Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius

"Critics being critics - there has been, is, and will be attempts to impose rules on free verse that (in theory) assist in making judgments about them."--gabriel

Most other art forms get a daily dose of public opinion to keep them honest. A snob might bemoan some purer form falling by the wayside, and I might even be that snob on occasion. The rules that critics have applied to free verse are better seen as genres--it's easier to compare a mystery to another mystery than to a cookbook--and while I don't particularly want to read horror, we wouldn't even know that there is a market for it if it we refused to publish it in the first place. Why is poetry different? We can point and laugh at the Dan Browns of the world, safe in knowing we can't even be compared. We have no expectations of poetry being popular, so we can feel validated by the lack of popularity and our own misunderstood genius.


"Oh, we got both kinds. We got Country and Western."--Blues Brothers

There are huge chunks of the population that don't want Country or Western, but poetry critics don't seem to want them to have the choice. Yes, it's a chicken and egg question: Is the market for poetry so small that we have to limit publication, or is the market so small because we already have?

I can't answer that question. Come on, you knew I couldn't. Don't look at me that way. But I think the internet, the world of blogs, online publications, and similar outlets can find out. Right now, we're still operating under the principle that there isn't enough space for all of it, Country, Western, Swing, Hip-Hop, Rock. We have to squash one genre to allow our chosen one room to grow. But there is a near-infinite number of pixels available and we've got more elbow room than sense.

I want a pony!

When I was a kid, my brother and I played innumerable rounds of Horse. Or Pig. Or even Superman which was a reversal of Horse and meant that a missed shot gave a letter to your opponent instead.

My brother Joe was a better shot than I was. Two years older, faster, stronger, better in every way. So we started employing trick shots instead of straight up shooting for the basket. No, now you had to spin around fifteen times or ricochet the ball off the planter or perform the layup with a blindfold on. These shots were less about skill and more about luck and abiding by the rules of the shot. And since anything can become easier with practice, we had to mix it up a lot, discarding old tricks that were no longer baffling our opponent, keeping them off-balance and always in danger of falling splat on the pavement.

Poetry is like that. Master a trick shot, even if it's the only one you can do, and keep dazzling your opponent with it. More importantly, if they can't make the shot, they get tagged with an H, even if the reason the shot involved bouncing the ball off her own head was just one person's way of keeping the game interesting, of preventing the Joes of the world from simply trouncing the Julies.

You want easy? Write in received forms

Inspired by a discussion on Stephen Burt's blog about the ubiquity of sestinas.

It's anti-intuitive for many readers, I think, to say that forms are easier poems to write than free verse. After all, in forms you have all those other things to worry about, repetends or meters or rhymes or envois or voltas or the dreaded couplet.

But when all is said and done, from my perspective, forms are easier. Why? A couple of reasons.

1. Fewer decisions. You know when a villanelle is done moving. You don't really have any choice about when to end a sestina. And while you can play with the expectations of your reader, you don't have to.

2. Language. Plunk the most plain-spoken prose into a dizain and it will sound like a poem. Rhyme and meter bolster language into something "poetic." In free verse, the word choice, the rhythms, they're out there on their own.

3. Expectation. Write a sonnet. Some people will dismiss you without reading it, but far more will praise you without caring about the quality of the poem. Writing in a received form is viewed by many as an accomplishment in itself.

4. Tradition. It's okay to write a derivative sonnet.

5. Validation. No one will say your villanelle isn't a poem. They might say it stinks, but not that it isn't a poem.

6. Solace. Poet you can't be too upset when a pantoum goes wrong. After all, you didn't expect it to be good in the first place.


All this is coming from someone who writes in received forms about 90% of the time. For some people, meter or rhyme or any other element of a form are too difficult to overcome. But for the majority of people, I think it's easier to write a "good"¹ sonnet than a "good" free verse poem.


¹"Good" is a poem that is received as good, not an attempt to define the quality of the poem itself.