Poemranker [Replying] Sat Nov 23 03:41:01 PST 2024

Replying to a comment on:

tribute (Free verse) by francis nor capule

who among us could indeed be called a poet? does one need to read the work of the masters, or just listen to ones soul? would obscure words, brand one or would it be better if made of pure simplest thoughts....

zodiac

4-May-04/12:08 PM

It would probably be better if it made a bit of sense, whatever form it's in. If this poem is, as I imagine it is, about how some vaguely-defined (read 'nonexistent') INSTITUTION forces everyone to write in rhyme and prettily-formed phrases exactly like the 'Masters', and how much of a rebel you and a few other daring souls are who take poetry out for wild formless spins at night, then it's utter crap.

In school (and I imagine you're thinking largely of some high-school-type setting) you're taught a bunch of stuffy carefully-metered rhyming poems and very few daring non-careful poems because you are being taught much of the best that poetry has done from its beginnings (in English at least), meaning 1200 years of rhyme and meter and pretty much only 150 years of not. And because in the lower-grades teachers are more likely to teach the rhymed and metered ones (like "My lady's eyes are nothing like the sun") because it gives them a whole lot of easy things to talk about which aren't closely related to its content, while such mostly non-rhymed, non-metered later poems as "The Waste Land" don't. If you have a problem with that, talk to your teacher, who, if he/she is anything like most American teachers, is hugely undertrained and liable to stick with what's easy. Or stick your head out a window and see what's going on everywhere else in the world, where non-rhyme non-meter has UTTERLY DOMINATED THINGS so long that many people are bored with it and looking for other things to do, such as write some kind of rhyme/meter again. Thank you.

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