Curtis,
Having read your crits with admiration, I'm really disappointed by your wholesale condemnation of free verse on the basis of a few examples. Oddly, I've The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997 on current loan from my local library. Like some of the free form stuff in it - other pieces leave me cold. Same goes for the annual Forward Book of Poetry (a British equivalent of The Best).
But that's what I expect of anthologies. And whereas I'm a great Louis MacNeice fan I find some current 'metrical' or 'formal' poetry less satisfactory than others. I use quotes because I don't see a sharp distinction between 'formal' poetry and the kind of 'free verse' I like best, in which there is rhythmic patterning but of a complexity that doesn't easily lend itself to analysis.
Here's an example of a poem by Catherine Byron published in her 1993 collection The Fat-Hen Hospital.
Damson-Fall in the Study of Dove Cottage
for Dorothy Wordsworth
An unseen letting-go, as of budscales -
the narrow twigs sigh upwards, straighten,
callouse their circular and crescent scars
A shoal of dark fish in the shallows
stunned, wounds beaded with mites,
the grasses' undulant threads netting them close
Slack and damp to my hands
that comb them out - little minnows,
little plummeted lapwings
I have held them for dseasons after,
their clear blood light in a glass,
their sharp preserve
but these walls hold them truest -
whitewash of blossom from their scrubbed spring
stained with the crush of their dying -
damson-fool.
I think the free-flowing rhythms of this piece are well suited to its organic trope and themes. I take the damson-fall to represent the sacrifices of motherhood and poetic
creativity Dorothy made for her brother's sake. The musicality and precision of imagery also reflect the sensitivity and sharp detail of her diaries.
A fine piece ... no? I could write with equal enthusiasm of some formally stricter poems. But why oh why should it be an EITHER/OR? Best, Margaret.
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