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Meters from the Classical Arabic canon form the basis of meters for most Hausa poetry that the poet composes in writing, with regular stanzaic form an end rhyme. The oral tradition of Hausa poetry and song, which typically does not have regular stanzaic patterns or rhyme, uses meters which presumably predate widespread education in Islam and the concomitant exposure to Classical Arabic poetry. Despite this bipartite division of Hausa poetic traditions, there is crossover, particularly where poets in the "written" tradition use non-Arabic meters from the "oral" tradition.
My paper "Text and performance in Hausa metrics" is a study of three poems related in this way. The "base" is a song by the late Alhaji Mamman Shata Katsina, "Wak'ar Mata Ku Yi Aure" [The Song Women You Should Marry]. The late Alhaji Ak'ilu Aliyu, hearing Shata's song, adopted the meter for his "'Yar Gagara" [The Wayward Woman], a stinging condemnation of prostitution. The late Alhaji Aliyu Namangi, in turn, adopted the metrical pattern he heard in Ak'ilu Aliyu's poem for a religious praise poem, "Tsarabar Madina" [A Gift from Madina].
Shata's song, in the traditional style, has "stanzas" of varying length, and no end rhyme. The latter two poets composed in couplets, Ak'ilu Aliyu using internal rhyme within each couplet (rather unusual for Hausa poetry) and Aliyu Namangi rhyming the second line of each couplet in the syllable -na throughout the poem (the commonly used Hausa rhyming pattern). What all three works have in common is a line with the rhythmic pattern
— vv — vv — vv — vv (where "—" = heavy syllable, "vv" = two light syllables or one heavy)
In the paper, I refer to this meter as "anti-mutadaarik" since it is the mirror image of an Arabic meter, mutadaarik, which Hausa poets sometimes compose in as well.
The paper studies in detail the way each of the poets has used this meter, including invariant aspects, deviations they permit, and some differences between the "oral" and "written" adaptations.