ABSTRACT
Here are thirteen short poems and excerpts from poems, written from the sixteenth century to the present. Perform them, sense the patterns that the beats and offbeats create, and put the conventional labels on them – first the predominant-meter and line-length labels for the rhythms, and then the form or stanza labels. The labels we would use are listed at the end of the exercise, with a few comments about occasional metrical surprises and several extended discussions.
