Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023) begins with dactyls: "Seated alone at the edge of the bed". The poem is in couplets, so the second line could balance that tetrameter with dactylic trimeter, but it turns to troches instead: "grasp the finest fabric first". That could establish a pattern for the poem: alternating lines of dactylic and trochaic tetrameter. But Hayes's third line shifts to iambs: "the shrunken sock or silk softest to touch". "Softest" is a trochaic substitution, but that's not unknown in iambic pentameter lines. The continuous movement between several meters in Hayes's poem models how "free verse" can make use of variable metrical effects. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 October 2024)
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