[Janet Kenny]

I am very impatient with any attempt to write inorganic poetry which doesn't grow out of the language in which the poem is written. I have absolutely nothing against syllabics, despite my unfortunate introduction to the form or description. I think it's a bit rich to claim the avoidance of predictable beats as a preserve of syllabics. I think all poetry can do that. It always gets questioned here and sometimes it deserves to be but other times it doesn't.
I suspect that a desire to pin down meter like a dead butterfly is at the root of many of poetry's troubles.

I find the Plath poem is strongly dimetric.

I admire Plath. She used language with such freedom.

There is a rather fashionable school of evasive poetry which if laid out traditionally is a conventional metrical poem but artfully uses line breaks — applied after composition would be my guess— in order to seem eccentrically constructed. There's nothing wrong with this but it is tricky and very fashionable. It gets huge applause. Sometimes it deserves it. (Edited back to witter on a bit more) I think the reason that such poems are well received is that they liberate us from the four square reading. We experience the nuances of sound and rhythm which we might miss if the poem were presented as a straight tetrameter or whatever. That is partly the fault of the reader. It is most definiitely why I am opposed to line caps. We have to flow with the poem.