ABSTRACT
There are a number of ways in which the present book might be seen to limit rather than open up the possibilities for and access to free verse. One is to see the whole prosodic project as an irrelevance in a fast-changing and fast-expanding world of poetic possibilities; another is to see yet more theorizing as either too post hoc or premature. The present chapter looks at some of these limitations and possibilities to gauge what a prosody of free verse might contribute to the composition and analysis of poetry. In doing so, it considers the ‘groove’ movement in music and the availability of this and other direct communication about rhythmic structures; the digital dimension and its implications for the conventional notion of the ‘poem on the page’; the notion of microrhythms; the ‘economics of attention’ and the way free verse navigates that economy; the relationship between free verse and other verse forms both for the composer and the listener, audience, or reader; rhetoric and the political dimension; and the ongoing relationship between orality and literacy and among image, sound and verbal text.
