Real Poetry
Free verse is naught but prose in guise.
No one can tell me otherwise.
Confessions, images, and aches
Are less than what a poem makes.
It need not rhyme but it must scan.
It needs a rhythmic formal plan
Which should not be Procrustean,
May even be Shakespearean,
But must be fashioned for success.
Amorphous words do not impress.
Iambic couplets like these here,
Enough to transmit meaning clear,
Bombard our brains with booming sound
Which simple prose has never found.
Confessions, images, and aches
Are best conveyed when one partakes
Of cogently well-ordered verse.
Melodic, liquid lines immerse
Us in the souls of humankind
Imposed on each enraptured mind.
Strict prosody is difficult.
Bright words alone do not result
In poetry worth eye or ear
Unless it resonates sincere.
Free versers take the easy road.
They only want to purge their load.
Unwittingly, though they presume,
The fact remains that those for whom
Free verse is the poetic norm
Admit they fail to master form.
Eric v.d. Luft, Ph.D., was Curator of Historical Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University from 1987 to 2006 and has taught at Villanova University, Syracuse University, Upstate, and the College of Saint Rose. He is the author, editor, or translator of over 690 publications in philosophy, religion, librarianship, history, history of medicine, politics, humor, popular culture, and nineteenth-century studies.
Your well-structured and rhyming poem is greatly appreciated in this era of prose and prosody that in modern culture has been confused with poetry because the author thinks it is.
From start to finish, you sum it up very nicely.
I agree, Eric!
The fact remains that those for whom
Free verse is the poetic norm
Admit they fail to master form.
I recall attending a poetry reading and Q and A with two prominent poets in the state we lived in at the time. They read poems–all free verse–then took questions. After a bit I asked why they didn’t use formal verse in their work. The first, a woman, answered smugly, “Well, there are just so many ways to rhyme June with moon, ha, ha.” The second, more honest, said, “It’s just too hard.” Precisely as you noted in the lines excerpted above. Free verse is rarely poetry. Very rarely. Hard as it may be, we need to press on with what makes poetry a thing of art and source of wonder. Well done.