Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
- It is difficult to find a definition of free verse that doesn't center on what it isn't. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for example, describes free verse as "the prosody of avoidance of meter." Doesn't tell you much. It's as if free verse's identity is entirely reactive - it's an absence, a negative form. That's an enormous oversimplification of how things really are, but the popular concensus is that free verse, unlike the verse forms that came before it, derives its identity by rejecting previous formal models instead of incorporating them.
- The rejected thing remains. It's revenant, which is to say, it always and again returns in some form. It's spectral, ghostly, a shadow beneath and within the contemporary poem. Previous generations hyper-consciously rejected form; it was necessary for them to do so, because they often had been rigorously trained to write formally. Our generation generally lacks such rigorous training - it's been replaced with an "intuitive" sense of cadence, taught to us over many hundreds of contemporary poems. We are drawn to certain rhythms and sounds as the ones that comfort us, or excite us, or make us angry. We share a popular poetic ear that's considerably different from the ear of a century ago. Often, when someone writes with a century-old sense of cadence, we call it inauthentic, forced or artificial. If that sense of cadence should appear in a line or a phrase within free verse, we detect it as a dead thing, an aural spectre, asserting regularity where our ear expects variation. The poem is haunted by past poems, all the way down to its foundations of cadence and sound, all the way to its spine.
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