My Thoughts in Poetry on Free Verse as Poetry

I've been thinking about this for more than 40 years now...

High School:

Free Verse

Today
Our verses are free:
Shed are the shackles
That chained them to convention.
All subjects are now suitable.
Rhyme and rhythm
Are outcasts,
punctuation and patterns
insignificant

Where
Is one to start?
Unwritten laws
Declare glory and honour with War
Incompatible.
Instead,
One is free to write about Anything
In Anymanner,
especially
the insignificant

Perhaps,
Despite their restraints and their fetters,
Rhythm and rhyme are the betters
Of man's inherent anarchy
Now manifest in poetry.

University:

Written in response to a very good traditional poem—which I believe had horror elements in it: I’ve never been much of a fan of horror—that was written by a dear friend of mine, Craig Borne:

New-Borne Poems

If rhythms were heartbeats
and poems were alive,
I wonder if anyone else would survive
the dread depredations of poet Craig Borne
—I write these lines not to condemn, but forewarn:

Craig’s not a bad poet
—not at all—he’s far from it.
His rhymes are so good that you wonder whodunit—
So good, that if science made poems come alive,
I do not think any but I would survive.

You see, if you met with a slavering grue
(not original, but for my poem it will do)
with fresh blood on its fangs and a whole nasty crew
of Borne-monsters behind it, each one of them new,
just sprung up from the page you were reading right through,
never yet seen before—and this newly birthed zoo
with one roar (plus a screech and a wail or two)
all leaped up from their page and came right after you,
every one of them large, and all sticking like glue
to your tail when you turned it to run like a gnu
from some cheetahs (except that in your case you knew
you were slower than they, and knew they knew it too)
—if this happened, I ask—would you know what to do?

I would. But because of the linguistic dearth
of word-knowledge that these days pervades the whole earth
wherever good books are replaced by TV
and where they’ve set all their good poetry free
I don’t know if there’s anyone else who could rhyme
up an anti-Borne counter-ghoul poem-tool on time.

So I do hope the science that’s brought us TV
will recapture a few of those poems they set free,
and that poet Craig Borne, when inspired by these few,
will then see his can be as life-giving and true.

To Professor Lee M. Johnson: ON POEMS

I always knew I did not like the poems
of our day, but never knew just why
those golden poems, read from olden tomes,
inspired, while “free verse” seemed but a lie.
I knew I loved those poems Grandad read
out loud to me before I went to bed,
but hated E.E. Cummings and his ilk,
whose modern poems trash taste, metre, and rhyme.
My loves and hates remain the same today,
but now, from Johnson, I have learned the why:
decorum, suiting forms to what they say,
true poems suits to echo forms on high.
A poem is not a poem which doth cease
pursuing its creator's ordered peace.

Note that the proper reading of this particular poem depends upon both the proper and the modern improper pronunciation of the word “poem”.

I have to admit that I'm probably a little hard on e.e. cummings, but for me he functions as a symbol of where modern poetry went wrong, and I am thus treating him as a symbol rather than a person. He was, in fact, quite capable of writing sonnets and other complex traditional forms of poetry himself (see, for example, his “the Cambridge ladies...” sonnet), and it is this symbolic unfairness to him that I address in my next anti-free-verse poem.

Graduate:

D-generation

e.e. cummings took a sonnet
wrote his capless letters on it
split it lengthwise
				made it new
but all his changes could not do
to it what he has done to verse
take it bad and make it worse

he did not mean it    did some good
but did not count on all the brood
of instant poets    formless snobs
who could not write to save their pens

e.e. cummings took the poem
took it to pieces    burned old Rome

Ironically, the only poem of mine that has ever been formally published is this free-verse poem I wrote in Grade 10.

Update: I forgot! Or, rather, I misremembered… For some reason, I thought that it was my “Child of Africa” poem that got published both in my school’s poetry newsletter (pictured above) and the BCETA Journal (the most formal medium in which my work has been published so far), but… when I actually found the old copy of the BC English Teacher’s Association in which my poem was published, I discovered (or, rediscovered, I guess) that the poem that had been published there was actually my “Free Verse” poem!