Len,
I understood your reference to "boring old shit." The following statements in support of what another called "boring old shit" are what troubled me:
Verse (that boring old shit
that should have gone away) focuses the human
sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable
content of human speech. It revels in sound
and play and charged language.
I think that defining "poetry" as being inherently
metrical allows the estimation that free verse is "just the paraphrasable content of human speech." Certainly, I can accept your more recent statement that "written or spoken language can be" divided into "metrical and non-metrical" language, but I don't think a definition of "poetry" must follow such a division. I have seen many attempts at creating metrical verse on this site and elsewhere which, although quite metrical, are not "poetry" in my estimation: they're flat, they're stilted, they're mundane, they're ineffectual, but metrical. Metricity is not the defining attribute of poetry.
Of course there are other attributes--we all know them: metaphor, sound, meaning, etc. I write much free verse, and I am at my best when I incorporate some or all of these things into my poetry. (Not that I always succeed, of course.) Just because metrical verse follows a recognizable, prefigured pattern doesn't mean that it alone revels in those things you mentioned.
Different kinds of revelation exist. If I were to list my top 50 favorite poems, assuming I could delineate the different levels of greatness between them, well over half--probably about 80-90 percent--would be metrical poems. Auden is one of my top 5 favorite poets. I am not immune to the greatness of metrical verse, but I esteem such verse--
good metrical verse--for its ability to transcend its metrical structure via those other attributes we all love to see in our poetry. One of the lessons drummed into beginning writers is to avoid blaring/glaring, pointless or facile rhymes and sing-song metrics (with, of course, exceptions to this rule), because we want more than the mere sound and structure of the poem. The same holds true for free verse. I can't deny the fact that most free verse--and there's so
much of it--uses its facile line structuring in a seemingly pointless manner, and that this pointlessness grates on the sensibility of those of us who expect rigorous attention to cause & effect in our poetry. Apparently, this irritability is inflamed even more by an expectation of metrical consideration, but I think it is too easy to say: "This poet doesn't seem to care about metrical speech; therefore, this poet has chosen irrationally; this poet has no
art." To take a newspaper article or any other typical work of prose, arbitrarily break it into lines of varying length, and claim that you've just written in the manner in which
all free verse poets compose their poems, is insulting.--I'm not dismissing your viewpoint, because I will agree that too many free verse poets write their poems without due consideration of what the structure of their poems ought to be accomplishing; I'm just saying that there are choices a good free verse poet makes when considering his/her poems' structures. The best free verse accomplishes a playfulness, in my opinion, by subverting expectation not by being combative (i.e., not by submitting broken prose and thumbing its nose at rational human beings), but by offering logic which is unanticipated, and this requires
form, even if the format is not distinguished via recognizable metrical standards.
I see that you have posted to this thread while I've been composing this reply--"There is nothing odious in making a logical distinction between prose and non-prose." I agree, there must be a distinction. I believe that the distinction is in how prose and poetry
operate rather than in how they are structured, but I'm going to close this up for now. I want to make this disclaimer re: "fundamentalism": I suppose that the choice of a poetic aesthetic is necessarily a fundamentalism, one we each must make for ourselves. Perhaps fundamentalism is necessary, if we are going to produce poems which contain logic of whatever kind: there must be order/fundaments. One definition of "fundament":
a. The buttocks. b. The anus. I like another:
An underlying theoretical basis or principle. In my original posting, I was of course using the first definition interlaced with the last, in the form of "anal-retentive," and I was speaking of the worst-case scenarios of both schools of thought.
--Curtis.
[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 07, 2002).]