, as Kinzie does above, that for them the rhythms of poetry are completely described in discussions of meter.* Alice Fulton offers a passionate corrective to that impression in her essay "Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Electric" (also reprinted in Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry); unfortunately, she displays a poor understanding of the nature of meter and a worse understanding of the science and math she uses to support her attack on a position virtually no one holds.
Fulton begins by noting "a critical outburst against the 'formlessness' of much contemporary poetry," identifying the source of that outburst in a "narrow notion of form, based largely on a poem's use of regular meter," and offering an alternative definition of form from J. V. Cunningham, of all people**: "that which remains the same when everything else has changed. … The form of the simple declarative sentence is the same in each of its realizations." From that definition she arrives at this astonishing claim:
Hence, by changing the content of any free verse poem while retaining (for example) its irregular meter and stanzaic length, one can show its form. And if a poem's particular, irregular shape were used again and again, this form might eventually be given a name, such as "sonnet."
To begin with, meter is just the superposition of some more or less regular pattern[s] of some language feature[s] over the ordinary patterns of speech. A metrical pattern must be perceptible, but not so obtrusive that it overwhelms the ordinary perception of language through listening or reading, nor so complex or subtle that either composer or audience must pay primary attention to it in order to perceive it at all. That is the reason that speakers of different languages use different kinds of meters: quantitative verse doesn't work in English and accentual-syllabic verse doesn't work in French.
Given that, what could the "irregular meter" of a free verse poem possibly mean? What features would count? How closely would which patterns within a given line or through a series of lines have to match before two poems could be said to have the "same" form? Let's try an example, one of my favorite poems, from Denise Levertov:
O Taste and See
The world is
not with us enough.
O Taste and See
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
Many wonderful technical things happen in this poem, especially in Levertov's use of the line break, but what can be said about meter? Oh, it can be scanned, but would another poem, scannable in exactly the same way, be recognized as such without going through the effort of scansion? Not likely—there's too much variation from line to line in word, syllable, and stress counts, and no pattern to that variation. Would it be enough to say "shortish lines, with from one to five stresses each in no particular pattern"? How is that different from saying "short-lined free verse"?
Of course that doesn't mean Levertov's poem, or free verse in general, has no rhythmic structure, and Fulton's on more solid ground when she turns from meter to other sources of rhythm and structure. The problem is that nothing in her long and admirable catalog, except enjambment, is specific to poetry***, and none of it is ignored by serious poets of any kind. In fact, Mary Kinzie, in the paragraph following the one I quoted at the top, laments that both poetry and prose have "less command over, because less acquaintance with, the reasoning, the rhetoric, and the distinctions that were basic equipment for poets in the great age of prose …. As a result, to ask as Ezra Pound did that poetry be at least as well written as prose is no longer to insist on the excellence of either kind of writing."
I've gone on at least long enough, but Fulton's misuse and misunderstanding of physics demands at least a token response. Modern physics has not "smashed Newton's mechanistic clockwork" but shown its boundaries—and almost everything we do happens within those boundaries. Einstein's wish for "a theory which represents things themselves and not merely the probability of their occurrence" has no discernible relation to Williams' "No ideas but in things." That "[we] now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks," like Schroedinger's Cat, is a demonstration of the incompleteness of quantum theory, not a fact about the world. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle limits only simultaneous measurement of certain coupled quantities and only at quantum scales, and has no conceivable application to poetry other than as a trope, another way of making meaning. Richard Feynman's remark on the incomprehensibility of quantum physics has no bearing on whether we can comprehend what matters in poetry, which is how it is be human. Finally, are there any poems more fractal in nature than the Divine Comedy or The Canterbury Tales?
*In English, meter (not necessarily accentual-syllabic) and the line break once distinguished verse rhythm from prose rhythm. Today the line break alone bears that burden. And yes, that means James Tate doesn't write much poetry anymore. He's still fun to read.
**Here is Cunningham's "For My Contemporaries":
How time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.
But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,
Despise me not,
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.
***Fulton's quite right that not enough attention is paid to line breaks and enjambment. I spent most of last December arguing that enjambment has very different rhythmic effects in free as opposed to metrical verse, and at West Chester this year Christian Wiman devoted a good part of his workshop to the rhetorical effect of enjambment.
9:25:08 PM 
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