I'm posting this flyer to call your attention to a fabulous and free workshop next month. I will be joining Jim Vires and Genie Rayner of Branch Hill Publishing, along with Melissa Stevens and Leona Charlie Holman to conduct five mini-sessions for writers. The topics to be covered include electronic publishing, editing for publishing, book cover art, writing metered poetry, and plot development. If you are near East Tennessee on October 8th, you are invited to join us!
I don't like it. I have been watching this happen over the last twenty-five years, although it has been going on for much longer. The last ten years, because of the Internet, the speed at which this has been occurring has seemingly quadrupled. I'm talking about the disconnect poets have with writing properly metered verse. There is no great secret, most poets write free verse poetry. Most of what I write is free verse. Writing free verse poetry is less "constipating" to creativity. That said, what I find amazing is the amount of rhyming poetry posted all over the Internet with no form or meter. Is this wrong? No, it's not. People are free to write in whatever manner they please. What is disturbing to me is the sheer lack of any metered poetry. Is there cause for concern over this absence of metered verse?
As I prepared to write this post, I made a survey of several popular poetry sites: Writerscafe.org, HelloPoetry.com, and Poetrypoem.com. I began to search out rhyming poems with reckless abandon, disregarding the author and focusing on the content of the poems. And what did I find? Is there a common denominator among all of these submissions? Why, yes there is. In my scansion of the poetry, I found no single rhyming poem on any of the three sites correctly metered. Zero. Now, I'm sure there are hundreds of examples posted that are in meter, but on this day, the poetry I reviewed was all irregular meter - trochees and iambs tossed about like magnetic poetry words falling off a fridge during an earthquake. I am troubled by this. A few years ago, I audited a creative writing class, upper-level mind you, at a local university. The professor was well published and the students had all the earmarks of aspiring writers...right down to the Starbucks coffee cups and the eccentric, happy-go-lucky creative mindsets with which we often pride ourselves. Most of these kids were tremendous writers. Gifted even. The writing these students put down was admirable at a minimum and intimidating at its best. As the semester wore on, we began the poetry module. We were lectured. We visited with Sylvia Plath. We visited with Margaret Atwood. We enjoyed a cup of joe while we gloried in the work of Langston Hughes. We touched on Frost and only cast a glance toward Shakespeare. Then we started the process of writing poetry, deploying various poetic devices, and critiquing our poems. Minus from this classroom learning was any discussion regarding poetic meter. I had to say something. We couldn't just assume these students understood meter, could we? So, onward I bore the standard for the masters and inquired why we are not covering rhyming poetry in greater depth. I was met with a blank stare. To paraphrase, the response went a little like this: "You would never place in a poetry contest with a rhyming poem. Most literary magazines trash those submissions as soon as they come in. I don't understand meter myself..." He was right and I knew it to be fact. And this is what really troubles me. It is not that ninety-nine percent of poets don't know a dactyl from a spondee. It is believing that we have an obligation to know and to understand the fullness of the art form. We have a responsibility to the art itself to teach it in whole and not in part. Sadly, when college level instruction in creative writing fails to include instruction in scansion, meter, rhyming poetry and its forms, then we fail to teach a respect for the masters and the craft. Even though I am certain there may be a lot of secondary and post-secondary instructors out there teaching these principles, the evidence is certainly not showing up in the work that is posted on the Internet or in many, many published and self-published chapbooks and collections. Truth is, eighty percent of the stuff I write is free verse. I will also tell you that I have never had a contest winning (or even placing for that matter) rhyming submission, while many of my free verse poems have placed or won in numerous contests. The fact that many literary magazines do not view rhyming poetry as serious material either underscores the fact they cannot scansion poetry themselves, or, they have abandoned form poems altogether - resigning them to an out-of-date style no serious writer would engage. I would suggest to you we have created a writing vacuum...a downward spiral where history, art, and respect for form poetry has been sucked out of society. With each generation, we move further and further beyond the roots of classical writing. Are we missing something here writing community? I can't help but feel we are going awry by not engaging the totality of poetry. What say you? |
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