Roy (Lynn?),
I'm not certain if you heard what I was saying: Yes, poetry is inspired speech; Yes, you conjure thoughts with certain musical sounds...but the line breaks, the stanza breaks, the commas, the periods, the m-dashes and semicolons and ellipsis marks and all those -- those are the notations we've developed to tell the reader where to pause, how to pause, how to be silent so that others may listen, and in that moment of silent listening, dream.
And with prosodic theory: All the words are just names put to things that already exist. A few days ago I learned a new word: chiasmus. A week before, I used one in my Umunum Song, not knowing what the prosodic device was called, just that I'd seen it on a few rare occasions before and it suited my needs.
However, that said, this is a workshop. A child does not need to know what a noun is to say "mommy," even though that word is indeed a noun. But a poet or any other writer who is wishing to talk craft with his fellow writers needs to know what a noun is, as every sentence has them, and it saves time when we're talking about craft to tell someone to "find another noun," rather than "another word of the same sort as 'mommy,' not that I know what those are called." Chiasmus? A rarer beast, so not as necessary, but still nice to know the name for if one comes up in conversation.
I was writing in perfect meters--and complicated ones too--before I knew the names for the proper notation. Once I learned, I used the formal words to describe them, since it would be silly to do otherwise.
As for tastes changing and styles changing, nonsense. The bones are still the same. You say you don't understand rap? Here, look at a perfectly popular rap song:
Woke up quick at about noon
Just thought that I had to be in Compton soon
I gotta get drunk before the day begins
Before my mother starts bitchin' about my friends
About to go and damn near went blind
Young niggaz on the pad throwin' up gang signs
I went in the house to get the clip
With my Mac10 on the side of my hip
I bailed outside and pointed my weapon
Just as I thought, the fools kept steppin
I jumped in the fo' hit the juice on my ride
I got front and back side to side
Then I let the alpine play
I was pumpin' new shit by NWA
It was "Gangster Gangster" at the top of the list
Then I played my own shit, it went somethin' like this...
What is that? It's accentual tetrameter, mostly anapestic tetrameter with some substitutions, many of them interesting. It's rimed in the same couplets as Chaucer would understand, and the rimes themselves are either perfect rimes or ordinary slants of the sort favored by Emily Dickinson.
This may be a new musical style, but it's not new poetry. And as for it being a new musical style, all you need to do is watch the iPod commercial where the girl's hard-pounding hip-hop song is synched to the folk in the cowboy hats doing country line dancing and it matches perfectly because the songs have the same base-beat--and there's the one with the guys break-dancing to the country song too.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And everything old is new again.