I've just been to an open-mic poetry reading. Some good stuff, some bad. Some rhyme, some free. But it wasn't the rhyme and metre or the freeness that made the bad bad. It was the pedestrian nature of the thought behind it. A Canadian visitor read a poem about her own menstrual blood (wasn't this first done in the 70's?) in free verse. A bloke wrote about how poetry really makes a difference, maan, in verse. Terrible.
Bad free verse and bad rhyme come from the same source: laziness of thought. A lot of bad poems are like Star Trek in reverse: boldly going where everyone's been before. And discovering that hey wow! drugs are bad for you, love's quite nice really.
Free verse is just as hard as metred verse, but only if you put work into it. A good free verse poem is as shaped in its way as a good rhyming poem. I think learning how to do metre may well help one to do free verse. I know it helped me; though I was never comfortable doing rhyme. It felt like I was wearing someone else's clothes, but that's just a personal reaction. So I took what I could from it: the sense of rhythm, the importance of choosing words not just for their meaning but for their sound as well, and the idea of the line as an important part of the poem.
Bad rhyming poems tend to be dull retreads, full of stock phrases and rhymes, and they don't "surprise with a fine excess." Bad free verse poems ramble on, telling us little anecdotes about the poet's life, are either too thin or too full. It's not that they sound like prose: some prose is terrific writng and if a poem was as good as, say, The Red Badge of Courage, I wouldn't mind. But it's dull prose, broken up into lines. In fact, I do wonder if reading good prose can be as useful to the poet as learning how to do metre.
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Steve Waling
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