An Antidote to Free Verse

What I know about poetic form has been absorbed gradually, over many years, sometimes accidentally, sometimes when I’ve actively looked for more information. Much of the time I’ve simply read a poem which I’ve appreciated, and then tried to write one with similar structure, or adapted its form to meet my needs. I’ve really just been playing it by ear.

The sestina and the villanelle are two forms I’ve discovered only this year, and I’ve come to enjoy writing them, but there is a temptation to just written dozens of those and nothing else. Now I feel like I need to learn about more forms, and to stretch myself to see what is possible. I’ve looked into buying books about poetic form, but they all seem to be very dry and overly academic. I keep falling back to Google searches, giving up, and going back to ‘if in doubt, write a sestina’, albeit customised to suit the poem I’m writing – I do break ‘rules’ if they need to be broken.

Yesterday I searched for ‘poetry’ on YouTube and found the video shown above. Stephen Fry (a legend in so, so many ways), talks about poetic form, and more importantly mentions a book he wrote about that very subject, teaching poetic form to people who want to write poetry.

It was a joy to listen to him talking about and promoting poetic form. The structure of poetry is what gives it something far more than prose, and I find it immensely satisfying to do the hard graft required to bring to my poetry the control required by whatever form I’ve decided to use.

Poetry without form is called ‘free verse’, so allow me to hit that particular topic with a sledgehammer. Although he was careful not to disparage free verse, it’s hard not to get the impression that it’s certainly not Stephen Fry’s favourite thing. I am far less coy about that subject. I have no love for free verse at all. Not because there aren’t any good writers of free verse (he mentions some in the video), but because 99.9% of free verse is, let there be no doubt, absolutely awful.

Random words thrown down without any structure at all, flowery phrases pulled out of someone’s backside just because they thought, ‘Oh that sounds nice,’ do not make great poetry. They just make a mess. They are not stirring my emotions at all, unless you count frustration as one – I am frustrated that people don’t know how to use words to write poetry, so they think that just writing a long jumble of lines is the way to go.

Bad free verse is no more than the literary equivalent of Jackson Pollock, who just spattered paint onto canvas in any old direction and called it art. No, Jackson Pollock’s splishy splashy crap was not art, it was just splishy splashy crap. Look up his stuff on Google images and tell me that any idiot with some pots of paint couldn’t do that. The art world is one of those places where if you can talk the talk you can get away with convincing art ‘critics’ that your plastic bag full of dog shit is ‘a commentary on the futility of war in a post-modern society’, or some bollocks like that. Free verse is exactly the same. People are telling you it’s art, but it’s not. It’s dog shit. In a bag.

Free verse, certainly in the hands of anyone I’ve seen on DeviantArt, is nothing its authors should be proud of. Maybe it’s just ‘not my thing’ in the same way as Jackson Pollock’s nonsense is ‘not my thing’, but I doubt it. It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes in poetry – there is nothing really there, and I’m calling it out for what it is. This journal post wasn’t originally intended to be a public lynching of free verse, but I’m glad to have put my feelings on the subject out there now.

What I really started this journal to say was that I’ve now ordered Stephen Fry’s book, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, and I’ll be trying to add to my skills, taking my poetry in new directions, at least new for me. If poetic form was good enough for the great poets over the centuries, then that’s good enough for me. Free verse is definitely not good enough for me.