01-21-2021, 12:30 AM
... of free verse.
It seems the internet is awash with nothing but these days. I'm reading some, and some makes sense and is thought-provoking and beautiful (e.g. Eliot's The Waste Land, Lawrence's Snake, but for the most part modern free form means do as you like without any discipline and call it poetry. Why else the internet plethora? Because it's (apparently) easy?
Extract from Asphodel (Williams) (yards of it):
The sea alone
with its multiplicity
holds any hope.
The storm
has proven abortive
but we remain
after the thoughts it roused
to How is this solitary word on a line explained?
re-cement our lives.
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death's
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden.
This is what I'm not getting, and why I believe so often across contributions, these single words and staggered forms give licence to some of the most appalling crap. If acknowledged poets can write one word on a line, then, it seems, I'll litter mine with the same.
My attempt at free verse based on real-world experience:
Verbal diarrhoea
oozing
down
the
page.
The current all-embracing trend of free verse is putting me off that form, especially when such a lot is a disjointed stream of consciousness littered with meaningless and arbitrary broken lines.
Grateful if someone could explain how to read e.g Asphodel with its single-word lines and choppy delivery. I don't want to give up on this form... yet.
Cheers.
It seems the internet is awash with nothing but these days. I'm reading some, and some makes sense and is thought-provoking and beautiful (e.g. Eliot's The Waste Land, Lawrence's Snake, but for the most part modern free form means do as you like without any discipline and call it poetry. Why else the internet plethora? Because it's (apparently) easy?
Extract from Asphodel (Williams) (yards of it):
The sea alone
with its multiplicity
holds any hope.
The storm
has proven abortive
but we remain
after the thoughts it roused
to How is this solitary word on a line explained?
re-cement our lives.
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death's
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden.
This is what I'm not getting, and why I believe so often across contributions, these single words and staggered forms give licence to some of the most appalling crap. If acknowledged poets can write one word on a line, then, it seems, I'll litter mine with the same.
My attempt at free verse based on real-world experience:
Verbal diarrhoea
oozing
down
the
page.
The current all-embracing trend of free verse is putting me off that form, especially when such a lot is a disjointed stream of consciousness littered with meaningless and arbitrary broken lines.
Grateful if someone could explain how to read e.g Asphodel with its single-word lines and choppy delivery. I don't want to give up on this form... yet.
Cheers.
