99% of contemporary poetry is written in free verse... I can't be the only one that thinks free verse is generally lazy and uninspired.
Lazy and uninspired verse can be made as easily with or without meter. And a great deal of the "serious" poetry published today, I find to be really boring. But I don't see how anyone can read Rimbaud's Illuminations and declare them uninspired.
I haven't heard of him. Google seems to say that thats one poem in a collection of prose poems. Which I think is the best way to format free verse. I always end up trying to read free verse as a prose poem but the structure into lines makes it difficult to follow. And redundant. It seems the lines serve no actual poetic purpose. Just a pretense of form. (If I'm using that word right lol). It seems To be, poetic When I write These words out, In lines. But actually, Im not really Saying anything I fooled you. Na na, ni boo boo Stick your head, In doo doo.
It’s even worse when it’s performed. The rising Intonation And the hands And the increase of speed To suggest drama It’s an easy way to make the audience think that… Then a pause And a sincere face And clenched fist Slowly released Quiet again For pathos.
If there's one thing i dislike more than free verse its definitely spoken word. Found a quote by Robert Frost. "I'd sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down."
Disclaimer: there is certainly some good free verse poetry. It does seem that free verse is the most pretense-dependent. All art depends on pretense to some degree, but ideally it's minimized. How much post-modern art can you make until it just collapses? It circles the drain, amorphous to convention to the point that it has no point or even effect. Literary fiction runs into the same problem at the esteemed level. Mrs. Territory read to me from two different books of women's poetry. One modern, one 17th century. The former was almost entirely motherhood angst with pretty basic imagery: e.g. Womb Or Prison? My child Warden ...While the latter was compelling, epic structured prose that addressed a myriad of complex issues women faced at the time. Here's a thought: what are you actually supposed to do if you devote 6-8yrs studying art academically, but fate's an ass so you're not so great at making it?
I agree with the OP. A lot of the time it feels like I'm reading some sullen diary entry oddly chopped up into lines, and then it's paraded around as "poetry". Obviously there are some exceptions, but I think it's mostly just because poetry as a whole has taken a turn for the worse. To get great poetry you need great poets, but poetry and honestly art as a whole feels less inspired now more than ever. There are a lot of distractions now a days that probably saps most of the creative energy out of most would be great poets. On top of the deterioration of the English language through over simplification for the sake of the masses, poetry has basically become this hyper-niche Poe inspired depressed circle-jerk, and I guess the people attracted to that are often times just bad at poetry. No hate, but definitely weak poetry.
It's possible, but it's also worth remembering that, for the most part, people only read the best of work from the past. It's easy to overestimate the quality of poetry in general when you read an anthology of masterpieces; in their time, they were surrounded by mediocrity, too. I suspect that if you did a deep dive into any particular era and really studied all the minor poets, you'd see exactly why they're barely read today.
I think free verse comes more from the heart. When writing ‘rhyming poetry’ - if this is in fact what you’re championing - your word choice is restricted. Only a handful of poems have ever truly connected with me, and all were free verse / blank verse. That said, I won’t pretend I don’t write free verse / blank verse (don’t really understand the difference) because I can’t be arsed putting the work in. So in response to your view that FV is lazy, yeah... it is in my case.
Unless the structure and metre acts like stabilisers on a bike. Take them away and you’ve got to make stuff sound good all on its own.
Take away the structure and nothing sounds good.. Noone can "make it sound good on its own." Why free verse is pretentious blah blah. No poets better than the form.
Let’s face it, good poetry - free, blank, structured, metered or not - is hard to write. To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t really care about technicalities. I’ve read a lot of poems by established and well respected poets that leave me absolutely cold. All that matters to me when I read poetry, is that it connects with me in some way. If it evokes a strong and familiar sense, it’s a good poem to me.
Good free verse is structured - it's just structured by the words themselves, rather than an external form. When the lines flow naturally, and breaks come in just the right spots to add that ineffable extra energy, that's good free verse. When they don't, well, you get chopped up prose. Ain't that the truth.
I dont know, there's something about a writer's assumption that I care about his word choices that annoy me. To me there's more to it than that. If you can show me one free verse poem that can convey any sort of effect without relying on a word (lol) or the novelty of rearranging a line and stanza, then I'd be surprised. And concede my bias.
I can’t really argue with this, and it’s exactly why my last was written as prose poetry. The first drafts were written as FV, but when I came to submit it I realised it would just be a pretence, and that I probably wasn’t using the line breaks for anything other than to make it look like a poem. I’ll also say it’s good to see an active discussion on poetry - we don’t get enough.
For instance, the poem I have in the poetry workshop "Miss you." Is written in blank verse. There's no rhyme but there's careful attention to content and form. It was inspired by biblical poetry, that uses repetition and building on the last line to make the point clearer. Three stanzas of seven lines, repeating until the final affect. One, six line stanza that is three couplets of contrast. And one final quatrain. Like, that took some thought and effort. And care in how and what was said. Even though there was no rhyme, there was a reason. Lol
Free verse is inherently more lazy, meter isn't the training wheels but the sidewalk itself, could you cut through the grass? Sure, will cutting through the grass save you time? Probably, is there any legitimate reason not to cut through the grass? Depends on whose grass it is. Point is, there's nothing wrong with free verse, but the way I see it used most of the time today is a complete farce. Metered line poetry has an intrinsic point, the METER. It's innately rhythmic. Could you find some arrhythmic music that despite holding no beat is still musical and tasteful, sure but would anyone want to dance to it? No, because people dance to the rhythm.
Oddly enough, I find the opposite to be true. Metrical poetry is a breeze to write! It's easy and fun, and the pieces just sort of snap into place; I did a workshop recently in which we wrote using tarot cards as prompts, and I banged out a couple of decent short, rhyming poems in 10 minutes apiece. They weren't brilliant, but I'm willing to call them good, and the other participants loved them. And the reason I was able to work so quickly was because I had a scaffolding of meter and rhyme to prompt my subconscious. I didn't have to scour the wilderness for the right words, just look further down a path that was already laid out. Meanwhile, I have free verse poems that I've been agonizing over for years, struggling to make a structure that works for my words. They all seem to have the same problem: strong beginnings and endings, in which the line breaks and flowing structure are exactly what they need to be, but a middle section that's just choppy prose because I haven't figured out how to turn the connection between beginning and ending into real poetry yet. For me, writing free verse is a lot more work than metrical poetry. I'm not trying to cut across the grass; I'm paving an entirely new sidewalk from scratch.
