Rhythm: Form and Dispossession
Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics

The entrenched divide between meter and rhythm persists despite its unsatisfactory nature—or more accurately, perhaps, because of its unsatisfactory nature. Vincent Barletta's Rhythm: Form and Dispossession and Ben Glaser's Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics demonstrate the enduring and novel uses to which a preference for either of the two terms may be put. They richly embody a more general trend within criticism, where treatments of rhythm have tended to be wide reaching and subjective, and considerations of meter rather more narrowly focused and historicizing. At the same time, they avoid some of the more reductive binaries into which these cognates have historically fallen: meter as skeleton, rhythm as body, meter as law, rhythm as variation, and so on. Both represent required reading to anyone interested in how such formal questions might relate to the most pressing questions of our contemporary situation: race, sociality, and the (generative) limits of individual...