I was sitting with friends in a small Toronto restaurant, just off Yorkville Avenue. This was back in the 1970s. And something happened that would become a touchstone in my writing.

As the four of us nattered away, I realized that my body had started to vibrate. Faintly but unmistakably — a slow, repeated throb. What was going on?

I asked the waiter. And he told us there was a studio in the basement where a rock band practised; in fact, they were going at it as we spoke. The studio was soundproofed, so nothing was audible. But the pulsation of the electric bass made the beams and girders vibrate. And the pulse travelled up through the frame of the two-storey building, activating the floor of the restaurant … the benches where we sat … and finally, us.

We had become a kinesthetic extension of the music, or at least of the bass line. Our bodies were collateral instruments.

•

I thought of the Yorkville vibration recently, when the editor at Stonehewer Books made an urgent request. Could I please tell readers what Wrestling with Cadence is about? The essays keep returning to something I call “cadence.” But despite all my descriptions, the editor still couldn’t fathom what cadence is. He’d never had the kind of experience I speak of, and the standard definitions of cadence didn’t seem to apply. So could I take pity on the reader? Spell out exactly what cadence consists of?

It was true: I had expanded the normal meaning of the word. So I promised to try. And maybe the story of the Yorkville vibration could start things off — as a down-to-earth parallel, which readers would get right away.

•

I worked on my first poetry collection, Kingdom of Absence, for seven years. And it was a dud. The poems were more or less sonnets, though they often broke the rules; I was both following the conventions of the form, and pushing against them. But there was no real point to the exercise, and meanwhile the voice felt cramped and abstract. Here’s a sample quatrain:

We explicate the trees but they go sorrowing
mutely beyond us, botched in our dimension.
Rilke, master of ripeness, and the things’
celebrant, rapt, be near to us in limbo. …

The book finally limped into print in 1967. And with that, I started paying closer attention to something I’d been dimly aware of for some time — a tumble of rhythms and hunches. Or to speak more accurately — a tumble of wordless energies, erupting and criss-crossing in a space I couldn’t identify, but which was unmistakably there. I’d felt it thrumming for years, but I’d been too trapped in this constricted poetic voice to do anything about it.

Mind you, I had made a few attempts. I have a fragmentary memory from back then, and it still gives me a pang. There was a shock of recognition I experienced whenever I read Gerard Manley Hopkins, and likewise with the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Their torrential rhythms felt like home. But how did they do it? I decided (in this snippet of memory) to find out for myself; maybe I could follow their lead.

So I’m reading a poem I love (by Hopkins? by Hölderlin?) — hoping that its headlong rhythmic power will rub off on me. I mark the strong and weak stresses, syllable by syllable, from beginning to end. And then I compose a poem of my own — with the spoken stresses of my text (the strong and weak inflections of conversational English) arranged to match each strong or weak stress in the original. I’m juiced … this is down-in-the-trenches research … it feels like I’m cracking the code …

I knew so little then. True, I did reproduce the rhythmic specs of a marvellous poem. But I could tell that my version was dead on arrival. It just sat there. And so, while my contemporaries were making notable debuts all around me, I went back to my bastardized sonnets. Haunted by rhythms I could sense, but couldn’t get anywhere close to in words.

Dennis Lee is a poet, song lyricist, children’s writer, and editor. He co-founded House of Anansi Press and was Toronto’s first poet laureate (2001–2004). Lee has published more than 40 books, including the Governor General’s award-winning Civil Elegies and his 2017 collected poetry, Heart Residence. His works for young people include Alligator Pie and Garbage Delight, and he wrote the song lyrics for Jim Henson’s TV series Fraggle Rock.