Poetry

If you take
A normal sentence from a regular
Paragraph,
And break the lines at
Irregular intervals
It may be free verse, but is it
Poetry?

This week the Writer’s Blog asked Why Don’t Poems Rhyme Anymore? A group called The Queen’s English Society is advocating a return to more formal verse. The group said

For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure, and second, alliteration and rhyme. Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems.

The Writer’s Blog took exception to the phrase “word-things” (a criticism of modern free verse), describing it as elitist and ridiculous, urging modern poets to turn the tables on the QES and adopt the phrase.

I’m going to disagree with the Writer’s Blog. They have focused on a claim by the QES that poems must rhyme. I don’t believe that poets must now grab their rhyming dictionaries and ensure that they write only in couplets. But should poetry not have some structure? What defines it as poetry if anything goes?

The great poets understood the structure of poetry. Iambic pentameter, heroic verse, double dactyls – these are not alien terms, these are elements of poetry. Free verse may be a part of poetry, but it is not all of poetry, and indeed some poets such as T S Elliot believed even free verse required to adhere to some elements of form.

In On Writing, author Stephen King bemoans the laissez-faire attitude that writing is a passive activity – that the writer is merely a conduit for some external creative force, and therefore whatever spills from their pen is art, and worthy, and should be exempt from criticism. After recreating a typical poem from the time, King has this to say:

“If you were to ask the poet what this poem meant, you’d likely get a look of contempt… Certainly the fact that the poet would likely have been unable to tell you anything about the mechanics of creation would not have been considered important…”

If that is the case, if form and meaning are unimportant, then everyone is an artist. And it takes no skill, no craft, and there would be no point in striving to better your talents. We don’t accept that for prose, why accept it for poetry?

QES seeks to reintroduce long neglected poetic forms, a move that will enrich, not impoverish poetry. They should be applauded, not criticised.

The best poets appear to have an innate understanding of these issues, even if they do not consciously know their Alcaic verse from their feminine ending. But they do know that splitting a sentence up into short, centre-spaced lines, does not a poem make.

I rarely venture into poetry, because I feel unequal to understanding these things. What poetry I have attempted is either uniformly bad (my teenage years) or intended for limited public consumption on special occasions.

We know that for prose to work, to be good, to qualify and validate itself, it has to come up to certain standards. Poetry should be no exception. It may not have to rhyme, but it ought to have reason.

I know that there are a few poets who read this site. I may, perhaps, have made a controversial statement, and they may view it as akin to a basketball player telling a footballer how to play their sport.

I would be interested to hear what you think, especially from the poets amongst you.