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"But more than a hundred years after Whitman, most people still want meter and rhyme." I'm probably going to regret posting this - but after being told to stop using end stopped lines in my writing - I wrote this short poem - just for fun!! ------------------------------------- three tho roughly modern poems 1 ahem… if i get to the edge of this line and fall off will i suffer enough not to do it a gen or next time with more pain should i jump in two meanings that fit in the palm of my head (i meant soul) amen 2 tho roughly modern millicent they say was mostly ignorint or innocent of men who tried to take her with the aim of getting in to vilent argument that might have hurt her temprament she took two pills and felt the world would finely come to rest 3 don’t try this on schoolchildren you see they only teach you to express your thoughts not sharpen them upon the ancient wits of men who long since gone have left us in a state of equilibrium don’t shake thy gory locks at me you who with auld temerity can laugh back through eternity i live with your bestowèd rhyme your thoughts, your metre and your measure and i just don’t like it maria ;) -----Original Message----- From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Michael Snider Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 1:13 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Poetry in PROSPECT On Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 09:40 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote: Michael wrote: About the only question an experimental poem can pose is "will readers buy this?" -- in every sense of buy, and, for the most part, they haven't. ... Just to contradict myself, I think that's a kind of evidence that the century-long experiment in the varieties of free verse as the /dominant/ form of poetry has failed. I have to quarrel with this - which readers? what poetry? why is the the only question to be posed one of "buying"? The readers I have in mind are the people who have no special training in poetry but who nevertheless carry around and have memorized lots of poetry because it moved them in one way or another, my carpenter, mechanic, and toolmaker friends. My musician friends. My programmer friends. Some of what they like is really not so good, but some is excellent. Very little of it, outside Bible verses and a bit of Whitman, is free verse. "Buying" doesn't have to mean buying with money, though that is one measure. It's really secondary to the meaning I had in mind: as in, you're not buying my argument right now. I don't see that the 20C free verse "experiment" has "failed" (how can that be judged so soon? - I said it's a kind of evidence (not a proof) that free verse as the /dominant/ form of poetry has failed. I mentioned free verse several poets I admire and would not willingly give up. But more than a hundred years after Whitman, most people still want meter and rhyme. that statement seems plain untenable for example in the face of the immense popularity of Neruda in English, never mind Spanish Neruda was a very great poet who wrote both free and metrical poetry. But who is his equivalent in English last century? Only Frost might be close. I don't know what the magic is that makes a great poet, but I doubt it has anything to do with the choice between free verse and metrical verse. - and isn't one of the precursors of modern free verse the King James Bible, one of the best selling books of all time? etc etc etc) Myself, I could not do without Pound or Eliot or HD or Apollinaire or Rimbaud or Joyce (Trevor _and_ James) or Jones or MacDiarmid, my life would be poorer without poets like Prynne or Dorn or Creeley (add whoever else) - agree with their poetics or not, it's poetry that strikes sparks off my brain, stretches my resources as a reader, puzzles and amuses and inspires me. Of course -- I'd have a slightly different list which included more metrical poets, but we share some. My point isn't about whether free verse can be good or not, but whether free verse as the dominant poetic form has helped to alienate Virginia Woolf's common reader from the reading of poetry. Really, who reads poetry now? Is Emily Dickinson "experimental" with all her funny punctuation? Is Phyllis Webb "experimental" after being corrupted by those naughty Black Mountain poets, or does she escape the epithet? Or are poets only "experimental" - whatever they say about their own practice - when popular opinion (whatever that is) has judged the poetry dull? Poets are never experimental in my view -- that was my point: that thinking of a poem as an experiment is a misunderstanding. Why should poets pretend they're doing science? What on earth would it look like if they tried? Aside from all that - the point of a lot of experimentation has been to make poetic language "truer" (I can't think of a better word at the moment). The 20C has been the most unprecedentedly violent in recorded human history, in terms of scale and technology, Well, there are more people, and the technology is more powerful, but no 20th century nation has managed to do what the Romans did to Carthage, or the Jews did to the Canaanites, or the Spaniards did to the Aztec and the Inca, or the19th Century US did to countless Native American groups. No 20th century war lasted a hundred years. No victors of wars before the 20th century spent larts parts of their wealth rebuilding the nations they had defeated. and it seems to me odd to demand of poets that they ignore the consequences of that violence, for language, for their being. What does this have to do with the choice between writing metrical or free verse? If anything, in a metrical piece, or in one haunted by that famous ghost, a poet can use disruptions of the pattern as expressive of that violence. But I really don't either has an advantage. Those larger forces - social, political, economic - enter into the dynamic of all our language, quotidian and poetic, and have been the scource of much questioning. Maybe the most influential "experimentalist" in that line has been Paul Celan, who seems to be translated every second day at the moment. I think the world both less utopian then and less desperate now than you describe , David. But yes. The world is certainly less utopian - less desperate? I guess it depends where one lives. The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the state And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizens or the police; We must love one another or die. Beautiful resonant poetry: but this is of course the poem which Auden famously repudiated as being "dishonest", and maybe signals the dangers of beautiful resonance. As Edwards Mendelson says in the intro to Auden's Selected Poems, "Still, when Auden called them 'trash which he is ashamed to have written' he was taking them far more seriously - and taking poetic language far more seriously - than his critics ever did." Best Alison Yes, he repudiated it. I quoted it in answer to and in agreement with the last line of David's post. And if beauty and resonance are inherently suspect, then being human is inherently suspect. Maybe it is. Maybe it could be one of the tasks of poetry to redeem them. Best Michael