Just thoughts, kooks.
I've bought an ebook from Google Play on poetry. You know, the rules and regulations, etc.
It's making me think I might not bother too much with becoming a technical master beyond the basics.
I'll become a great poet through the power of my language, the meaning of it, phrase-making and rhetoric, and finally ... the concentration and polish of it.
I'm going to use my instinct most of the time ... what feels right for a voice talking at any particular moment.
Like with my conceptuals, maybe.
People who think that metre can show a ship bouncing up and down on a stormy sea are just silly.
There are different kinds of poets, man, and you've got to play to your strengths.
So ... my best and most serious poems will probably be written in free verse BECAUSE ... I'll be "free" to do what I want.
However, freedom is hard, stressful.
I'll just be loose and, uh ... freewheeling with the traditional stuff.
I mean ... I don't know.
Who knows what I'll be writing twenty years from now?
I always like to push myself harder.
Dylan Thomas just counted syllables in his most mature poetry, apparently. That's rare in English poetry because of all the strong stresses.
Eliot definitely played to his strengths to beat Yeats with The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. / Pound for pound, and line for line, Yeats was the superior poet.
The Waste Land is really just great fragments put together in an impressive way. And it was Ezra Pound who did it ... sort of. I mean, he helped a lot. / Also, Eliot wanted to call the poem, He Do The Police In Different Voices. Which was a quote from Dickens. FFS.
His own worst enemy.
Cats!
I'll just say though ... the rough drafts of free verse poems cause me a lot of anxiety and pain, but I don't get that from traditional verse.
It's just the chaos, you know?
However, the artistic achievement of free verse is better - if you can make it work.
Just takes work, you dig?
That book was less than £5, but there's a Princeton one you can get for about £40. That's a bit expensive for me at the moment. It looks really good though. I'll get it when I can.
Anyway, a dozen big poems like the one I'm working on will do the trick.
Traditional verse is best for poems with one to fifty lines, I reckon.
Short free verse poems might not be substantial enough if you're using a lot of short lines.
I like short lines because they look good on the page. Also, short lines are best for the meaning. The impact.
Unless you need to say something with a long line, obviously. Don't worry about it.
Long traditional poems are boring. It's just stanza after stanza, ain't it? All the same, normally. So, don't go over eighty lines.
The Whitsun Weddings - eighty lines!
A Prayer for my Daughter - eighty lines!
Ode to a Nightingale - eighty lines!
Get the picture?
'Nice one!'
Laters.
By the way, A Prayer for my Daughter is a bit dodgy in regard to the subject matter, but it's the beauty and power of the language that counts.
