photo of homelessness in the UK‘Free Verse as Nightmare Surrealism’: A Poem by Phillip Whidden The Society August 13, 2024 Culture, Poetry 26 Comments . Free Verse as Nightmare Surrealism “I thirst for new songs without moons or irises, and without loves that have died.” —Lorca, New Songs (Cantos Nuevos) Who doesn’t? But the problem is the songs Aren’t songs. Once irises and moons are gone, We suffer dreck. Where poetry belongs, We get instead a trashcan rattling dawn, Some words slapped down in little almost lines. The imagery is random like some dumped Word puzzle by the road, or like landmines Defused, or like a druggie sprawling slumped In rags alone for smoking frozen spice. When unrequited love is ditched for lust, Some stanzas (?) made of awkward words like lice Suck Sappho’s head and cause a shattered bust. _Let’s turn from moons and fragrances in verse __That make a fool of poems. Call the hearse. . . Phillip Whidden is an American living in England who has been published in America, England, Scotland (and elsewhere) in book form, online, and in journals. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. Trending now: 26 Responses Karen Darantière August 13, 2024 Thank you, Phillip! It is time to call the hearse indeed. Enough already of this parody of poetry which free verse is. Reply Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Thank you, Karen Darantière. I like your attitude. I’m glad you enjoyed the sonnet. Of course some free verse is powerful I have had a few examples written decades ago published here and there. I much prefer my traditional poems, including a sequence of limericks in a literary journal in Scotland (Edinburgh). They are sufficiently rude (about a woman being sexually annoyed by her bosses) that I doubt that this present website would publish them. Reply Gerry Poster August 13, 2024 Marvelous. Thank you! Reply Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Thanks, Gerry Poster. Marvelous is a strong word. I’ll try in my modesty to live with it. You are welcome to the sonnet. Use it as best you can in the war. Reply Roy E. Peterson August 13, 2024 What an effective and accurate portrayal of free verse! Great take! Reply Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Thank you very much, Roy E. Peterson. And here’s the fun bit: I enjoyed writing it. Reply Joseph S. Salemi August 13, 2024 Some free verse is excellent and crystal clear, like that of Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker. But what you find is that such excellent free verse is the product of someone who was also very good at formal verse. Today, “free verse” is exactly what Whidden describes — just a lot of amorphous, emotionalizing crap. Reply Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Joseph S. Salemi, I am sure you are more knowledgeable than I am, especially about poetry. It’s been a long time since I’ve read verses by Nash. My memory may be seriously mistaken. What I remember is that his verses almost always rhymed. His rhythms (if you could call them that) so deliberately unrythmical (opposed to the usual concept of rhythm in traditional poetry) were deliberately crafted to milk humor from the fact of their breaking the rules of traditional rhythms. If these two factors that I just mentioned are actually what he used in his verses, then to my way of thinking, his verses were not free. He deliberately controlled them for silly humor. I’m probably wrong. If we want to be serious about rhythmical poetry, let’s remark on famous verses that many people have considered have considered to be poetry. For instance, Wordsworth’s sad attempt at a sonnet, his famous one about a view from Westminster Bridge, is so crippled in its scansion that I reject it as a sonnet. It is perhaps a great poem. It is definitely not a sonnet. Longfellow’s famous verses about the midnight ride of Paul Revere are so often stumbling in their “rhythms” that I find them painful to read. Others may well be comfortable with a stumbling ride. Fine. To each his own or her own. On the other hand, e e cummings’ “loneliness a leaf falls” is (despite its visual appearance upon first reading) so strictly controlled in the way it is set forth on the page that it cannot seriously be called free verse. I hope I am not offending anyone. Reply Joseph S. Salemi August 13, 2024 I agree with you about Nash — his verse is very controlled in order to milk humor from it, and I call it “free” simply because it doesn’t necessarily follow the traditional rules of scansion. The same is true about Dorothy Parker’s “Hymns of Hate.” They are “free verse” in that they cannot be scanned in the traditional sense, but they are as lucid and funny as can be. And yes, e.e. cummings disguises his control. Many readers don’t recognize this about him. As for the Wordsworth and Longfellow pieces you mention, we have to cut some slack to poets. There has to be the possibility of some looseness in scansion (at least as an occasional option, not as a requirement). Ask any woman about wearing a girdle — she’ll confirm what I mean. If we don’t allow this, we fall into the trap of the extreme “perfect meter types,” or mathematical definitionists, who will not tolerate the slightest substitution or extra syllable or elision. Of course, much of this is a matter of personal taste — one man’s looseness might be another man’s formlessness. No offense taken, or intended. Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Joseph S. Salemi, I agree with you. Case in (immediate) point: in the sonnet currently being discussed line seven abandons iambic pentameter in the last word. The iambic pentameter is wrecked. I will allow readers to figure out why the poet made that deliberate choice. Thanks for your comment. Oh, and thanks for ignoring my keying in error earlier in my reply to your previous message. Cynthia Erlandson August 13, 2024 Yes, Phillip, I can imagine you DID enjoy writing this! I definitely enjoyed reading it. Every single simile you’ve used (I counted five, from “trashcan rattling dawn” to the lice sucking Sapho’s head) is amazingly apt and makes a very strong image! “Some dumped word puzzle by the road” is, I think, my favorite. And your last line is such a brilliant conclusion! You’ve said so very much in a sonnet-small space. Reply Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Cynthia Erlandson, I think I’m in love with you–or at least your reading of the sonnet. Of course my appreciation of your reading is becauuse of your very particular attention to how the sonnet insist on being a POEM. It did so, as you totally noticed, by making its “argument” through figures of speech, sometimes similes, sometimes metaphors. Now I am chary of mentioning my poetry in the same breath as Shakespeare, but . . . a critic I read years ago said that Shakespeare’s dramas suffer from “metaphoritis.” I think the critic meant that that writing was so crammed with figurative language that it is as if it is fevered with it. I love the last two lines of this sonnet because of the roiling irony in them, which is a sort of seering sarcasm. Yes, I do know the difference between figures of speech as apart from matters of tone–and I know the distinction between irony and sarcasm. You are allowed to call me sneeringly, Phillip Know-it-all, if you want to. I am utterly aware that I do not know nearly enough. Reply Susan Jarvis Bryant August 14, 2024 Phillip, what a powerful picture you conjure with vivid imagery that appeals to the senses. I can hear the rattle of the trashcan dawn. I can see the “druggie sprawling slumped / In rags…”. I can feel (with a shiver) those lice that “Suck Sappho’s head and cause a shattered bust”. I love your expert employment of sibilance… like a sinuous serpent slithering between the lines. Your sonnet most certainly lives up to the promise of the enticing title. Every line drew me in, as did the conversation that followed. The great take away for me is: “… excellent free verse is the product of someone who was also very good at formal verse.” (Joe, thank you!). I have just written an endorsement for a free verse poetry collection that impressed me greatly… though not enough to seduce me into writing free verse again. Phillip, thank you very much for the poem and for the points you make in a very interesting discussion. Reply Phillip Whidden August 14, 2024 Now, Susan Jarvis Bryant, I find it a bit challenging to express how glad I am to have people of your caliber communicating with me…and about such a supremely important human thing as poetry. Thank you from the bottom of my unworthy heart. In the depth of last night I wrote a sonnet the burden of which was how my lines are perforce from the experiences of humans from very ancient times. It’s great, from my point of view, that one of the comments by another reader was the real takeaway for you. I love to be in such a mix. Thanks for praising some of the sonnet’s particular imagery. That lifts me up. For a reason or reasons I don’t quite understand, I have felt an affinity with Sappho’s very fragmented poetic production (not that I have any ancient Greek language in me). It strikes me that were it not for grammarians of the very ancient past we would have even less of her poetry in our culture. Discussion per se about poetry is, in this instance at least, crucial to the ages. I can too easily imagine that many people might feel (I, holding back from using the word “think” instead of “feel”) that dry-as-ancient Lesbos’ dust grammarians were pathetic excuses for human beings. Without them a lot of Sappho would be worse than lost. Without them even those who do have imagination would not have been able to conceive much of what we “know” about her and her poetry. We do need academics. I would almost certainly be unable to write an endorsement for a book of free verse. You are a better person than I am. At the college where I took my first degree, there was another poet, Alan Davies. There’s a Wikipedia article about him. He has been far, far, far more successful in his free verse universe than I have been in my “career” in being published. Way back when, he published a small book of my free verse poems. All but one, I think, were what I would now classify as juvenilia. Nevertheless I am still grateful to him. Can you credit it that he and I are still in contact five decades later? I find it hard to believe. Who doesn’t love sibilance, huh? How about the deliberate repetition of vowel sounds as well? From last night’s sonnet I offer: “Sometimes lines contain cologne Mark Anthony mixed in with scents his queen Had spread upon her breasts, his chest upon Her, they not thinking of the unforeseen Asp fangs.” Reply Joshua C. Frank August 14, 2024 In short, free verse is to actual poetry as modern culture is to an actual culture. Well expressed. Even the best free verse is more poetic prose than anything, when you think about it. Without form, how do you even know it’s a poem apart from line breaks? Reply Phillip Whidden August 14, 2024 Joshua C. Frank, thanks. I am sure I’d much rather read intensely figurative prose instead of bland free verse. Think “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Reply Daniel Kemper August 15, 2024 Greetings Mr. Whidden, I very much enjoy the precision of your craft. It is quite dangerous to write broken verse about broken things, but you step through it admirably here. There’s a limit, right? (The more broken the subject, the more broken the verse?) Anyway, you don’t broach that limit here. I’m really happy to encounter you/this. I’m also very happy to see you know exactly your variations, controlled where they are, and do not shy away from calling them what they are. An important point of agreement between you and me, I think, is that without the perfect meter to background it, the fact that these are deliberate choices would not stand out and be effective. Perhaps I mistake you to a certain degree though. We hardly know each other yet. In any case, by standing out, the meter itself carries a message in addition to the content–a harmony of meanings, a very high craft. The signal would be lost in the noise otherwise. Here’s my favorite line: “Some words slapped down in little almost lines.” “Little almost lines.” That’s awesome. There is a pronounced tendency to protect the flaws of our predecessors rather than improve upon them. I address your take on Wordsworth here. There is a good reason though, at least as regards public venues. The world that your poem so aptly describes will run with those critiques to destroy the goodness of the verse and deluge the world with even more dreck. Should not a poem be a special thing? A model on the runway? A bold entrance at the event of the season? Should it be anything but striving for the best at every point? Hw manyy typos shld we allow in published txts? Are I allowed grammar mistake? Hou abowt spelling? Should, we also permit; punctuation errors. Why then, in the one thing that distinguishes poetry from prose and/or dreck, would we settle for less? There’s more to say regarding the myths of perfectionism, but hopefully later, over time. I’ll bundle the post up as an, “In my opinion,” kind of thing. We need gratitude for the past, but clear perception so we can build better. “Art demands of us that we not stand still” (Beethoven). Looking forward to more of your work. Reply Phillip Whidden August 15, 2024 Hi, Daniel Kemper, good man. Lend me your ears for a while. I think you know me well enough, hopefully not too well. Everyone wants surprises in their bundles…thus the catwalks. I was blessed to be able to attend an art exhibition in Beijing while teaching there. (My poor students had to write reviews of it. That probably degraded it for them.) The show was called something like “Dior and Contemporary Chinese Art” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). Only one other art exhibition in my whole life over several continents surpassed it in excellence. The reason this Beijing exhibition was so thrilling was because the mannequins were in striking outfits constructed from many previous sorts of bits of “clothing” but jarringly stuck together in startling ways I had never imagined before. The most brilliant designer was John Galliano. My point is that his method is what poets such as me aim for: we take tried and true bits and try to make them zing. I love the freedom of your expression in what you wrote in your recent response to the sonnet. Your almost tangential manner of using language is pretty much beyond me–except sometimes when I write poetry. I’m jealous. “little almost lines”? May I quote Mark Anthony? “I only speak right on.” Yes, I feel the weight of tradition (the North Star) holding me back from using broken language to discuss broken stuff. I try to keep control. A former student of mine at university level (who was DEMM clever) says that my greatest poem is one about the death of a U. S. Marine in the First Gulf War. The poem started out as a sonnet but as I was approaching its end, I knew I had much more to say. Yep, I could have written a sonnet sequence. One or two of mine have been published here. But…an overriding theme of the poem was meant to be the brokenness and loss, so somehow the ideal of a neat, classic sonnet sequence seemed obscene. The dead soldier had been from that would-be foursquare religiousness of the Mormon state of Utah. So I settled on writing four stanzas each of 16 lines. 4×4 = 16. Excessively fourquare. But these “perfect” stanzas were ruined by internally ruined scansion in the lines–this very obviously emphasized by great blank gaps in them…such as the horrific gap caused by his death. A balance always has to be found in true poetry. I hope I did not leave you with the impression that I despise early Wordsworth. I merely rejected being required to call that scansionless things about Westminster Bride a sonnet. When I next am on that bridge, I will think of you. Reply T. M. Moore August 15, 2024 Thank you for this thoughtful and carefully crafted poem. It reminded me of the argument Czeslaw Milosz made against 20th century verse in “The Witness of Poetry.” I do believe there is a place for free verse and experimental forms that make us read them over a few more times and try to enter the heart of the poet. But much of what you note is sadly true. I sat through a poetry reading at a West Virginia university some years ago. The readers were introduced as two of the state’s leading poets. They read for over an hour, and everything was in free verse. Not a rhyme or discernible rhythm in sight. Then they took questions. I asked about the absence of any formal verse in their readings. One poet dismissed my question by saying, “After all, there are only so many ways to rhyme moon and June.” The other poet was more thoughtful and said, “I find it’s just too hard.” Some people really want to be poets, but formal verse is, in fact, too hard for many. And yet I suspect that free verse does not quite satisfy their poetry itch. That’s why this website matters so much. We should befriend fellow poets who are trapped in a free verse free fall and direct them to the many excellent resources to be found here. Including your poem. T. M. Moore Reply Phillip Whidden August 15, 2024 T. M. Moore, I will never be in a position to race with your mind. You seem to be an academic marathon runner. (I hope you have never had to run with a broken leg as that British woman did last Sunday.) As that so-called poet sneered at you, I sneer at him/her. I’m afraid I am as dismissive of her/him. There are many ways to rhyme “moon” and “June” (if we accept that they rhyme at all since “June” contains a dipthong and “moon” does not). Here are two samples: “flared June” and “dared moon”…and “ambivalent moon ” and “equivalent June”. Anyone with the will and gumption to use traditional forms of poetry will almost certainly like me have found that the formal requirements actually boost/supercharge the speed of the writing. I have recently (do not be too shocked and horrified) sent a villanelle to this site. As everyone knows, when the first and third lines of a villanelle have been written, then the bulk of the poem is ZAP already finished. Easy Peasy. I suspect that this website will reject my villanelle. If that rejection comes, maybe I’ll paste it in here in this conversation. I happen to know that a creative writing teacher in Cambridge, England has used my sonnet “Vermont” posted years ago on this site to teach about sonnetry. He says that the majority of his students make it very clear that they want to learn how to write a sonnet. Thank you for your praise at the end of your comment. We all need a bit of positive stroking. I have not read Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Witness of Poetry.” To be frank, I am so focused on writing sonnets that I probably never will read it. You have good reason now to dismiss me. Reply Phillip Whidden August 19, 2024 A Liberty Leading through Strictness to Pulsing Joy as in The Perfumed Garden A freedom licks my hands. It says to write Whatever I may want and how. I rhyme And follow measured beats of rhythm. Tight- Appearing stanzas seem to follow. Time Reveals that strictness frees my mind. I look To see what rhyme is needed in the line Appointed. Then I use that rhyme to hook The better image needed to refine The poem when I reach that point. This tack Improves imagination, leads the way To newer thinking building up a stack Of new ideas as pictures hold the sway. I almost do not have to think. Instead The pattern helps to fill my rhyming head. Reply Adam Sedia August 24, 2024 You’ve done a good job with this polemic poem, which does not ignore the poetry for the polemic. The language is well-crafted and the poem is rich in metaphor. I particularly like how you frame this as a dialogue with a noted modernist, looking back after the experiment has run its course. Reply Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Adam Sedia, I’m working on my third sonnet for today and so I only just noticed your comment. I am really impressed with how much territory you covered in a concise comment. Yes, I tend to dislike polemical poetry especially if it is so polemical that it veers away from being actual poetry, veering away from figurative language to mere argumentative language. I will not give examples of such failed “poetry.” I think of a lot of it as more vehement verse than true poetry. Undoubtedly somewhere in this cosmos there is a vehement political poem that is actually a real poem. If so, good. Lorca writes striking images, STRIKING, but first I have to say my Spanish is minimal and so I have to approach him in translation. Sad, yes; I know. For me his Surrealist imagery is baffling when read merely as a rational mind would normally read language. However, his poetry causes my guts to react. He might have imagined that it would cause my brain-as-guts to react, perhaps as a brain reacts in nightmares since he was trying to create Surrealism in poetry. I have two friends who used to write whacky poetry. The one who was serious about it caused my brain-guts to wrench in a dizzying response. That I suppose was the point. The other friend did it just as wild language almost as if to mock such upsetting verbiage. Unfortunately the pathetic aftermath of Modernism continues. Thank you for your clear-minded praise. Reply Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Hi, again, Adam Sedia. My website’s counting capablity tells me now that as of today I have posted on the website more than 3,400 of my sonnets. Reply Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Adam Sedia (and anyone else listening) I just finished my fifth sonnet on this date, August 24, 2024. That means my website now has several more than 3,400 of my sonnets on it. Hmmm…I rather think no one is listening. I hear no Olympic marathon cheering. Reply Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Adam Sedia, Jambo. I thought you might like to know that I have now finished for new sonnets today. Perhaps you’ll not be surpriased that not even one of them is polemic, at least not openly so. I suppose that in some sense, almost all poems are polemic–even the choice for each poem’s form might be said to be polemic. Today’s four sonnets (so far) are about: 1. Walt Whitman and his “poetry”; 2. Lorca’s arrival in Havana (contrasted with my visit there); 3. How the mind stores memories; and 4. my bungalow while I was living on the very edge of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. That’s quite a heterogeneous bag of ’em. Yup. 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Karen Darantière August 13, 2024 Thank you, Phillip! It is time to call the hearse indeed. Enough already of this parody of poetry which free verse is. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Thank you, Karen Darantière. I like your attitude. I’m glad you enjoyed the sonnet. Of course some free verse is powerful I have had a few examples written decades ago published here and there. I much prefer my traditional poems, including a sequence of limericks in a literary journal in Scotland (Edinburgh). They are sufficiently rude (about a woman being sexually annoyed by her bosses) that I doubt that this present website would publish them. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Thanks, Gerry Poster. Marvelous is a strong word. I’ll try in my modesty to live with it. You are welcome to the sonnet. Use it as best you can in the war. Reply
Roy E. Peterson August 13, 2024 What an effective and accurate portrayal of free verse! Great take! Reply
Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Thank you very much, Roy E. Peterson. And here’s the fun bit: I enjoyed writing it. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi August 13, 2024 Some free verse is excellent and crystal clear, like that of Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker. But what you find is that such excellent free verse is the product of someone who was also very good at formal verse. Today, “free verse” is exactly what Whidden describes — just a lot of amorphous, emotionalizing crap. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Joseph S. Salemi, I am sure you are more knowledgeable than I am, especially about poetry. It’s been a long time since I’ve read verses by Nash. My memory may be seriously mistaken. What I remember is that his verses almost always rhymed. His rhythms (if you could call them that) so deliberately unrythmical (opposed to the usual concept of rhythm in traditional poetry) were deliberately crafted to milk humor from the fact of their breaking the rules of traditional rhythms. If these two factors that I just mentioned are actually what he used in his verses, then to my way of thinking, his verses were not free. He deliberately controlled them for silly humor. I’m probably wrong. If we want to be serious about rhythmical poetry, let’s remark on famous verses that many people have considered have considered to be poetry. For instance, Wordsworth’s sad attempt at a sonnet, his famous one about a view from Westminster Bridge, is so crippled in its scansion that I reject it as a sonnet. It is perhaps a great poem. It is definitely not a sonnet. Longfellow’s famous verses about the midnight ride of Paul Revere are so often stumbling in their “rhythms” that I find them painful to read. Others may well be comfortable with a stumbling ride. Fine. To each his own or her own. On the other hand, e e cummings’ “loneliness a leaf falls” is (despite its visual appearance upon first reading) so strictly controlled in the way it is set forth on the page that it cannot seriously be called free verse. I hope I am not offending anyone. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi August 13, 2024 I agree with you about Nash — his verse is very controlled in order to milk humor from it, and I call it “free” simply because it doesn’t necessarily follow the traditional rules of scansion. The same is true about Dorothy Parker’s “Hymns of Hate.” They are “free verse” in that they cannot be scanned in the traditional sense, but they are as lucid and funny as can be. And yes, e.e. cummings disguises his control. Many readers don’t recognize this about him. As for the Wordsworth and Longfellow pieces you mention, we have to cut some slack to poets. There has to be the possibility of some looseness in scansion (at least as an occasional option, not as a requirement). Ask any woman about wearing a girdle — she’ll confirm what I mean. If we don’t allow this, we fall into the trap of the extreme “perfect meter types,” or mathematical definitionists, who will not tolerate the slightest substitution or extra syllable or elision. Of course, much of this is a matter of personal taste — one man’s looseness might be another man’s formlessness. No offense taken, or intended.
Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Joseph S. Salemi, I agree with you. Case in (immediate) point: in the sonnet currently being discussed line seven abandons iambic pentameter in the last word. The iambic pentameter is wrecked. I will allow readers to figure out why the poet made that deliberate choice. Thanks for your comment. Oh, and thanks for ignoring my keying in error earlier in my reply to your previous message.
Cynthia Erlandson August 13, 2024 Yes, Phillip, I can imagine you DID enjoy writing this! I definitely enjoyed reading it. Every single simile you’ve used (I counted five, from “trashcan rattling dawn” to the lice sucking Sapho’s head) is amazingly apt and makes a very strong image! “Some dumped word puzzle by the road” is, I think, my favorite. And your last line is such a brilliant conclusion! You’ve said so very much in a sonnet-small space. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 13, 2024 Cynthia Erlandson, I think I’m in love with you–or at least your reading of the sonnet. Of course my appreciation of your reading is becauuse of your very particular attention to how the sonnet insist on being a POEM. It did so, as you totally noticed, by making its “argument” through figures of speech, sometimes similes, sometimes metaphors. Now I am chary of mentioning my poetry in the same breath as Shakespeare, but . . . a critic I read years ago said that Shakespeare’s dramas suffer from “metaphoritis.” I think the critic meant that that writing was so crammed with figurative language that it is as if it is fevered with it. I love the last two lines of this sonnet because of the roiling irony in them, which is a sort of seering sarcasm. Yes, I do know the difference between figures of speech as apart from matters of tone–and I know the distinction between irony and sarcasm. You are allowed to call me sneeringly, Phillip Know-it-all, if you want to. I am utterly aware that I do not know nearly enough. Reply
Susan Jarvis Bryant August 14, 2024 Phillip, what a powerful picture you conjure with vivid imagery that appeals to the senses. I can hear the rattle of the trashcan dawn. I can see the “druggie sprawling slumped / In rags…”. I can feel (with a shiver) those lice that “Suck Sappho’s head and cause a shattered bust”. I love your expert employment of sibilance… like a sinuous serpent slithering between the lines. Your sonnet most certainly lives up to the promise of the enticing title. Every line drew me in, as did the conversation that followed. The great take away for me is: “… excellent free verse is the product of someone who was also very good at formal verse.” (Joe, thank you!). I have just written an endorsement for a free verse poetry collection that impressed me greatly… though not enough to seduce me into writing free verse again. Phillip, thank you very much for the poem and for the points you make in a very interesting discussion. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 14, 2024 Now, Susan Jarvis Bryant, I find it a bit challenging to express how glad I am to have people of your caliber communicating with me…and about such a supremely important human thing as poetry. Thank you from the bottom of my unworthy heart. In the depth of last night I wrote a sonnet the burden of which was how my lines are perforce from the experiences of humans from very ancient times. It’s great, from my point of view, that one of the comments by another reader was the real takeaway for you. I love to be in such a mix. Thanks for praising some of the sonnet’s particular imagery. That lifts me up. For a reason or reasons I don’t quite understand, I have felt an affinity with Sappho’s very fragmented poetic production (not that I have any ancient Greek language in me). It strikes me that were it not for grammarians of the very ancient past we would have even less of her poetry in our culture. Discussion per se about poetry is, in this instance at least, crucial to the ages. I can too easily imagine that many people might feel (I, holding back from using the word “think” instead of “feel”) that dry-as-ancient Lesbos’ dust grammarians were pathetic excuses for human beings. Without them a lot of Sappho would be worse than lost. Without them even those who do have imagination would not have been able to conceive much of what we “know” about her and her poetry. We do need academics. I would almost certainly be unable to write an endorsement for a book of free verse. You are a better person than I am. At the college where I took my first degree, there was another poet, Alan Davies. There’s a Wikipedia article about him. He has been far, far, far more successful in his free verse universe than I have been in my “career” in being published. Way back when, he published a small book of my free verse poems. All but one, I think, were what I would now classify as juvenilia. Nevertheless I am still grateful to him. Can you credit it that he and I are still in contact five decades later? I find it hard to believe. Who doesn’t love sibilance, huh? How about the deliberate repetition of vowel sounds as well? From last night’s sonnet I offer: “Sometimes lines contain cologne Mark Anthony mixed in with scents his queen Had spread upon her breasts, his chest upon Her, they not thinking of the unforeseen Asp fangs.” Reply
Joshua C. Frank August 14, 2024 In short, free verse is to actual poetry as modern culture is to an actual culture. Well expressed. Even the best free verse is more poetic prose than anything, when you think about it. Without form, how do you even know it’s a poem apart from line breaks? Reply
Phillip Whidden August 14, 2024 Joshua C. Frank, thanks. I am sure I’d much rather read intensely figurative prose instead of bland free verse. Think “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Reply
Daniel Kemper August 15, 2024 Greetings Mr. Whidden, I very much enjoy the precision of your craft. It is quite dangerous to write broken verse about broken things, but you step through it admirably here. There’s a limit, right? (The more broken the subject, the more broken the verse?) Anyway, you don’t broach that limit here. I’m really happy to encounter you/this. I’m also very happy to see you know exactly your variations, controlled where they are, and do not shy away from calling them what they are. An important point of agreement between you and me, I think, is that without the perfect meter to background it, the fact that these are deliberate choices would not stand out and be effective. Perhaps I mistake you to a certain degree though. We hardly know each other yet. In any case, by standing out, the meter itself carries a message in addition to the content–a harmony of meanings, a very high craft. The signal would be lost in the noise otherwise. Here’s my favorite line: “Some words slapped down in little almost lines.” “Little almost lines.” That’s awesome. There is a pronounced tendency to protect the flaws of our predecessors rather than improve upon them. I address your take on Wordsworth here. There is a good reason though, at least as regards public venues. The world that your poem so aptly describes will run with those critiques to destroy the goodness of the verse and deluge the world with even more dreck. Should not a poem be a special thing? A model on the runway? A bold entrance at the event of the season? Should it be anything but striving for the best at every point? Hw manyy typos shld we allow in published txts? Are I allowed grammar mistake? Hou abowt spelling? Should, we also permit; punctuation errors. Why then, in the one thing that distinguishes poetry from prose and/or dreck, would we settle for less? There’s more to say regarding the myths of perfectionism, but hopefully later, over time. I’ll bundle the post up as an, “In my opinion,” kind of thing. We need gratitude for the past, but clear perception so we can build better. “Art demands of us that we not stand still” (Beethoven). Looking forward to more of your work. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 15, 2024 Hi, Daniel Kemper, good man. Lend me your ears for a while. I think you know me well enough, hopefully not too well. Everyone wants surprises in their bundles…thus the catwalks. I was blessed to be able to attend an art exhibition in Beijing while teaching there. (My poor students had to write reviews of it. That probably degraded it for them.) The show was called something like “Dior and Contemporary Chinese Art” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). Only one other art exhibition in my whole life over several continents surpassed it in excellence. The reason this Beijing exhibition was so thrilling was because the mannequins were in striking outfits constructed from many previous sorts of bits of “clothing” but jarringly stuck together in startling ways I had never imagined before. The most brilliant designer was John Galliano. My point is that his method is what poets such as me aim for: we take tried and true bits and try to make them zing. I love the freedom of your expression in what you wrote in your recent response to the sonnet. Your almost tangential manner of using language is pretty much beyond me–except sometimes when I write poetry. I’m jealous. “little almost lines”? May I quote Mark Anthony? “I only speak right on.” Yes, I feel the weight of tradition (the North Star) holding me back from using broken language to discuss broken stuff. I try to keep control. A former student of mine at university level (who was DEMM clever) says that my greatest poem is one about the death of a U. S. Marine in the First Gulf War. The poem started out as a sonnet but as I was approaching its end, I knew I had much more to say. Yep, I could have written a sonnet sequence. One or two of mine have been published here. But…an overriding theme of the poem was meant to be the brokenness and loss, so somehow the ideal of a neat, classic sonnet sequence seemed obscene. The dead soldier had been from that would-be foursquare religiousness of the Mormon state of Utah. So I settled on writing four stanzas each of 16 lines. 4×4 = 16. Excessively fourquare. But these “perfect” stanzas were ruined by internally ruined scansion in the lines–this very obviously emphasized by great blank gaps in them…such as the horrific gap caused by his death. A balance always has to be found in true poetry. I hope I did not leave you with the impression that I despise early Wordsworth. I merely rejected being required to call that scansionless things about Westminster Bride a sonnet. When I next am on that bridge, I will think of you. Reply
T. M. Moore August 15, 2024 Thank you for this thoughtful and carefully crafted poem. It reminded me of the argument Czeslaw Milosz made against 20th century verse in “The Witness of Poetry.” I do believe there is a place for free verse and experimental forms that make us read them over a few more times and try to enter the heart of the poet. But much of what you note is sadly true. I sat through a poetry reading at a West Virginia university some years ago. The readers were introduced as two of the state’s leading poets. They read for over an hour, and everything was in free verse. Not a rhyme or discernible rhythm in sight. Then they took questions. I asked about the absence of any formal verse in their readings. One poet dismissed my question by saying, “After all, there are only so many ways to rhyme moon and June.” The other poet was more thoughtful and said, “I find it’s just too hard.” Some people really want to be poets, but formal verse is, in fact, too hard for many. And yet I suspect that free verse does not quite satisfy their poetry itch. That’s why this website matters so much. We should befriend fellow poets who are trapped in a free verse free fall and direct them to the many excellent resources to be found here. Including your poem. T. M. Moore Reply
Phillip Whidden August 15, 2024 T. M. Moore, I will never be in a position to race with your mind. You seem to be an academic marathon runner. (I hope you have never had to run with a broken leg as that British woman did last Sunday.) As that so-called poet sneered at you, I sneer at him/her. I’m afraid I am as dismissive of her/him. There are many ways to rhyme “moon” and “June” (if we accept that they rhyme at all since “June” contains a dipthong and “moon” does not). Here are two samples: “flared June” and “dared moon”…and “ambivalent moon ” and “equivalent June”. Anyone with the will and gumption to use traditional forms of poetry will almost certainly like me have found that the formal requirements actually boost/supercharge the speed of the writing. I have recently (do not be too shocked and horrified) sent a villanelle to this site. As everyone knows, when the first and third lines of a villanelle have been written, then the bulk of the poem is ZAP already finished. Easy Peasy. I suspect that this website will reject my villanelle. If that rejection comes, maybe I’ll paste it in here in this conversation. I happen to know that a creative writing teacher in Cambridge, England has used my sonnet “Vermont” posted years ago on this site to teach about sonnetry. He says that the majority of his students make it very clear that they want to learn how to write a sonnet. Thank you for your praise at the end of your comment. We all need a bit of positive stroking. I have not read Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Witness of Poetry.” To be frank, I am so focused on writing sonnets that I probably never will read it. You have good reason now to dismiss me. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 19, 2024 A Liberty Leading through Strictness to Pulsing Joy as in The Perfumed Garden A freedom licks my hands. It says to write Whatever I may want and how. I rhyme And follow measured beats of rhythm. Tight- Appearing stanzas seem to follow. Time Reveals that strictness frees my mind. I look To see what rhyme is needed in the line Appointed. Then I use that rhyme to hook The better image needed to refine The poem when I reach that point. This tack Improves imagination, leads the way To newer thinking building up a stack Of new ideas as pictures hold the sway. I almost do not have to think. Instead The pattern helps to fill my rhyming head. Reply
Adam Sedia August 24, 2024 You’ve done a good job with this polemic poem, which does not ignore the poetry for the polemic. The language is well-crafted and the poem is rich in metaphor. I particularly like how you frame this as a dialogue with a noted modernist, looking back after the experiment has run its course. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Adam Sedia, I’m working on my third sonnet for today and so I only just noticed your comment. I am really impressed with how much territory you covered in a concise comment. Yes, I tend to dislike polemical poetry especially if it is so polemical that it veers away from being actual poetry, veering away from figurative language to mere argumentative language. I will not give examples of such failed “poetry.” I think of a lot of it as more vehement verse than true poetry. Undoubtedly somewhere in this cosmos there is a vehement political poem that is actually a real poem. If so, good. Lorca writes striking images, STRIKING, but first I have to say my Spanish is minimal and so I have to approach him in translation. Sad, yes; I know. For me his Surrealist imagery is baffling when read merely as a rational mind would normally read language. However, his poetry causes my guts to react. He might have imagined that it would cause my brain-as-guts to react, perhaps as a brain reacts in nightmares since he was trying to create Surrealism in poetry. I have two friends who used to write whacky poetry. The one who was serious about it caused my brain-guts to wrench in a dizzying response. That I suppose was the point. The other friend did it just as wild language almost as if to mock such upsetting verbiage. Unfortunately the pathetic aftermath of Modernism continues. Thank you for your clear-minded praise. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Hi, again, Adam Sedia. My website’s counting capablity tells me now that as of today I have posted on the website more than 3,400 of my sonnets. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Adam Sedia (and anyone else listening) I just finished my fifth sonnet on this date, August 24, 2024. That means my website now has several more than 3,400 of my sonnets on it. Hmmm…I rather think no one is listening. I hear no Olympic marathon cheering. Reply
Phillip Whidden August 24, 2024 Adam Sedia, Jambo. I thought you might like to know that I have now finished for new sonnets today. Perhaps you’ll not be surpriased that not even one of them is polemic, at least not openly so. I suppose that in some sense, almost all poems are polemic–even the choice for each poem’s form might be said to be polemic. Today’s four sonnets (so far) are about: 1. Walt Whitman and his “poetry”; 2. Lorca’s arrival in Havana (contrasted with my visit there); 3. How the mind stores memories; and 4. my bungalow while I was living on the very edge of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. That’s quite a heterogeneous bag of ’em. Yup. Reply
