[Allen Tice]

My wife (all hail, Ellen) said she enjoyed something the other day by e.e. cummings, and wondered if I might think it was a SPOW (short piece of writing) rather than a poem. I said cummings was very, very good, and wrote many, many sonnets. She then showed me the item, which is the second item on this link :
Good Reads, author quotes, E_E_Cummings.

She again asked if it was poem. I said I see some exact rhymes, and that, while possibly sentimental, it rises above spowishness in content, but the layout looks terrible : let me see it in hard copy. Two minutes later on the page it was clearly seen to be a sonnet with some slant rhymes.

This link above renders some of cummings' works well enough, but look at this mess. American writers and readers are in such a debased state of free-verse stupor that no one at this site knew the difference. BAH!

[Martin Rocek]

Allen,
what are you on about? That is a quotation site--it is not a poetry site at all.
Try this:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179622

[Allen Tice]

I'd be even more depressed if the Poetry Foundation had messed up. My only point is that the leading poem (a fairly obvious sonnet) on a prominent quotation site by a well-known poet was accidentally hashed into paragraphs and no one had a clue since they were numbed down by overexposure to Garrison Keillor-ated prose that is ubitquitously called poetry.

[W.F. Lantry]

Allen,

Pardon, your slant is showing.

And what does a radio host have to do with this? It was just some doofus, cutting and pasting. And into a text editor designed for a different purpose.

Besides, someone, all these years later (and they are many), liked the poem enough to pull it out and try to share it. Out of the vast mountain of dreck that is the Collected cummings. Have you seen that one? Many inches thick. In another life, I read the darned thing entire. Luckily, as one moves through it, there are many pages with only a few words on them. One can turn through those quickly...

Thanks,

Bill

[Roger Slater]

Garrison Keillor's books have introduced me to some poems that I really love, and also include poems I already knew and loved. He includes many formal poems as well as free verse poems. His taste is quite solid. He does not purvey Hallmark or Readers Digest pseudo poetry, but the real thing, and he brings it to millions of people, something no one else is doing. I wonder, Allen, what you have done in the service of the poetry you admire that can hold a candle to what Garrison Keillor has done?

[Allen Tice]

Aha, fire and smoke. Perhaps I should re-edit Garrison Keillor out because he's not so bad except for two things : one is his, to me, dreadful moanish drone; two, I have to listen to him every evening at when his gloomy tone protrudes into the classical music program we usually listen to at dinner time; and third, his sometimes (often?) dreadful mass-mind artified taste of what constitutes poetry suitable for force-feeding to the NPR radio public. Once, I laughed at him, now I run screaming to another room while my wife waits for me to return.

Maybe it's his thudding reading style as much as anything. But when I'm asked if what he just read was a poem or a SPOW, way too often I answer, A SPOW, totally a SPOW. Where's the poem?

Roger, I think GK is better than nothing. His choices are usually not Hallmark, and some are excellent. Some are more of the dry blah-blah kleenex many of us loathe. Actually, I don't have to be a poet hero like Conrad Aiken, e e cummings, Edna Millay, Chaucer, or Roger Slater to have an opinion. In art, everyone is a critic. That's the territory.

I'd like GK to read some Chaucer (in the original and then updated, in that order), some other Middle English, some Alexander Pope, some W.S. Gilbert, something with life in it !

Bill, you are too gentle and forgive too easily, always excusing digital peccancy. It's not a slant I have, it's a hard-earned learning curve, and it's almost straight up.

Oh well, oh well.

[John Riley]

Let me see if I understand this. A member of Goodreads shows interest in e.e. cummings and he/she is "a person without sympathy for literary or artistic culture." (OED)

I had to look it up. I'm at least three-quarters barbarian myself.

[Ed Shacklee]

As to ignorance, prevelance is not the same as strength.

Ed

[Maryann Corbett]

Allen, you're not wrong about people's inability to see and hear meter and/or chiming rhymes. It's just that this seems like very late alarm at a problem that's as huge as it is, and this doesn't seem like the best example of the phenomenon. (And I agree with Roger that GK is not at fault here.)

Perhaps I have extra exposure to the problem because I used to spend time on boards with majorities of free-verse poets, and I still do submit to many, many magazines that get mostly free-verse submissions. So I know that metrical poems get carved up all too often by readers or editors who can't or won't see and hear meter. One just has to keep insisting.

The barbarians, if we must call them that, own the city and are collecting the property taxes. That's life.

[Allen Tice]

I'm ventilating here on this thread, so not everything is as logical and orderly, or even well-founded as I'd like.

It's just that when I started writing, I truly LIKED sonority and rhythm and rhyme. Meter was just super when it was well done. But no one wanted that. So I tried free verse. Everywhere, everything was free verse. In ever-increasing waves, thick on the ground, free verse. Even David Lehman gave up form and started writing somehat inferior free verse. More free verse. Indistinguishable free verse. Fungible free verse. That was the final straw: everyone was writing the same damn five poems! And not much of it was worth hearing or reading a second time. (Here and there, a little bit, maybe.)

I quit.

Maybe I'm not good at what I want to do, but I quit doing the lemming thing.

I know this is old news and I know you're right, Maryann. I will be quiet now, maybe.