On The Struggle Of A Poetry Grump When Confronted With Free Verse That Isn’t
Scuffling with poetry that fails to resonate, blooms and dies. Parched flowers in the dark.
What purpose here, another line?
No cadence, no rhythm,
no dance through time?
Just prose, with
random
line
breaks in?
Contrived.
Artless.
Stilted.
Bin.
WHAT IS THE POINT of a poem? Why is it there? We conceive our theme. We tend its passion-flower growth. We trim and prune, let the best of it bloom. Finally we hit Publish with fingers crossed: will it be read… shared… appreciated (in the echo chamber of fellow poets)? Will it be loved – best of all – by outsiders, touched and moved as they’re brought in from the cold by our brief beauty, our precise nuance?
In short, will it work?
My silly little poem above is a concentrated harrumph at an irritant that may affect only me: the dress-up game that takes narrative prose and sends it on a journey to free verse. On the way, it is bent out of shape, like a body stuffed into a suitcase.
I don’t have a problem with the words themselves. So many free-verse examples start off as wonderful prose, paragraphs that encapsulate the universal or isolate the uniquely profound. My mental block (blind spot?) comes when the author, in a bid to make something so fleeting fit into a poetry-shaped hole, breaks up their prose with absurd line-breaks and… ta-daaaah!… i HaZ pOeM! Which I suppose it is, because it looks like one. But often I unfold the line-breaks, and the narrative becomes more meaningful as it regains its flowing splendour. A paragraph of text is fine! Craft that. But it ain’t poeming.
So here’s the meat. I’m bearing the torch for poetic traditions that actually work.
How do we define that? I’ll have a stab: a poem works if its description of the world lodges in the reader’s mind, to the point where it can be recalled. Poets going back through centuries have been well aware of the tricks for recall: rhyme, rhythm, meter, cadence, some musicality in the structure. All of this gets our words right into the noggin, anchored. We see the poem and listen to it, too. As one line finishes, we anticipate the next.
I think rhythmic structure gets a bad rap because it’s seen as archaic. There’s a tendency in academic circles to pose: “Look! I’m over here on the edge! Shocking you with the new!” But let me reassure you dear poet: free verse has not been “new” for over a hundred years, when the Modernists (Pound, Eliot, the rise of the French avant garde) blazed the trail pioneered far earlier by, say, Whitman. There is also some nose-holding amongst poetry purists who avoid these traditions because they detect a low-brow taint in their adoption by folk, rock, pop and rap lyrics for the past 70 years. And let’s not even get started on advertising slogans.
Maybe the pendulum should swing back. These anchoring techniques all have highly functional roles if you want your words to reverberate. The benefits of paying attention to these aspects are worth the effort. The clumsy becomes graceful. The ugly becomes elegant. The stilted gains rhythm. The disjointed coheres. A distinctive use of patterns help to mesmerise the reader, rooting your words in their memory. When it comes to spoken-word, the effect is forceful: a line opens a thought, and its rhyme concludes it, stringing your observations like beads on a necklace.
We are living in times where poetry matters. Political forces are opening their cheap suitcases to sell snake-oil in radical places, and the likely consequence will be a rapidly changing society. New norms of behaviour, energised evil and a challenge to goodness are all weighing on a disoriented population. Being able to describe the state of our world – both grandiose and minutely domestic – will have enormous value. Poetry is right there, a brief, concentrated, sharply-focused lens. It’s the language for when there’s no other way to say it, the means to tackle giant subjects on a confined scale. But only if our words are electrified by the spark of resonance, only if our lines are amplified by simple forms, by rhythms that harmonise with the readers’ heartbeats.
PS: If you’re thinking “Hey! He’s having a pop at my stuff!” Obviously, I don’t mean you my valued subscriber. It’s all the others. To the barricades, citizens! We are the New Structuralists! 😉
PPS: Having said all that, this really should start with “In this TED Talk, I shall…”. Well, whatever.
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Illustration: “Die Dorfschule” (The Village School), Johann Peter Hasenclever, 1845
It's funny: early free verse, especially Whitman, has so much rhythm it practically reads as blank verse. Also, I have a poem called "Scansion" in a folder on my computer marked "Second-Rate Verse" which sums up my feelings on the subject:
I don’t write in meter and rhyme just for fun.
There’s lots I could I say if I wrote in free verse.
But Jesus H. Christ man, it seems like a curse:
I mean, how the hell do you know when you’re done?
I'm just not... GOOD at rhyme or meter. Intense images I can do. Things you remember- verses that stick out, okay. But I've never been able to write song lyrics or any decent piece of poetry that rhymed. It's like wearing a corset. I do enjoy reading rhyming poetry though and see the logic behind your argument- and maybe it does take more skill to write that way and still be interesting rather than predictable.