Tim, thank you for the kind words, though I won't stand up in comparison to Murray Gell Mann.
Curtis, rhythm is sound is time sequence. Not the other way around.
I used to do a type of mathematics named "non-standard analysis". The adherents to this style of analysis realized only too late that naming a style via negativa would be the big bar that would hinder that wonderful tool going mainstream. The mathematics itself wasn't defined in a negative manner. It had a positive definition: Mathematics by means of infinitesimals. But the definition only appeared to those who looked past the name.
"Free-form poetry" is a bit akin to that. But in free-form's case, it is not only the name that is given as a negative, but also the definition. It is a "not that". That isn't, and can't be, an improvement. Do you think Einstein would have improved on physics if his amendment to Newton's laws was "not F = m* a"?
You say In fact, the idea of "improving on tradition" bit by bit would suggest that a loosening of meter might be one way of doing it. And that is indeed true. AE Stallings is an exponent of such a move relative to tradition. We have two threads, here and in the Mastery, concerning "Het Met" - heterometrical poetry. Tim works in alliterative poetry. John Beaton works with strong alliterative elements in addition to the accentual-syllabic - a strengthening of the rhythmic aspect.
You say I find it hard to believe that a similarity of sounds (such as alliteration) needs to also be metrically driven in order to create the complex, dynamic systems we are calling "poems." Have you tried to set up a brick wall, Curtis? Or maybe you have seen it done? Notice how they keep the straight lines? It is an error to believe that those straight lines are extrinsic to the wall - that the wall consists of bricks only, and that any structure to the wall aside from the pure spontaneity of the brick layer is an imposition from the outside. Is a brick wall "straight line driven"? Or is structuring part of the art of building a wall?
I don't have anything against each and every "free verse" there is. I love Crane's "The Heart", for instance. But note that his poem is packed with self-referential sound. He doesn't merely declare "as opposed to those who have used a hammer as a tool in their poetry, my poetry makes use of the tool I call a non-hammer". A non-hammer is simply not a tool, though I am sure it would confound the expectations of those who were buying the house.
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Svein Olav
.. another life
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