[Peter Goulding]

Now that, Roger, is very clever.

Wish I'd thought of it.

[arkava das]

Originally Posted by Peter Goulding

Taking Chris's advice that maybe we should try one of each (most of us appear to be going for rhyme mocking free verse)

At first she thought she could live with it –
the insistence on parallel cutlery,
the meticulous sheet-folding and bed-making,
the obsession with symmetrical paintings,
even the rigorously-timed foreplay.
But then - Oh God! – he started writing poetry,
highly-structured formal verse
with perfect pitch and perfect rhyme
and perfectly accentuated syllables.
Let your mind run free, she sobbed,
cast off your shackles and scream.
But he couldn’t.
She keeps his book in the kitchen.
It tilts the table at a slight angle.

haha. excellent stuff.

[Brian Allgar]

Free verse? Come on, it’s anything but free!
As though to compensate for lack of rhyme,
It’s fettered by a drab obscurity.

As though to compensate for lack of rhyme,
The authors of this dismal stuff pretend
That their absurdity is quite sublime.

It’s fettered by a drab obscurity
That, frankly, drives this reader round the bend -
You say it’s just my immaturity?

Not so! For me, it’s all a massive con;
I’m surely not the only one to see
The Emperors have no clothes - they’re bare as mice
When form and rhyme and metre all have gone.
Although such poetry’s described as ‘free’,
It isn’t even worth the asking price.

[Roger Slater]

Oh free-verse poets, have you folks no shame?
Are you moronic, ignorant, obtuse,
foolish, thick and dim, or should we blame
an evil purpose? What is your excuse?
Whence the gumption whereby you discard
long centuries of usage and tradition?
Might it be simply that to rhyme is hard?
Or do you want for genuine ambition?
Why, if rhyme and meter suited Blake,
Shakespeare, Keats, Rossetti and Millay,
have you concluded poets must forsake
these tools to say the things that they should say?
Just where exactly did you folks get lost?
Your verse is free, but do you know the cost?

[Matt Q]

Since his wife left, he has more time for crosswords
and Sudoku. He’s pretty good at puzzling out solutions
when the rules are well defined. He writes poetry too.
Free verse? “A cultural cul-de-sac,” he tries to mumble
with derision, but his mouth’s too full of nipple; he’s nursing
at the geometric breast of Mother Form. Surely she will
always keep him safe? He clings on tighter still and shuts his eyes.
But sometimes, late at night, he longs to experiment
with line breaks; he imagines only using words that say
exactly what he feels, not just those that fit and rhyme and scan.
But these are wicked thoughts. He ties himself up with metres
of the roughest rope, the most elaborate of knots; he beats himself
and begs forgiveness at the metric feet of the Dominatrix of Form.
Asleep, he dreams he escapes from a prison; he runs wild
and free across open countryside until panic overwhelms him.
He wakes screaming for a map, gets up and checks on all the locks.

[Lois Elaine Heckman]

In his repetend nightmare,
he virelayed down the enjambment,
dropping his epode while he fled
from lions-o’-rhymed-tales
that beat quatrains into migraines.
He nearly went into anapaestic shock
when spondees scanned him,
peeking into his pyrrhic;
trochees tried to truncate his epistle;
and iambs elisioned him,
(with a pterrordactyl as guard doggerel),
after he fell in the distich, tropping –
over his own feet. It was awdl!
One day he’d escape in a syntaxi,
find caesura, catalect himself
and wake up entirely vers libre!