Free Verse Isn't Free

He who writes it anathema sit.

Everyone’s encountered modern poetry,

It goes something like this
Then another line
Then an extremely long line drawing out a point to absurd (yet totes necessary) lengths
Suddenly short.
maybe theres no punctuation
Maybe it's aaaaaaaaaalllllll punctuation!!!!!!!,.,';!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!-=,.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(take note: bad skelling's a must)
Usa otro idioma, mi amor
Usually
Shrimple as 2+2 = 3/4
All serving to cast the reader's mind into a maddening morass of mediocracy for the sake of the authors ego
After all—only xir sees the monarch's robes.

The usual subjects are sex, superficial love, breakups after sex, trauma, and the writer xirself. If they’re particularly creative, a stray note of red wheelbarrows and geese might creep in. All are bound by one law more tyrannical than a thousand: “Do whatever you wish—do it as little or as much as you wish—but do not do the same thing twice.”.

Free verse is not free.

The price of writing however the versifier wishes is the paucity of whatever xir has to write about. The blade of free verse frees the camel of her humps. Whatever is left may be a fine beast, but it is not a camel. In the beginning vers libre was simply oratory prose. That was where she was at her best. Her greatest wielders: Whitman, Hughes, Eliot concede as much. They are greatest where their prose slips into poetry.

"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."

You read it. Now speak it—poetry is meant to be sung. With assonant “rising and gliding”, music enters, wells with the alliterative picture of the penultimate line. Then—by the cadence of a perfect sonnet, she spills over, soothing the dusty soul.

"Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
     I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
     He did a lazy sway . . .
     He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
     O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
     Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
     O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone..."

Hughes at his best was a jazz singer. His best poems are jazz songs—rhythmic as the lapping Louisiana bayou and tangled like mangrove roots. At his worse, he is uglier than the grunts of a whipped slave.

It is with Elliot that poetry casts aside her burka of newfashionedness, springing forth as the morning sun.

"Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
...
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."

He reveals her eternal oldfashionedness. Beowolf is born again as a balding clerk amongst anglo-saxon verse, chaucerian five-stress-lines, and helter-skelter skeltonics. Read a line, then read it again and the internal rhythm, edge-rhyme, motifs, and meter are simply astounding. Most do not perceive what makes it great and imagine that greatness lies in the slapdash haberdashery they use to crown themselves.

The poet’s pride is in humility—he subjugates himself to constraints and chains, to praising something else, putting himself last that art and the object of his art may be first. Be it only Dante’s glorification of Beatrice. David’s greater exaltation of the Exalter. This is the secret of Frost’s glory and the glory of Homer.

Do not think that art is in the rules or in breaking them—Art is transgression to a truer law. There is hardly anything more poetic than not touching the stove, then learning how to scramble eggs. Some of you reading this are thinking: “I know how to scramble eggs. My scrambled eggs are the best!”. Get that retardation out of your skull: your eggs are scrambled—you don’t even have cake. Or pie. Know your limits or you won’t grow past them. Do not be self deprecating—that’s also retarded.

Know this: Others will always be better than you—you will best them by work. There is a paradox here, but it’s the paradox of Jack and the Beanstalk. The path Niggle walked, of whom the poet sang “Over the hills and far away.”, waits for you.

Learn how to scramble eggs.

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Next up: The Building Blocks of English Poetry

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