About dream poems...

I should confess something: None of the dream poems I've written recently were based on dreams I actually had. That includes "Weight of an Old Quilt," "Penguin Dreams," "Wreck of the Five Oh One." In all of these poems, the dream is a literary device.

I rarely remember my dreams. I wake up knowing I've dreamed, and maybe an image is left. Everything else is gone.

Remembering dreams is a trainable skill. For a while I kept a dream journal, and I got a lot better at remembering my dreams just by making the effort every day, and writing them down. But after about six months, I gave up. Because my dreams... were boring.

I feel a bit like, as a creative person, I'm supposed to have dreams that are, I don't know, somehow special. Surreal. Symbolic. No such luck! I apparently dream a lot about work, of all things-- and i love my job but it's not what I want to write about most of the time.

But a dream can be a useful device to introduce a mysterious or surreal poem as if it were something I had dreamt. And these poems are more fun than my actual dreams. In so far as I remember them. Maybe I just could never remember the best parts?

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

A lot of water under the bridge

So... a lot has happened in the last five years...

(Right?)

I'm not proposing to recap the last half-decade in detail. Especially not 2020, the year whose name is written on the walls of Hell. But I've been through a lot of growth as a poet, much of it linked to the events of the world, and it seems useful to take at least partial stock right now.

2016 and 2015 were my least productive years of poetry ever, since I begin writing in 2005. I wrote about 32 poems in each of those years. I know this because I keep my poems in folders by year, so all I have to do is see how many files are in each folder. There's occasional duplication, and once in a while I find a poem that I wrote and posted but never saved as a file - so the numbers aren't exact. But it's clear that those years are my low-water mark for productivity.

There are reasons: I was serving as president of OPA, which was a big draw on my time and energy (I finally stepped down in the fall of 2017). There was all kinds of bad stuff going on at work, which I won't go into now. But mainly, I had fallen away from the habit of writing. This is an observation I've made before, but it bears repeating: The more you write, the easier it is to write.

2016 of course ended with the election that brought us an unspeakable presidency from which we're just now emerging. Like a lot of people, I spent the last couple months of that year in a state of stunned depression, which was not conducive to writing. But 2017 kicked me into high gear. I felt the urgency to write: to respond, to resist. I turned out a lot of poems that year, and frankly a lot of them weren't great: sincere and passionate, but not great poems.

Interestingly, I wrote a lot of formal poems over the years between 2017 and 2020. Partly, it was because the exercise of form was a good way back into the habit of writing (it's how I got myself started writing poetry in the first place, and it worked just as well for a re-start). But it also had to do with the nature of protest writing. I'm always tempted to rant, and turn poems into laundry lists of everything bad that's happened in the last Twitter cycle. The discipline of form helped me stay on task with what this poem is about, and was a useful frame for emotions that threatened to overwhelm sense.

Meanwhile, my father passed away in 2018 and my mother in 2019. I spent most of the rest of 2019 writing the series of poems that are now published in my chapbook The Day of My First Driving Lesson.

Then came 2020. In March, my workplace closed down and I went to working from home (where I still am). This gave me a lot of free time, although I was working the same number of hours (or more - for the first couple of months, we all pulled a lot of extra time reinventing our jobs). My daily commute amounted to almost two hours that I now could spend writing. And the urgency was redoubled: I understood that I was living through a historical event, and that any record, no matter how incomplete, fragmentary, and personal it might be, was of value. So I started my plague journal, which is still ongoing.

Again, a lot of not so great poems. The value in them (if any) is in the immediacy.

And then came May, and George Floyd's death, and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that swept the world and lasted the rest of the year here in Portland. Yes, I was out there when I could manage it. And through it all, I wrote and wrote and wrote. It felt like life and death: it literally felt to me like if I stopped writing, I'd be dead.

Sometimes I wonder how any of us survived.

In November, when things had calmed down some (relelntless rain will actually do that!) I got a copy of Diane Lockward's book The Practicing Poet. Since we weren't going anywhere for Thanksgiving, I took myself on a little writing retreat, just me and the book. It really took my writing to a new level. The passion and the urgency are all still there, but the craft has firmed up under it. I aspire to, and sometimes actually reach, an effect that a friend once described as "elegant rage."

I should also mention that between the last few months of 2019 and (coming soon) the first half of 2021, I submitted, got acceptance for, and saw publication of two chapbooks and a full-lengh collection - Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable, The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and Dervish Lions, which will be coming out from Fernwood Press within the next few months. By poetry standards, that's phenomenal success! (And a pretty big ego-stroke). More importantly, I've received so much kind and generous input from friends and fellow-poets.

So my goal right now is to try to write about two poems per week for the rest of 2021. I feel like I can sustain both the craft and the urgency at that pace. By the end of 2021, if Allah wills, I should be ready to start assembling another manuscript and line-editing the poems that will go into it: primarily, poems from 2017 and later. I have some thoughts about organization, which may or may not survive first contact with the actual body of poems.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

That last poem...

It's a form called a "sidewalk sonnet," which is new to me. So-called because the original exemplar (what in my grad school entomology days we called the "type specimen") was about seeing primroses growing in a crack in the sidewalk. It's called "Primrose Path," by Mark Smith-Soto.

To me it looks more like a book cover, with the central couplet representing the spine. You can tell I grew up before e-readers.

The poem, by the way, does not do justice to its subject. Capilano Suspension Bridge Park is outside Vancouver BC, where the Capilano River cuts through a range of granite hills or small mountains on its way to meet the ocean in Vancouver Bay. The park is built in, around, and above the Capilano gorge, which is narrow and has spectacular vertical sides-- take it from someone who's grown accustomed to the sights of the Columbia.

But what makes Capilano truly magical is that a large part of the walkable area consists of catwalks and circular (donut-shaped) platforms suspended in the rainforest canopy. Because the gorge is so steep, a short climb from the rim gets you onto the level of the mid- and high-canopy branches of trees rooted lower down. Walking through those treetops was breathtaking, exhilarating; it really made me feel as if I could fly.

(Rain? Yes, of course it was raining. It was British Columbia. Oregon isn't the only place in the world that deserves to be made fun of about the rain.)

(Not recommended if you don't have a good head for heights.)

Honesty compels to me to admit I did not actually see a swan while I was there. Although it's not impossible, it seems unlikely that they would be attracted to water at the bottom of such a narrow gorge. I could be wrong, though.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

A note about sestinas, and my professional development

Sestinas really reward revision. Why? Well, they're long, for one thing: very few of my published poems go over one page, but the thirty-nine line sestina always does. A longer poem has more room for improvement.

With any repetition-based form, the trick is to not say the same thing over and over. I find that my sestina drafts often include some lines, using the same end word, that really do say pretty much the same thing. One of the tasks of revision is to identify those lines, and swap one or both out with a line that uses the right end word but says something definitely different.

The COVID sestina has less of a narrative through-line than a lot of my sestinas. Instead, it's strong on language. Anaphora and paralellism, to mention a couple of rhetorical devices: these are not new tricks for me, but I've definitely learned to use them more consciously.

Here are some of the resources that I've been developing:
The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics, edited by Diane Lockward
This book is the foundation of my ongoing writing retreat. The craft tips are not all that engaging for me, but the prompts are terrific.

The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase, by Mark Forsyth
Not specifically about poetry: examines the techniques of classical rhetoric. Many of these techniques are still in use in poetry - perhaps more so than in prose.

Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune
Recommended by my buddy Armin Tolentino. As the title suggests, this book looks at various kinds of turns that a poem can take, illustrated by "master" poems. It's not a writing primer, but should stimulate you to try to write a poem using a kind of turn you've never, or not often, used.

A reader alert to poetic techniques will notice that all of the above titles alliterate...

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Discipline and surrender

Can't believe it took me this long to figure it out: The discipline of this retreat is a form of surrender. Giving in to the requirements of the prompt.

Turning out some good poems, and some that are frankly practice pieces-- but that doesn't matter as much as the lasting effects I can see this will have. The next level, or at least a next level. Awareness of many more aspects of poems. Challenging to hold them all in my head at one time, while working on a poem: but then, that's what revisions are for, right?

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

And another thing

So Todd put me on to this site: Talk to Transformer

You type or paste in text, and "it" (a neural network, apparently) "completes" the text. Usually it gets cut off at a certain number of characters. Occasionally, it'll come to an apparent end.

It's crazy how good it is. It's actually a little scary.

It seems to recognize the difference between prose and poetry. Interestingly, it interpreted the first verse of a sonnet of mine as being part of a song. The content is... sometimes horrifyingly appropriate.

I fed it the first siz lines of this poem and here is what it came up with...


I step out into a rain-washed morning
cloth mask tucked in my pocket.

At quarter to seven the neighborhood is quiet.
First buds of the year on my rosebush.

Next door’s Dalmatian maybe died—
haven’t seen her in months, poor old thing.

We’re meeting at the pond where we once fished.

A line is runnin’ across its top.

Down below, the Feds are out.

Cops are everywhere.

Cars are being towed.

It’s funny that I can’t see them from my window.

The storm drains are clogged with muck and leaves and twigs.

The bodies have been picked up, and those of the kids have been loaded into vans.

I feel suddenly uneasy.

I’m shivering, my hands begin to shake, as if there were icy, frozen raindrops on them.

Can’t stop shaking.

The way I’


Sounds like a perfect summary of 2020, doesn't it? I suppose I could call this a found poem.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

What I did on my Thanksgiving staycation

Of course we're not going anywhere.

So, I am taking myself on a writing retreat of sorts. I have Diane Lockward's book, The Practicing Poet. I'm supposed to be reviewing it, but... I haven't actually been able to read all the way through it, because I keep wanting to stop and do the writing exercises!

My goal for Thanksgiving is to get through a couple of prompts per day. I'm not sure if it's going to work: I could get depleted. I have plenty of time, but there may not be enough duration in a long weekend. (For the difference between time and duration, see my other blog.

Two today so far. One of the poems, I'll post shortly. The other, maybe not.
Update: I've written eight poems in four days. It's been extremely fun, and at least of a couple of the poems are sound stuff. I'm prepared to declare this phase of the experiment a resounding success.

One of the issues I'm having to overcome is thinking "I already did that in a poem." That doesn't mean I can't use the same trick again, in a different poem. It's a bad old reflex from student days: I already did the exercise, and learned everything I need to from it. The point is not just about the learning, it's about the creating.

Having four days off to do nothing except write (Not that that's actually what happened! I went for a long wa;l, did yardwork, cleaned up around the house, etc.) is a luxury I won't often get. I don't expect to keep this pace. I'm going to try to work through one prompt per day during the work week: I think that's reasonable.

Books Available
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

More Fun with Word Power

Have I mentioned I get obsessive when I'm stressed?

Last (half) week was the start of school. Always a busy time in my work life-- and this year, there's so much extra to do and we're making it up just as fast we can.

Anyway...

For a long time, I've been wondering how my word usage compares to other poets'. Not to brag, but I have a really large effective vocabulary compared to most English users. (Pardon a brief trip down memory lane: When we got back from Tanzania, I was planning to apply for college. I studied for the SATs. My mother and I went to a bookstore and picked up a study guide. I chose the "intermediate vocabulary" study guide, assuming it would be the right place to start. My mother glanced through it, and without saying anything, put it back on the shalf and handed me the advanced guide.)

I know a lot of words, and I'm not afraid to use them. Especially, I'm not afraid to use them in poems.

Is that good or bad? See my earlier thoughts about Gene Wolfe, and "doing more with less." Short answer: I don't know. It's all in what you're trying to accomplish. I like words.

I found a couple of sites that will take a text document and give you some word usage stats. Wordlist Maker and Character Count. (Note: Character Count does not count the number of characters that appear in a piece of fiction. I was disappointed.) They give slightly different results, which doesn't surprise me: you can get slightly different word counts out of different releases of Microsoft Word. I suspect a lot has to do with how they interpret plurals, contractions, posessives and the like.

I ran four texts through both of the above: High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable, the manuscript for The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and the current state of the manuscript of Dervish Lions. (Note: Dervish Lions went to the publisher a couple of weeks back: there will be an editing and book design phase starting shortly.)

Both WM and CC give a total word count and a count of distinct words. CC's counts are consistently higher, but the ratio of distict words to total words, for each of my manuscripts, was very close to the same according to WM as according to CC. CC also gives a count of words that are used only once, and a count of "difficult" words (the site meant to be used educationally).

According to CC, the percent of words that are used only once is highest for Driving Lesson (66%) followed closely by High-Voltage (65%). Country Well-Known scored a little lower at 63%. Dervish Lions came in substantially lower, at 54%.

Which means what?

My guess is that this ratio will tend to drop as the piece of text gets longer. (I would try it on Drumheart, but it might take a long time to process such a big piece of text.) The longer a document is, the more likely any given word is to be repeated at least once. Dervish Lions is 68 pages (including title page, contents, etc.) That makes it twice as long as Country and High-Voltage, both at 34 pages. Also, both Country and High-Voltage also feature formal poetry with a high degree of repetition-- villanelles, sestinas, and pantoums-- which would drive the percent used only once down. So it makes sense that Driving Lesson would have the highest percent used only once, out of these texts.

CC scored Country substantially higher for "difficult" words. The other three texts scored 26 - 27% difficult words: Country scored 30%. Alas, CC did not tell me which words were considered difficult.

This still doesn't tell me anything about how my work compares to other poets' work. Unless I'm willing to retype an entire chapbook (to say nothing of a book!) and dump it into Character Count just out of curiosity...

Books Available
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Manuscript construction

Someone asked me recently about putting together a manuscript. I realized it's been a different process for each of my collections, but there are some common threads that I think are important principles.

Revised and updated... because the train of thought continued on past the station!

Ultimately, the selection and order of the poems in a manuscript is a matter of feeling. This should not mean it’s mysterious and inexplicable, nor that it’s random or unimportant. Most of this post will be about how a poet can train, or develop, informed feelings about the order of poems in a manuscript.

Largely this happens through play. Play with your poems and get as familiar as possible with them, as individual poems and as a group. Be particularly aware of how it feels to read each poem after just having read the (tentatively) previous poem. Did the previous poem “leave a taste in your mouth,” and if so, does that taste clash or meld nicely with the taste of the current poem? Neither is wrong! As long as you recognize that interaction, you can decide whether it serves the purpose of your manuscript.

Here are some helpful steps:

Have an idea of your target length. If you’re planning to submit to a particular publisher, check their guidelines. In general, a full-length collection is expected to be between 60 – 100 pages of poetry, which does not include title page, table of contents, section title pages, dedications or acknowledgements. Chapbooks are shorter, usually at least 15-20 pages. Check the guidelines before you submit, as the above are very variable.

Remember that your length guideline will usually be number of pages, not number of poems. (Double-check.) Typically, every poem gets at least a page to itself. Longer poems may occupy more than one page. Standard paperback pages (the format in which most poetry books are published) are narrower than an 8 ½ x 11 Word document page, so some poems that appear to fit on one page in this format may run over when published. For these reasons, your page count will generally be equal to or larger than your poem count, and you may not be able to tell exactly what it is.

Word allows you to create documents that have approximately the same proportions as a paperback page, which can help you check some of your longer poems and see if they run over. If you’d like to try this, go to Page Setup and use the settings below:

 

 

Print out the candidate poems: a necessary step for most of us. I’m as opposed to killing trees as most people, but I simply have not found a way to manage this process on screen—and I have a big monitor and a laptop screen to work with. Print out more poems than you expect to include: I suggest anywhere from a third to a half again as many (if you plan to include 60 poems, a third again as many would be 80, half again would be 90). If you do have multiple-page poems among your candidates, you may want to staple them together so that the pages don’t get scattered as you move piles around.

Start strong and end strong. Put a knockout poem up front and a knockout at the end. This applies both to the collection as a whole, and to sections within the manuscript if there are any.

The first poem or first few poems are important to get the reader hooked. But I actually believe the last poem, or perhaps the last few poems, are more important than the first few. Because that's what the reader will remember. They may or may not remember the actual poems, but the feeling they have when they close the book, that ahhh... Nail that, and you've nailed the reader.

Put your poems into categories. The point is not necessarily that you would present the poems grouped by these categories. You might choose to. Or you might decide you should not let poems in the same category “sit together.” Or you may feel a certain category is unimportant. Here are some examples of categories:

• ·         Structural elements: formal vs. free verse, long vs. short, long lines vs. short lines.
• ·         Emotional content: happy vs. sad (that’s extremely simplistic: most poems are more complex).
• ·         Type of imagery: I at one time grouped a significant number of poems into “burning” poems that incorporated vivid desert and fire imagery vs. “quenching” poems that included a lot of water, rain, and wind imagery.
• ·         Goal orientation: poems that aim to convince, poems that simply narrate, poems that depict a moment or express a feeling.
• ·         Narrative poems vs. lyric poems (full disclosure: I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition of lyric poetry that makes sense to me).
• ·         Anything else you can think of!

Note that characteristics like length are not binary categories but spectrums. You could end up thinking in terms of long, medium, and short poems. You might order all your poems from longest to shortest, like the Suras of the Koran.

You may want to write on each poem, in a corner or on the back, what categories it belongs to.

As you put your poems into different stacks, you’ll observe ways that the categories reinforce each other, or cut across each other. You might find that almost all your long poems are lyric and almost all your short poems are narrative. That could make the one short lyric poem into a real standout.

Look for an arc. Arcs are likely to arise naturally from playing with categories. Again, just because there’s an arc, a natural progression, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it. You might set up an arc, create the expectation that it will be followed, then deliberately disrupt it. This is the kind of surprise that we love in an individual poem – it can be created at a manuscript level as well. Here are some examples of arcs:

• ·         Narrative: Poems might be arranged as a group of related events— not necessarily in chronological order. Consider arranging a group of events in reverse chronological order, like the movie Memento. Or consider if there is a key event that was the cause of many other events – is it more effectively presented as a flashback within a series of poems?
• ·         Emotional progression: A collection that follows an emotional arc tells an emotional story, even if the poems may be about unrelated things or events. Consider the sequence of moods through which the reader will move as they read the poems is different orders.
• ·         Pace: Poem length and line length can make a reading experience feel “faster” or “slower.” Short lines tend to slow a poem down, because the brain has to pause to process each line break. (The physical rate at which readers intake words may actually be higher, though, because the eye doesn’t have to scan back and forth as much.) Poets understand this well within poems, using long lines to create momentum and short lines to interrupt the flow and catch the reader’s attention. Consider how the literal change of pace between poems affects the reader.

As your manuscript begins to take shape, start manually numbering the pages. Use pencil, or use different colored pens and note which color goes with which revision. This way, if your stack gets scattered by accident, you won’t lose the work you’ve done. Renumber the pages when you’ve changed the order.

Random shuffle. If all else fails, throw the whole stack in the air and pick them up without looking.

Be prepared to revise poems. This is where all the playing that you’ve already done can really pay off. If you have a poem that seems strong on its own, but just doesn’t fit where you’re trying to put it in the manuscript, think about its place in a developing arc, or its category characteristics. That may give you ideas for a poem revision that will better suit the manuscript. If you do an extensive revision, you may want to print a fresh copy for your stack.

I’m not suggesting you should rewrite all your best poems to fit into some standard you’ve established for a manuscript. But you may end up having to make a choice between including a poem that sits really awkwardly with its neighbors, revising it, or…

Be prepared to discard poems. This is not “kill your darlings” advice. As an arc, manuscript, or section takes shape, it may not accommodate some poems that are, in your judgement, better than other poems. These poems may find a home in another part of the manuscript, or in a different manuscript. This is why you want to start with more poems in your heap than you expect to put in the manuscript.

If you haven’t guessed by now…

Most of the above is just to get you to spend a lot of time handling your poems, reading your poems, and thinking about your poems. This is how you develop awareness of your poems as a group, not just as individual poems. A manuscript, whether book-length or chapbook length, is an aggregate entity with emergent properties. Your readers will experience these properties, over and above their experience of individual poems. This aspect of the reader’s experience is yours to control, as much as any aspect of a single poem is.

Books Available
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Poetry Box to publish a chapbook (by me!)

The Poetry Box will be producing a chapbook by me, titled The Day of My First Driving Lesson. It's a collection of poems about my parents. Expected release date winter 20/21.

For interest's sake: The vast majority of the poems I've written have been stand-alones. I have only ever written a few sequences. The Musketeer sonnets, and of course the sonnet sequence that began (ended) with Lifeline, and now forms the core of my chapbook Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable.

But very shortly after my mother's passing, I had the good fortune to attend a workshop by the incomparable Penelope Scambly Schott, on writing series poems.

I don't know why it never occurred to me before. Of course I tried to write about my father's death, and then my mother's final illness and death. But how to? Where to even start? It was clearly too much for one poem-- especially since I did not want it to be all about grief. Of course there is a lot of grief expressed. But my parents deserve so much more than that.

A poem series was the perfect solution. I incorporated some older poems (including the title poem), reframing and rewriting in the process. I worked on it for pretty much the rest of 2019, and around the end of the year, put it into submission in a couple of places. The Poetry Box picked it up.

We haven't yet discussed production steps. I'm hoping the book could incorporate some of my parents' wedding photos-- poor quality images, alas-- or their wedding license...

Books Available
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Field Guide to Meter in English-Language Verse

Meter in English verse is a difficult subject. As I've blogged before, English meter is a hybrid of pure syllable-count meter, inherited from Romance-language verse traditions, and accentual meter, drawn from Germanic verse traditions. Thus, we English-writing poets are stuck with having to count syllables and control the stress pattern. Lucky us.

Explanations and classifications of meter that I've seen tend to be less than intuitive. One of the issues is that it's easy to lose track of meter in the middle of a line, when using traditional scansion techniques. Another is that even strict rules of meter allow for some exceptions. But the allowed exceptions can completely destroy the sense of the definition, without destroying the metrical sense of the line itself. Examples include allowing an extra unstressed syllable at the end of an iambic line, to accommodate a two-syllable rhyme; or skipping a syllable at the start.

You can find plenty of technical definitions of meter online, including Wikipedia. The below is more of a field guide to common meters than a scientific taxonomy.

Notes:

This assumes a consistent meter throughout the line. It will not help you with mixed meters, or meters that by design have changing stress/nonstress patterns, such as sapphics.

Promotion: Technically, a word can have one and only one stressed syllable. However, in normally spoken English, there is a strong tendency for stressed and unstressed syllables to alternate, and a string of three or more unstressed syllables feels uneasy. Hence, in a word with four or more syllables, it's likely that besides "the" stressed syllable, one or more other syllables will be spoken with a noticeable stress. This can even happen in a three-syllable word, such as "consequence." If "consequence" occurs at the end of a line with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, the "quence" will frequently be read as a stress.

Most of the suggested scansion methods I've seen start analysis from the first syllable. In my experience, the last syllable of a line has much more impact on the listener, and therefore leaves a stronger impression of the overall rhythm.

"Marching" and "swinging" are my own terminology. and my attempt to capture what I consider a crucial distinction among meters. Many people of my acquaintance either genuinely can't tell the difference between iambic and trochaic lines, or feel that the placement of one syllable is a silly and trivial way to try to understand rhythm. But almost everyone feels a strong difference between the alternation of stress and unstress in iambic/trochaic and the "dah-dit-dit-dah-dit-dit" of the swinging family.

Argue that this family could just as easily be represented "dit-dit-dah" (repeat) or "dit-dah-dit" (repeat)? That's exactly the point. To me, the defining characteristic of a meter is the rhythm experienced in the middle of the line, less so at the end of the line, and not at all at the beginning. So it doesn't matter where you start your scansion.

The flowchart makes this clearer:



Feet
The simplest way to think about "feet" is that the number of feet equals the number of stressed syllables, including promoted syllables as above. Five = pent, as in iambic pentameter. Four = tetrameter. Six = hexameter. Longer or shorter meters are pretty rare in English.

One type of foot not covered here is the spondee. A spondee consists of two back-to-back stressed syllables. Spondees are rare, and emphatic, in spoken English. Correctly speaking, a line made up entirely of spondees would be termed "spondaic"-- but it hardly seems possible to construct such a line in English, any longer than "Hey! Ho!"

I tend to think of the spondee less as a meter and more as a structure that can be featured within a line of any meter. There are several ways to scan this line...

“No Pa, I thought that corpse's toes were worms.” (consistently iambic)
“No Pa, I thought that corpse's toes were worms.” (turning the first foot into a spondee instead of an iamb)
“No Pa, I thought that corpse's toes were worms.” (turning the second pair of syllables into a trochee, and creating a spondee in "Pa, I" In this case, the spondee straddles the last syllable of the first foot and the first syllable of the second foot.)

If reading aloud, you get to pick. The second reading here seems the most natural to me. Which sounds good to you? Oh, in case you want to read the rest of that poem-- here.

Books Available
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside