[John Whitworth]

I know I've done this, though possibly at too great a length. I will investigate. A breeze I would have thought. Perhaps one should try free verse - whatever that may be. Would Ogden Nash fit the bill?

Damn. I forgot by 9th October up at the top. Can some clever whizz add it?

No. 2819 buttoned up or open neck

You are invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse. Please email entries, of up to 16 lines, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 9 October.

[John Whitworth]

Yup! Perfect. Never throw anything away.

Buttoned Up or Free Verse

Say you want to be a poet but you frankly can’t be arsed
With the polishing of verses, like the poets of the past.
No, you haven’t got the patience and you haven’t got the time
For the artfulness of metre and the subtleties of rhyme.

Like a toad beneath the harrow or a nail beneath the hammer;
You’re a slave to Dr Syntax and his pestilential grammar.
Oh it’s hard to be a bard when you’ve no notion how to do it;
Yet the secret’s very simple and there’s really nothing to it.

If you’re long on inspiration, but you’re short on taking trouble,
Writing Free Verse very freely sees your output more than double.
First you jot down thoughts at random like a postcard or a letter,
Then you hack them up at random and the randomer the better.

Make them hectoring, repetitive, vainglorious or vatic –
It’s a trick that any fool can do, it’s truly democratic.
No need to be judicious or ingenious or clever,
Just go on and on and on and on for ever and for ever.

[John Whitworth]

I'm just talking to myself here. Come along with you. I hope Lucy doesn't read D.H. Lawrence.

Free Verse

How beastly the old poets are,
especially the rhymers of the species
with their iambics and their trochees
and (my God) their anapaests and dactyls,
bobbing, bobbing, bobbing along like plastic bloody ducks.

Nicely groomed they are,
spick and span in their natty suitings,
like funguses living on bygone poems,
sucking the life out of the dead pages of the glorious dead.

Reading their horrible rhymes here, there and everywhere,
reading it out loud in the lecture halls and libraries of old England
like over-educated toadstools (did I say that before?)
full of squirminess and worminess
with their posh Oxford voices, the superior gits.

There, I knew I'd get that one in.

[Peter Goulding]

Will need to take a hatchet to this one.

How to write a good poem (by one who never has)

A poet ought to choose his title gainfully,
Abstract nouns are often viewed as trite.
Editors view ‘Winter’ most disdainfully,
And ‘Love’ will doubtless be dismissed as shyte.

Check each word to make sure it is vital.
Condense! they cry, not meaning size of font.
(Except of course when thinking up a title –
That can be as wordy as you want.)

Make sure that the tangled tale you’re spinning
Has one obscure word, plus hapes of slang.
Never start a poem at the beginning
And always try to let the ending hang.

small letters should be used to start a sentence
capitals, it seems, are quite passé
(if you’ve already done this, show repentance –
no need to put your caps lock on today)

Do not write of dying or dementia,
Of unrequited love or fading youth.
And you will not have been the first, I venture,
To stumble on some elemental truth.

Better to avoid the formulaic,
Free versers often can and will bear grudges.
And ‘ware, lest language used is o’er-archaic,
‘Tis something that will not win o’er yon judges.

Simplicity of course, is indefensible,
The modus operandi of the Devil.
Better that your ode’s incomprehensible
Than understood on just a single level.

Throw in some allusion to mythology,
Ideally as obscure as you can cite.
Ancient Greco-Hebrew ornithology
Will have the critics purring with delight.

Above all else though, heed this final warning
And don’t commit the worst poetic crime.
If you must poeticise, some dreadful morning,
God forbid you ever make it rhyme.

[John Whitworth]

This is fun but I don't see that you can hack out four stanzas that will fit the rubric. I think you write very nice poems. Don't sell yourself short, Peter. There are plenty of others clamouring to do that. Sod them!

[Mary McLean]

Yup, I'll bet a lot of us have these in the cupboard.

Cider with Poesy

I found free verse the same time I found cider
(fourteen, when all of life’s a salted sore).
Each teenage girl has got some angst inside her -
a pen will tap the sap out from her core.
Alone I’d pour out anger, grief, rejection,
convinced this was the worst life had to give.
With friends I’d drown the pain in insurrection,
determined not to let my liver live.
Like too much cider, free verse from the young
spews forth unchecked. Release brings calm, but then
the memory lingers foully on the tongue,
and cider never tastes the same again.
These days I far prefer the type of art
where I must use my head, not just my heart.

[Jayne Osborn]

Damn. I forgot by 9th October up at the top. Can some clever whizz add it?

(Yep. Some clever whizz just did )

They've done this one before...

[Roger Slater]

There once was a girl from Nantucket
Who told me, "Your free verse can suck it!"
With a form-friendly curse
She rolled up my free verse,
And I still can't believe where she stuck it.

[Chris O'Carroll]

To squeeze maximum fun out of this one, seems to me we gotta try one of each. I don't have the highest hopes for my free-verse piece. I haven't written much of merit in that mode, so I'll probably be able to manage nothing more than a lame Allen Ginsberg parody. But a rhymed, metrical denunciation of vers libre should be something I can handle. Of course, I'd rather take a stab at a rhymed, metrical denunciation of formal verse. But that's a whole nother comp.

[Brian Allgar]

"Free verse", said the Poet dogmatically,
"Is the future", and smiled seraphically.
But it gets up my nose, for it’s really just prose
That’s been buggered about typographically.

xxxxxxxx***

It doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t scan,
The stuff they call vers libre.
If that’s a poem, my good man,
Then I’m a spotted zebra.

xxxxxxxx***

Pruishly, frockishly,
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Tells us that ‘vers libre
Does not exist’,
Adding that metre is
Incontrovertibly
Present - at least, that is
Roughly the gist.


(John may complain about the false rhyme at the beginning, but I couldn't find another one that didn't end with the 'identity' -graphically.)