[Max Goodman]

(not a thought you haven't encountered before, but strikingly put)

Vers libre, or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
--G.K. Chesterton, "The Romance of Rhyme"

[Tim Murphy]

Asked why didn't write free verse, Robinson said "I write badly enough as it is."

[Ed Shacklee]

Although these witty remarks are new to me, I've heard quite a few clever digs at free verse over the years. I wonder if anyone knows any equally clever digs made at formal poetry? I could use a good laugh directed at myself.

Best,

Ed

[Nicholas F.]

Not all measures involve finger-counting.

[Tim Murphy]

Robinson also opined "It is said that vers libre is much harder to write than formal verse. From what I've read, I'd have to agree."

[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by Ed Shacklee

I could use a good laugh directed at myself.
Ed

“When shall we three meet with Shacklee?”
Witches’ voices, gruff and crackly,
Mocking, jeering, harsh and cackly.
“When he writes vers libre?” “Exackly!”

[John Whitworth]

Writing free verse
Is worse
Than being dead
Said Ed.

[Kate Benedict]

"Why do you scorn free verse?” Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter. “Isn’t it the only kind of verse now being written which has any aesthetic impulse back of it?”

Whatever. I very much fear "lockstep thinking" -- meaning that one joins a movement and accepts its tenets so wholeheartedly that thinking stops, experimentation stops, the possibility of surprise stops.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Ed Shacklee

Although these witty remarks are new to me, I've heard quite a few clever digs at free verse over the years. I wonder if anyone knows any equally clever digs made at formal poetry? I could use a good laugh directed at myself.

Best,

Ed

“Forcing twentieth-century America into a sonnet—gosh, how I hate sonnets—is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs off to make him fit. When you get through, you don’t have a crab any more.”
—William Carlos Williams

[Ann Drysdale]

Originally Posted by Julie Stoner

“Forcing twentieth-century America into a sonnet—gosh, how I hate sonnets—is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs off to make him fit. When you get through, you don’t have a crab any more.”
—William Carlos Williams

No, William, dear. You craft the box to fit the crab. Works every time.