The book's prosodic rules

Yoshisuke Funasaka, My space and my dimension - M543. 2004, woodcut, 59 x 56 cm. (
Via Library of Congress)

From the author section of Best American Poetry of 2024, from Maggie Milner about her poem Couples

These poems have been excerpted from a book-length, narrative poem about love, queerness, heartbreak, and constraint. The book's prosodic rules, based on a loose interpretation of the heroic couplet, formalize the speaker's competing obsessions with control and submission. In this sense, it is a poem explicitly interested in dualities -- not only those thematic binaries related to gender and romantic coupledom, but also those that haunt and animate all makers of poems: verse and prose; constraint and freedom, lyric and narrative, me and you.

I ask Claude to explain prosodic rules: 

 In this context, "prosodic rules" refers to the formal structural constraints that govern how the poem sounds and is organized rhythmically and metrically. Prosody encompasses the patterns of stress, rhythm, meter, and sound in poetry.

The author is explaining that their book-length poem follows specific formal rules loosely based on the heroic couplet (traditionally, pairs of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter). These self-imposed structural constraints aren't just technical choices—they're thematically meaningful, mirroring the speaker's psychological preoccupations with "control and submission."

The paragraph suggests that by choosing to work within these formal limitations, the poet is enacting the very tensions the poem explores. Just as the speaker grapples with wanting both control and surrender in relationships, the poet simultaneously constrains themselves with formal rules while finding creative freedom within those boundaries.

This creates a meta-textual layer where the poem's form becomes part of its content—the prosodic rules don't just contain the poem's meaning, they embody it. The formal structure itself becomes a way of exploring the dualities the poem investigates: the tension between restriction and liberation, between imposed order and creative expression.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​