I'll briefly address both MacArthur and Curtis.
First, Mac, I enjoyed the poem you posted, but it is indeed free verse, with few if any recurring patterns of rhythm. Still, it has its interests.
Curtis,
Your post is too long to address in every detail, so let me simply answer by saying that I agree with Ezra Pound's definition of poetry: "a shape cut in time." This shape is an aural shape when heard or read aloud. Sight comes into the poem in two ways.
First, when we use our imagination, words evoking sight imagery actually stimulate the sight area of our brains, though only about half as much as actually seeing things. What evokes these imaginary sights, however, is the words, which are sounds associated in our minds with a fuzzy set of ideas.
The second way poems use sight is the way they look on the page, which seems to me a fairly trivial aspect of their shape, since a creative typographer can arrange words and letters in all kinds of ways. Mechanically making all lines exactly the same length with no internal similarity is not the same as letting words develop into metrical lines of approximately the same length with repeating and shifting patterns.
As to the supposedly random dispersal of stars in the night sky, astronomers have recently discovered that the distribution of stars in not random--they form a shape like a collection of bubbles or foam--thus they make a repeating, fractal pattern.
Paul Lake
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