anti-rhythmic: Poetry that deliberately disrupts or avoids regular rhythmic patterns, working against metrical expectations to create tension, emphasize content irregularity, or reflect fragmented consciousness. Anti-rhythmic techniques include unexpected pauses, irregular line breaks, varied stress patterns, and deliberate metrical disruption. This approach contrasts with traditional verse's reliance on rhythmic regularity and can convey disorder, anxiety, resistance, or modernist fragmentation. Anti-rhythmic poetry emerged prominently in twentieth-century experimental work that questioned traditional prosodic assumptions and sought new expressive possibilities.

Anti-rhythmic poetry deliberately disrupts or avoids regular metrical patterns. This modernist technique rejects traditional prosody to create tension, reflect fragmentation, or emphasize natural speech patterns over formal meter.