Bliss in Triple Rhythm--A Toolbox for Poets: Nine Ways to Shape A Word Song: Shown in 300 Original Poems

Martin Bidney’s Bliss in Triple Rhythm: A Toolbox for Poets is what its title promises and more. Bidney begins with a lucid explanation of why triple metrical feet—the amphibrach, the anapest, and the dactyl—have such potential power for the poetic line, under-utilized in most contemporary poetry. He then gives us a generous offering of his own poems—291 of them!—to make his case. These poems—by turns sensate, philosophical, theological, elegiac, autobiographical, and comic—answer to what Wordsworth argues is the first aim of the poet, to give readers pleasure. For the most part, they are literally “upbeat.” Beyond this, in their versatility they leave us pondering a range of elemental questions concerning what there is of value in human life that survives the ruins of time. In his introduction Bidney provides a telling metaphor for why poetry has such a deep connection with our biological selves. Many of us were told in our youths that what we hear in a seashell is the ocean. What we in fact hear is better: “the vastly amplified sound of the blood-flow in your own ear.” So considered, “if your poetry becomes the song of the inner ocean that is the glory of your own blood-flow amplified in lyrics both written and sung, you’ll be a seashell that both sets the blood astir and grants a deep and lasting peace . . .” The triple metrical foot has a deep rootedness in our biological being that Greek and Roman poets understood and that poets today, making use of Bidney’s toolkit, could incorporate mutatis mutandis in their work. In an era of free verse and the prose poem, such a view may seem out-of-date, but that it so seems is the very reason Bidney gives us deft and brilliant poems that prove the triple foot’s abiding power. These are poems that ideally would be read aloud, for the eye alone cannot fully take them in.