From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.

Nicholson Baker Quotes