by Samuel Hux (December 2016)
I have been quarreling with colleagues for years about the existence of “free verse” (including “some of my best friends” who write it), I contending that while the “prose poem” is a contradiction in terms and an opportunity for people who cannot write poetry to “write poetry” (and not to be confused with “poetic prose,” which is what happens when natural poets, say Herman Melville, try to write prose), free verse may exist—may rarely, may occasionally, may just now and then exist—but is most often merely a miserable prose poem arranged in lines instead of paragraphs. more>>>
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3 Responses
What to do with your memories, you ask. Keep writing about them. Also about where you’ve been and what you’ve read. I recently discovered your essays and have read six of them. Too fast, I fear. I will go back to them As for the ones I haven’t read, I’m spacing them out like chocolates (or, in the old days, cigarettes). in order to have one to look forward to.
If it's kosher to comment on a comment: Thank you so very much Mr. Knapp for your kind words. You've made my day (week, month, decade?). To have my essays likened to chocolate or cigarettes gives me more pleasure than I can handle. Bless you!
While prosaic free verse has been creeping up on us for decades, I think that the final loss of poetry may be due to the trend in popular music to have everything accompanied by crashing percussion thumping out a banal beat. This means that the words of songs have lost any need for intrinsic rhythm, since rhythm has become an external thing oafishly dumped on them. It applies even to rap, which seems ultra-rhythmic but can't maintain its rhythm when simply considered as words.
Another very destructive influence has been the RADA verse-speaking technique applied to Shakespeare and other writers, in which verse is spoken exactly as if it were prose. Watching plays performed in this way, I find that most of my attention is devoted to working out where the ends of the lines originally were, to the detriment of understanding anything else.
I am old. I know almost no one younger than me who understands scansion or can write poetry that scans — and the one exception is a professor of linguistics at a European university with a deep knowledge of Greek and Latin prosody.