[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."

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

For me, the ridiculous thing in the Chesterton quote is the belief that verse and meter are synonymous.

They are not. They often correspond in metrical poetry, but they are not the same thing.

For me, verse is all about turning: turning the idea, the argument, a focus during the progression of lines, images, metaphors, etc.

Meter is merely the arrangement of stress.

I have—yes I have—read many poems on the Met board that were obviously quite metrical, even nice to read, that did not seem to me to be good verse. This is especially true when enjambments are used willy-nilly, seemingly without a care beyond whether enough beats are in a line and the right rhyme falls in the right place.

And of course I've read plenty of free verse on the Non-met boards that did not seem like good verse or any kind of verse at all.*

*Edit: I wanted to add that I'd say that a poem, or poetry, is also distinct for me from both meter and verse.

[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.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Kate said
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.

So true.

And anyway, vers libre isn't all that free.