Qualified Ghost: Iambic Pentameter in Contemporary American Prosody

“Qualified Ghost” asks why poets writing after the dawn of the so-called “free verse revolution” cannot relinquish iambic pentameter. Though non-metrical poetry is now the norm and poets are reluctant to claim any affiliation with a form increasingly associated with elitism and obscurity, poets and theorists since Eliot have imagined spectral pentameters lurking in every corner of their verse. Rather than determining whether meter deserves exorcism or invites séance, this dissertation develops a rich metrical vocabulary with which to articulate how, in ostensibly unmetered poetry, iambic pentameter haunts both the line and the syntactic unit, indexing poets’ unfolding thoughts and deepening their affective performances. With close attention to the ways that forms can carry or suppress the baggage of the irrepressible past, “Qualified Ghost” contributes to a wider conversation about what kind of cultural formation poetry is and to what extent meter—even in its absence—continues to shape understandings of what poetry can do.

The first chapter, “‘You don’t seem too haunted, but you haunted’: The Specter of Iambic Pentameter in Contemporary African American Sonnet Sequences,” explores why and how sonneteers tackling psycho-cultural terrain like the legacy of slavery invoke but sidestep meter the way they do. The chapter traces two dominant strains of ghost meter: enclosing metapentameters that sit at thresholds, in doorways, and across gates or fences in the work of Rita Dove, Kiki Petrosino, and Kevin Young; and iambic cudgels that, through figures for meter as a bodily beating, link patterns of violence and the violence of patterns in the work of Wanda Coleman, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Tyehimba Jess. That chapter concludes with a reading of Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which combines the two strains. My second chapter, “‘And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him’: Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, and Prosodies of Loss,” shows how, in two poems of mourning from the 1960s, the use of mixed rhythmic codes affords moments of uncanny recognition. These codes include “embedded pentameters” in the long lines of “Kaddish” and loose “freed verse” stanzas in “Crusoe in England.” Engaging the ghost meter metaphor in its confrontation with two distinct approaches to elegy, this chapter explores the affordances of prosodies that involve compulsive revenance and palpable presence-in-absence. My third chapter, “‘He held his arms out and embraced the air’: Expressive Spaces in the Post-Confessional Prosodies of Kay Ryan and Shane McCrae,” connects the impulse to cleave and puncture units of iambic pentameter through innovative lineation and spatial play to two popular poets’ efforts to work through idiosyncratic thought-feelings in the wake of post-confessionalism. Kay Ryan’s mid-meter enjambments generate rather than disrupt units of iambic pentameter, and her motifs of textured edges, revealing dislocations, and asymptotic arrivals reflect and deepen this prosody of ambivalent self-disclosure, in which “split pentameter” plays a vital role. In relation to the motifs of memory holes, aerated spaces, and temporary dismemberment that suffuse Shane McCrae’s oeuvre, meanwhile, his visual caesurae, which correspond spatially to the audible syllable counts of each line, offer a certain uncertainty that reflects his interrelated theories of trauma and holiness; I call this prosody “porous pentameter.”

Throughout, these readings aim not merely to practice the mimesis-informed kinds of interpretation that inhere in such motifs, but also to elucidate the diffuser ways that phantom pentameters alter the pace, structure, voice, and tone of poems to make them what they are. “Qualified Ghost” lavishes attention on the ghostly presence of this one meaning-laden metrical form, iambic pentameter, in order to study and celebrate the poems in which it appears, in all their cultural, political, emotional, and formal complexity.