I think Rhina is right that there's not much point in drawing lines in the sand, but I'm very interested in understanding what poetry is. So I'm going to raise a question inspired by the above debate.
"Verse" is usually understood to be a technique, which may or may not produce poetry (one can versify a washing bill or a dreary bureaucratic memorandum without making them poetry).
If verse is a technique for achieving poetry, it seems possible that one might arrive at poetry by means of another technique -- or entirely without any technique.
On the other hand, the term 'free verse' seems nearly oxymoronic if one regards verse as essentially a technique (a means of achieving some end -- a means one could explain to someone else -- a craft). If verse is understood as a technique, then it is most plausibly identified with meter.
But this still leaves open the possibility that "poetry" is a goal definable entirely apart from meter.
Can we reject "free verse" as self-contradictory: "techniqueless technique", and yet admit that there is something else, "poetry" which may be achieved without any set, teachable technique? Can there be 'free poetry' or 'prose poetry' -- i.e. poetry free of meter?
The answer depends on whether we can distinguish poetry from prose in some way OTHER than by meter.
I'm sympathetic to the attempt to do this, but so far, I'm not sure I've heard anything that would clearly distinguish the aims of poetry and prose. Metaphor and the other things listed above seem common to both poetry and prose.
I would be very interested to have someone tell me what distinguishes the aims or the means of poetry and prose, putting meter to one side. (Here I am trying to restate Len Krisak's assertions as a challenge.)
That challenge might be too difficult -- it's too hard for me right now. Could someone define 'lyric poem' in a way that leaves it open whether a lyric poem employs meter at all, but at the same time distinguishes it from prose-genres (like the short-short story)? This seems more hopeful.
Even if my challenge is unmeetable, and "poetry" can't be defined without reference to meter, it will not follow that 'free verse' is valueless -- only that it is a set of genres better classified as prose.
[And this raises a final question: perhaps 'free verse' is more like prose for some purposes, but more like poetry for other purposes. But if that's right, let's try to get more specific about which purposes go with which distinctions.)
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