Is the Music Over? Has Free Verse Made Poets Tone Deaf?

by Jannine Dresser

riverbabble Issue 18 Winter 2011

 
 

When asked what it was he liked about poetry, Theodore Roethke wrote:

Hinx minx the old witch stinks,
the fat begins to fry.

Childhood riddles and rhymes taught us that language was fun and magical, playful and mysterious. Word-sound awoke our nascent poetic selves.

I have been wondering if this lesson has been forgotten when I hear poems spoken at local readings or read them on the page; so many are presented as dull, semi-lifeless forms that just lie there without groove or enthusiasm.

Once upon a time, song and poem and dance were inseparable; a poet who could not hold a tune was consider no poet at’all. Is it decades of practicing “free verse” that has left so many poets tone-deaf? Have we sacrificed joyful sound and rhythmic language in pursuit of ever more clever images and convoluted metaphors? Sometimes I wish that William Carlos Williams had stated “no ideas but in sounds,” instead of “no ideas but in things.”

Rather than sharing a poem’s inherent and well-crafted musicality, we now have that famous “poetry-reading voice,” a kind of sustained monotone or drone that has an uplifted inflection at the ends of lines. It’s a performance shtick that often has nothing to do with the meaning in the line and everything to do with compensating for the lack of music in it. Substituting for musical form — as conveyed through meter, rhythm, rhyme, assonance or consonance, onomatopoeia, etc. — is this formulaic vocalizing of lines being passed off as poetry.

In an age overwhelmed by image, the poems of the last few decades have heavily relied on photographic, even cinematic techniques of capturing, cutting and framing scenes from observed life or memory, in order to transform subjective experience and find that perfect “objective correlative” (as defined by T.S. Eliot) to human emotion. Rather than Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” we mostly have emotion recollected or objectified through image in diverse or sequential scenes. Many poets have honed this to a high art. We also have a lot of interest in how a poem looks on a page, with little regard for how one should read it aloud or hear it in the stereo system between our ears. Here is a model for a lot of contemporary poetry as poems take shape in a kind of “form” (I was told a variation of this by a poet friend):

Stanza 1:    Image or observation as noticed by a narrative voice (perhaps the poet’s, perhaps a persona).


Stanza 2:    Image or observation, etc., perhaps developing or counterpoised to the image(s) of stanza 1. Possibly filtered through memory.

Stanza 3:    Epiphany! Culminating in an uber image that has crystallized in the narrator/poet’s heightened awareness as drawn through prior images.

I could give you example after example from my own oeuvre but suspect you have written many poems of your own using this form. I am not saying using a formula is bad, but for those who refute poetic form or so-called traditional verse in lieu of vers libre, we should acknowledge that something has become formulaic in a lot of free-verse poetry.

The fact that many modern poets have eschewed traditional verse (too many dead white male poets, I suppose, has become an excuse for knowing the masters of English poetry) has resulted in many poetry readings where poems are not much more than prose broken by (mostly) artificial or seemingly random line breaks. Many poets cannot tell you why they have broken the lines where they do, or what overriding purpose guides their line-breaks (as in Frost’s concept of a breath line), while others have chucked the whole thing by simply renaming their efforts as “prose poems.” But, why prose poem when there has been little attention on the music in language; why not just call it prose?

I was asked to explain a comment I made recently about a poem that I said lacked musicality. Here is what I mean. Your poem lacks musicality when:
* There is no evidence of at least some level of attention to meter (i.e., the patterns of stress and unstressed syllables in our language);
* there has been little attention to the sounds of long and short syllables or to syllable count if it would make a more interesting poem;
* you don’t know an iamb from a trochee or a dactyl from an anapest (if you think I’m speaking Greek, you are right and you haven’t had a good grounding in versification);
* narrative is more important than the sounds embedded in syllables, words, lines;
* diction is commonplace rather than drawn from a wider palate of vocabulary, especially what I call a poet’s subconscious vocabulary--those intuitive insertions of words selected as much for their sound as definitions;
* you have learned how to write from the heart but have not removed the cotton from your ears;
* you over-depend on line break to make your writing look like a poem;
* you mask a poem’s lack of music by adopting either a sing-song reading style or that predictable poetry-reading voice and cast your inflections not by meaning and sounds but by line or stanza-break.

Poets are specialists of the language as no other artist can be; we are responsible for drawing out the beauty in our language’s flexibility and range. If you went to a surgeon who told you he skipped anatomy class in med school because it was passé, you wouldn’t want him operating on you. As a teacher, publisher of other people’s poetry, a contest judge, and sometimes critic, I am perhaps overly aware of the problem I characterize as a kind of tone-deafness in many contemporary poems. Because I love music, I miss real rhythm in poems, but more so a broader neglect of musicality in contemporary poetry. Even our best, most widely published poets are challenged in this way. Here is an example from a famous poet who I shall not name:

He was born one sunny Florida morning
and napped through most of his childhood.
He spent his adult life relaxing in beach chairs,
always a tropical drink in his hand.

A strong image, surely, but it sounds like it was a feature in the Sunday entertainment section of your newspaper.

It has mostly been the impact of my marriage to a Shakespearean actor and scholar, and my efforts to learn to sing and study music that have awakened my ears to hearing poetry more as a musical art. It surprises me that our education system, in training students of literature and writing, no longer require in their core curriculum a class in prosody, nor a full history of the development of English poetry. Some colleges offer a choice between Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare: how can you possibly choose between three of the stepping stones of early English poetry, and its musical influences from Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek, Hebraic, and Italian sources? Much of what I gleaned about meter and form, I’ve learned from my husband, from the world of actors and theater, and from trying to catch up with a basic vocabulary of poetry I never learned in college as either an undergraduate or graduate student (with a few small exceptions). 

The words we use to talk about our art are derived from poetry’s skeletal music and dance structures: meter is the measure, as in a musical unit, to identify patterns of stress and unstressed syllables; verse comes from the idea of the turn in the ancient Greek chorus that was sung across auditoriums of old; sonnet, queen of the English verse forms, was originally a little song or little sound in its Italian womb.

My wonderful Mills College professor, Marilyn Chandler, showed how many of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the tune of the “Yellow Rose of Texas.” Go ahead: try it.

I dwell in Possibility
A fairer house than prose
More numerous of windows
Superior for doors

Of chambers as the Cedars
Impregnable of Eye
And for an Everlasting roof
The Gambrels of the sky

And why should this be so? Because Ms. Em was steeped in a Protestant hymn tradition. Walt Whitman was steeped in the King James’ Bible; his poems absorbed not only an Elizabethan poetry sensibility but the turns-of-phrase, parallelism and cataloguing tradition that comes from the Bible’s Hebraic root. Umm, perhaps modern poets need to go back to church or synagogue and learn how to sing and chant once again?

I was lucky to come to poetry through the old nursery rhyme, prayer-and-song route, the oral tradition mostly, and was furthered suckled by the incredible music of the 1960s and 1970s:

Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish might, have this wish I wish tonight

or:

There was an old woman
who lived in a shoe
who had so many children
she didn’t know what to do.

Later, I was moved by the rhythms and sounds in rock and R & B:

Before you slip into unconsciousness
I’d like to have another kiss

and,

Why do you fill me up, Buttercup, baby,
Just to let me down, And mess me around,
And then worst of all, You never call, Baby,
When you say you will, but I love you still.

Even the free-verse Jimi Hendrix had rich music in his poetry:

Angel came down from heaven yesterday
She stayed with me just long enough to rescue me
And she told me a story yesterday
About the sweet love between the moon and the deep blue sea
And then she spread her wings high over me.

Poets need to take responsibility for the general public’s lack of interest in their art when we proffer so many unmemorable and un-rememberable lines. And what makes a poem memorable? In the tradition of our bardic ancestors, it was a bag of tricks the poet used to craft verse:
* repetition, of individual memes or sound units, and of entire lines;
* figurative language, which finds new ways to describe familiar things such as the kenning tradition in Anglo-Saxon poetry or the epithets of the Greeks;
* word-sound as they are linked to the ancient brain-stem that matched utterances to things;
* meter and rhythm, which is the end-result of repeated meters.

Try to memorize a dozen free-verse poems compared to poems written with more formal attention, and you will quickly understand why most of the best-loved poems are ones with strong music. If I had discovered poetry today at the average open-mic venue, I probably would not have become a poet. I go to poetry to love what language can do, not just to hear about how the poet’s day went as she went about her business being reminded of something that happened a long time ago . . .

Poetry interests us for its sounds, and the pleasure of hearing, feeling, speaking with music. Imagery and narrative are important — don’t get me wrong — but without the music, they belong to the realm of fiction and other kinds of prose. If poetry can do anything that no other art form can do, it is in its ability to marry word to sound, and in so doing heighten our sensory perception beyond a purely intellectual exercise into the body, into the kinesthetic experience that causes the skin to tingle, the heart to roar.

The true poet advances our knowledge and appreciation of language through performing these marriages — words + sound — with sensitivity, boldness, finesse, and a finely-tuned ear. To Eliot’s reminder that “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job,”  I would add that no verse delights us that does not appeal to our sense of sound and rhythm.

(Talk Presented at the 11/14/10 meeting of the Ina Coolbrith Circle in Lafayette, California)

 
 
 



Jannie M. Dresser

is a SF Bay Area poet with deep roots in California's Central Valley. A poet and writer, she is editor and publisher of the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review and SF Poetry Examiner and teaches innovative workshops in poetry writing. Some of her writing can be read at http://sites.google.com/site/jdresserpoet/.

Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review: http://www.bayareapoetsreview.com
SF Poetry Examiner: http://www.examiner.com

 

Maggie,

Thanks for sharing this - it's fascinating... I'll be pondering it as I go into my day and probably come back for another read later on.

M

What exactly is Dresser's complaint? Has someone passed a law against meter?

What it all boils down to, despite her contentions that more formal poetry is far better than free verse, is that readers don't actually seem like it as much. Why? She doesn't seem to know -- just complains that Billy Collins and other contemporary writers of free verse are not "true poets" but are writers of "lines being passed off as poetry."

No one's stopping her or anyone else from composing metrical work. Scads of people do. But I have a beef with anyone trying to constrict the world of poetry.

If she wants to be as popular as Billy Collins, she's not going to get there by complaining about him.

It's a modern argument for sure. Content vs sound, gut vs brain. Interesting how a "poet who could not hold a tune was consider no poet at’all." Now enter the age of trance music, ambient, industrial, music that, for lack of a better explanation, can't be hummed. How does that impact 'musicality' and poetry? Bring in rap, metal, grindcore, etc. and the 'tune' of poetry becomes even more muddied.

Great article Maggie, sure to spark purists and avant-guardists into verbal battle. But I think the above author is a) out of it and b) clinging to a past long gone.

I leave you with this - sing it:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

     Aside from some quibbles about confusing the terms "strophe" and "stanza", I think the author was doing okay until she stumbled here:



     Comparing the average or worse contemporary poet to the greats of the past is hardly fair.  Couldn't someone just as easily juxtapose some of that prose-with-linebreaks with William McGonigal's doggerel to "prove" that non-metrical poetry is superior to verse?

     She then defines prose poetry out of existence by not recognizing any distinction between it and free verse:



     If we accept the original definitions (i.e. meter is quantification, free verse is rhythmic but not quantified, prose poetry repeats everything except rhythm, prose doesn't rely on repetitions), the difference between actual prose poetry and prose is far more obvious than that between good contemporary meter and free verse.  

     Then she cites an example which illustrates the opposite of what her point was:



     The first line is a little shaky but the second and third are nothing but iambs and double iambs.  The fourth is clearly trinary.  In short, these last three lines are more rhythmic than most verse and are typical of the polyrhythmic free verse we saw starting in the mid 1930s.  (The rest of the poem is similar.)  Of course, had she been fair she'd have used a more polished example, as R L Raymond did with Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro", which is monorhythmic iamb with a lame foot beginning L2.

     Tom asks a fine question about the disappearance of verse but, of course, Earl the Squirrel and others have solved that mystery.  Verse survived in the public eye by adding music.  Free verse and prose poetry?  Not so much.

     Ms. Dresser makes a good point about free verse poems being harder to memorize.  She could have strengthened her position by mentioning how verse has always outsold non-metrical poetry, even without including song lyrics, ad jingles and slogans.  

     All in all, I'd give this a B-.

-o-

And I'd give Colin's analysis of the essay an A+. Note that it was achieved without deriding anyone. Excellent.

This doesn't scan metrically.


He was born one sunny Florida morning
and napped through most of his childhood.
He spent his adult life relaxing in beach chairs,
always a tropical drink in his hand.

I think the mark was missed, here. Dresser's not saying abandon free verse  and become a formalist, he's saying pay attention to what it is you're writing.
The same as Gioia stresses line lengths and Ginsberg the 'who' you should be writing to. And Ezra Pound, whose..." own significant contributions to poetry begin
with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and
economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."

This is a perfect illustration of what he was talking about.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

The rest of the article on Pound is at poets.org.

"..."compose in the sequence of the musical phrase..." This is worth bringing out each time you find a line or phrase that's grabbed hold of your ear.



"I go to poetry to love what language can do, not just to hear about how the poet’s day went as she went about her business being reminded of something that happened a long time ago . . .

Poetry interests us for its sounds, and the pleasure of hearing, feeling, speaking with music. Imagery and narrative are important — don’t get me wrong — but without the music, they belong to the realm of fiction and other kinds of prose. If poetry can do anything that no other art form can do, it is in its ability to marry word to sound, and in so doing heighten our sensory perception beyond a purely intellectual exercise into the body, into the kinesthetic experience that causes the skin to tingle, the heart to roar.

The true poet advances our knowledge and appreciation of language through performing these marriages — words + sound — with sensitivity, boldness, finesse, and a finely-tuned ear. To Eliot’s reminder that “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job,”  I would add that no verse delights us that does not appeal to our sense of sound and rhythm."

If you don't go to poetry for this, then why go at all?

Leave dry and lifeless to the academics on both sides of the coin.

You might shake your head, but I suggest reading this again with attention to when it talks about technique.


And Lehman should remember that, "...when I say margharita, I mean a margharita.
Daiquiris are for women who fake orgasms."

Maggie

Devil's advocate: "The true poet..." that sentence starts with two constructed notions, "truth" and "poet," neither of which really amount to a hill of beans. Maybe that's my point. Shakespearean, beat poets, sound poets, imagiste, modern, post-modern, drone, sonnet, villanelle, found poetry, abstract poetry, blood & guts, visceral, ethereal, whatever... we ALL adhere to some school or another. Why? Really, at the end of the day, it's because we think the words, strung together, sound cool, conjure an image, shock, pacify, soothe, again, whatever. If metre ain't part of your aesthetic, it don't matter. Period. When we try to make poetry something to analyze, we lose the point -- this ain't science or math, it can't be proven or quantified. So, maybe theorists WANT to make poetry more than it is -- words strung together that people may or may not enjoy -- in order to sell books, essays, get teaching positions where they can TALK ABOUT poetry, WRITE ABOUT poetry, in not poetic language.

All the above said with respect and zero ill-will.
And yes, I come from Academia.
Just one Non-Poet's ramblings.

We grew up and had to get out of the sand box, had to but away the imaginings of talking squirrels and flying pigs. I think art is the grownup playground for uncovering the mystery to expose another, to dig a little further than the truth, to swing in an air electric with dare.

I’m a fan of these discussions, they wrestle with our imaginings to see if squirrels still talk and pigs can fly. They open ways for others to see. In the visual arts, the dare was how far you were willing to swim from the “representational” shore. There is never an answer, only the unfolding of new questions and quite often the questions themselves ignite an element to the arts that “blow off the top on one’s head.”

I think its fun to assume the writings aren’t definitive, but queries, exploring style, method, techniques, even the ones that get pedantic thinking their ship can’t sink. We often think of forms and the lack thereof as tools for the construction of words into something that bridges me and you, I think they’re air, some stale, some electric. Try to make a sound in an airless room.

This article begins and ends speaking to the subject. I think Windemere's conclusion is right on the money.


Daily Metaphors: Poetry in Everyday Speech

By Arthur Windermere

Introduction

"Every day, in nearly every sentence we utter, we surround ourselves with metaphors, most of which we are not even aware we use. In Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense," he points out how our perceptions of things are not themselves the same as the thing. For instance, if you stand far away from a circular table, it appears to be an oval. Yet we know it is not really an oval; our perspective merely makes it seem so. Are our perceptions, then, not metaphors in some sense? Then to these perceptions we apply sounds, like "cup" or "ball", but these sounds themselves have nothing to do with the thing or the image. Are these concrete words not metaphors? Perhaps not; we don't have to agree with Nietzsche. For the next step, however, we may just come around.
 
Then from these concrete words we form concepts. Just as in Japanese ideograms, a dog and an ear depicted together means 'bark,' so in our Western languages we have formed concepts out of concrete nouns and these concepts over time have mutated to have their present meanings. The word 'onomatopoeia', for instance, is made of two Greek words, one for 'sound' (onomos) and one for 'to make' (poiesis), meaning literally "made of sound."

In what follows, I shall take a few concepts that are used often enough, perhaps daily, and explicate their humble beginnings as concrete words.







 Aristotle



Everyday Philosophy


'Object' and 'Subject': Both of these words are close relatives of 'eject,' as they in fact come from the same root, the Latin iacere, meaning 'to throw.' As you might guess, 'eject' means 'to throw from,' like your VCR throws the VHS tape from its mouth. 'Ob-' is a prefix that means 'against,' and indeed 'object' literally means 'the thrown-against thing.' Subject, on the other hand, is just what you have probably guessed, 'the thrown-under thing.' This meaning is clear in other contexts. For instance, "I object!" stated in a courtroom environment is a 'throwing against' of sorts, throwing courtroom rules and etiquette against a statement. Also, when we speak of someone being subjected to some treatment, it is easier to see how they can be seen as a 'throwing under.' It is, however, more of a stretch to see how objects have earned this name. To make a long story short, medieval philosophers used the term to refer to anything 'thrown against' the senses. So anything one can see, smell, taste, hear, or feel is an object.
 
'Substance': The '-stance' root is one we can see shared with 'circumstance' and 'distance,' and means more or less what would would imagine, standing. Coming from the Latin stare, meaning 'to stand,' 'circumstance' literally means 'that which stands around.' Circumstances are the 'standing around things.' Distance, combining 'de-' with '-stance' means 'to stand away from,' making distance the awayness between standings. So substance must mean 'that which stands under,' and indeed it does. Again, Latin philosophers, particularly in translating and discussing Aristotle, used the term to refer to anything that has physical being. For Aristotle, there are two things, properties and substances; properties inhere in substances, and substances are the things that 'stand under' these properties, the pure thing itself. Over time, 'substance' acquired its more scientific term and any stuff of which one is studying the properties, whether it be bisodium carbonate or dihydrogen monoxide.


Crossing Over


Let's take a break from philosophy and have some lighter etymologies.
 
'Peninsula': It would be possible to figure out the etymology of this word on one's own, if one thought about it for a while. The 'pen-' in 'peninsula' is the familiar one to be found in 'penumbra' and 'penultimate,' which means 'one from the last.' The 'insula' is the very same to be found in 'insulate' and 'insular,' coming from the Latin for 'island.' Hence to 'insulate' is to 'islandize' something, to break off contact with the exterior on all sides. If an island, then, is characterized by being out of contact with mainland on all sides, and we now know that 'peninsula' means 'one from an island,' we can see that the metaphor refers to the contact a peninsula has with mainland on one side only.
 
'Excruciating': The 'cruc' in 'excruciating' is shared by 'crucial' and, yes, 'crucifixion.' 'Crucifixion' itself comes from 'ficere,' meaning to fasten or join something (to something else) and 'cruc' naturally means 'cross.' This leaves 'excruciating' to mean 'from the cross.' Whether the term is Christian in origin or merely Roman origin I can't say, but it certainly brings to mind the most famous cross-victim, Jesus. An excruciating experience is therefore an experience similar to the experience of being crucified. Naturally, this is speaking metaphorically.
 
Since I've mentioned crosses and islands, it bears mention that metaphor is itself a metaphor. 'meta' means in Greek, amongst other things, 'over' and 'across' and 'phor' from the Greek for 'to carry.' A metaphor is thus literally something that 'carries over' or 'carries across,' like a boat. Incidentally, as often happens, the Latin term meaning the exact same thing on the literal level has come into English as something altogether different: translate, from Latin 'trans' (over, across) and 'latum,' the supine of 'fero,' meaning 'to carry.'


Going Once, Going Twice


'Ambition': Composed of 'amb' meaning 'about' and 'ire' meaning 'to go,' 'ambire' originally referred to the going about of Latin officials to gather votes. It is not a stretch to see how this came to refer to the drive to higher offices and eventually simply the drive to succeed and have honors.

'Obituary': Composed of 'ob,' which we say above means 'against' and 'ire' again, 'obire' literally means 'to go against.' However, as is often the case, 'against' is meant in the form of 'meeting' here, hence 'to go to meet.' The Roman phrase 'mortem obire', 'to go to meet death', was a euphemism for 'to die' and later in history the 'mortem' was safely dropped and 'obire' meant 'to die.' The ending '-uary' roughly means 'place of,' hence a sanctuary is a holy place, a mortuary a place of the dead, and an obitary is therefore literally 'the place of going against.'
 
'Initiate': Composed of 'in,' meaning, naturally, 'in' or 'into' and 'ire,' 'inire' literally means 'to go in' meaking 'initiation' mean a 'going in,' or an entry into something.
 
Other 'ire' based words include 'perish,' meaning literally 'to go through' and 'transition,' meaning 'to go over' or 'to go across.'


Conclusion


So there you have it, we are all poets in some sense, constantly speaking in metaphors, constructing our experience of the world through metaphor. There is a poetic beauty to our speech, everyday speech, however unremarkable. However, every age is always hungry for new metaphors, metaphors that fit our age and allow us to interpret new experiences and shape for ourselves a human world appropriate to our time and circumstances. We need new metaphors to move forward, to progress mentally and spiritually. For this we must look to the true poets. In an age so riddled with cliche as ours is, where Batman comics, Spiderman movies and Big Brother have taken the place once held by the likes of Dickens and Shakespeare, where barely literate text messages have taken the place of well-written letters, one despairs that our era is poor in metaphor and overburdened with the concrete on the one hand and tired metaphors of a past age on the other. We have to work much harder in this age to find new metaphors, and some may never find them, but find them we must. Fresh metaphor is the spiritual grace of civilization."

i watched a TV programme that involved selecting works for an exhibition, and the criteria looked for by the judges was so simple:

Originality
Technique
Emotional impact

Doesn't that cover a mountain of verbiage?

milner

Not really, Mil. How could another's judgement of a painting, or a poem be the last word when the best in show might not have made the final cut because of a judge's limitations and prejudices, and I mean that in the mostly good way,
well aware those same limitations and prejudices sometimes work to direct the course of art in one direction or another.

Even you, Mil, are still learning with every new poem you read or write. Every out of the closet poet who picks up a book of poems, etc., is a living definition of the word autodidactic. It's the same in any field.
But for us, shouldn't we know what we're doing with words?


Sarah Gridley has some interesting things to say, some relevant, in an interview with PSA.  I like her poem, too.

http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/new_american_poets/sarah_gridley/

PC is but a dot in the genre we call poetry. A serious poet looks all around the word-use of others to unlock the secrets of skill, and then he or she writes and writes and writes, and reads some more, and writes.

We never get out from under the learning. Words can be a burden or a love affair. Like any other craftsman, we need to look at skill with pride no matter where it comes from.

I've learned what craft I have, Maggie, from writing and reading, but if I had spent much time on the homilies of others on the nature and definitions of poetry, then I fear my horizons, my potential scope, could have been seriously restricted. But, by nature, we are all different, and each to their own.

In my sailing days I learned the importance of having an attitide that did not go on the lines of 'what does the book say I should do?', but rather 'what can I do?'.

milner

The homily writers, Mil, include those judges you spoke of, their one view apiece. We need only sample what they say. We feast where our passion is.
The nature of life through observation is what I think you studied, Mil. How it got to paper makes no never mind to me. I'm just glad it did.

Maggie

In my own case, I suspect I took to free verse because subconsciously I thought it would be easier.  Yet I saw that Whitman wrote it, beautifully.  Whatever the reason, it seems poets today are not as interested in tempo, rhythm, punctuation, caesura, sound, line placement, rhyme or half-rhyme, form, punctuation/assonance/consonance, and other technical matters which have weight. I confess I often forget them.  There are free verse poets and then there are free verse poets: some good, some bad, many in-between, just as in fixed form verse writing.  Perhaps many of us are too quick to rush to computer print; I'm afraid I am.  Thanks for the topic.