inversions in poetry

[abu nuwas]

You use words made up of more than one bit. Why? It is too hard to know what you mean. Shame on you!

But if you must: it is constantly preached, that the reader takes away whatever he does, as he is king. Ambiguity is the order of the day. I spend hours wondering what, if anything, people mean. Yet of all things, it never crossed my mind that inversion was a problem. It is hard to believe.

The origin is immaterial. We find ourselves with the box of tricks that we do, and are foolish to deny ourselves some help, because of fears of being those affected. It has never occurred to me before, but I suppose as time passes and the language degrades more, that will become true --if people choose to make such assumptions. Why they would not feel the same about any other poetic device, I cannot imagine. It is inconsistent. So there are two very different views. Poor Loretta must wonder what she has stumbled into.

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just read a thread where inversion of some lines of poetry were mentioned. some for some against. i wonder what the general consensus was.

i think when ever possible, it's best not to use them, as always there has to be exceptions to the rule but for me an exception should a rarity indeed.

while poetry uses different rules than other styles of writing, it has tend to stick to the syntax of a languages era. in victorian time there was a fair bit of yoderism going on the same can be said of other times. plays written back then were often iambic pent with lots of inversion. since then it has changed. call it a trend or simply the fashion but it has changed. Using inversion isn't breaking new ground as much as digging up old ground. it reads well in a period piece such as a sonnet but even then it has to be a real period piece written in the same structure throughout. while a lack of punctuation doesn't hold up the read of a poem if done properly. inversion often makes the reader step back and do a double take.

the real big point for me though is this. it's deemed as a bad habit, as are cliche and other areas of poetry. why on earth not tell people that there inversion hold the read up or make them think of yoda. if after being told this they wish to ignore the fact, then fair enough. some would always tell a poet that I should be capped. ee cummins didn't think so but him thinking so hasn't changed the majorities way of thinking on the subject. inversion don't work for me and a capital letter starting every line doesn't either. people still use the caps thing and it's said to be a choice. most agree that inversion really is for the best part, a no no.

i say learn to write without inversion and once you can, you can start playing about with it properly. most who invert have no idea they are doing so. most who use cliche have no idea they are doing so.

Billy, there is something quite frightening about being constrained by ''people now think..'' or worries about what to-day's general consensus might be. Such things are the bane of contemporary writing, imperceptibly pushed by peer-pressure into a kind of sameyness, each thing different, yet somehow the same. Illiterate educators in cursed Creative Writing schools shoulder a part of the blame; the rest is that tendency of people to lazily get in step with the marching morons. If you catch my drift.