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Metric Apologetic

Perhaps I ought to publish my position (as if there's anyone disposed to care!): I'm not convinced that open competition is profitable. Poets, self-aware, and full of self-esteem (as many are!) increasingly seem disinclined to share the fruits of midnight labour. From afar (and I do not possess a crystal ball) I think that I perceive a lowered bar: requirements (this is just my judgement call) to dress one's thoughts in rhythm or in rhyme do not delight our writers. They appal. We need not think of strictures as a crime. Does discipline torpedo erudition, or might it help us grasp at the sublime?

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Suzanne Delaney

Date: 10/1/2022 1:39:00 PM

Hi Michael: I agree on the discipline of forms and how they work, especially for different stories. I think Haas wrote the best description explaining how Form Vs Free Verse works and after I read that I could see it working for me. I will post here if it will fit. SuZ. “ Robert Hass in comparing metered poems with Free Verse states: ‘……the metrical poem begins with an assumption of human life which takes place in a pattern of orderly recurrence with which the poet must come to terms- Meter organizes accents into an overall pattern and more or less evenly times the lines bringing an organizing influence that allows the story to unfold. The Free verse poem…begins with an assumption of openness or chaos in which an order must be discovered. The basic fact of free verse: each poem is shaped from within. You’ll often hear a poet say they didn’t know where the poem would end when they began writing it but that it comes to them as a natural act of writing."

Michael Coy
Date: 10/1/2022 3:19:00 PM