erotica

The rhythm of the poem is mostly irregular with several lines not following a consistent metrical pattern. The rhyme scheme is also inconsistent, with some lines rhyming and others not. The main breaks in rhythm occur in lines 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12, while the rhyme is irregular throughout the poem.

Who says that there has to be rhyme within a poem, let alone that it has to be "regular" and something that needs to end every one of a poem's lines?    
   
Perhaps you'll tell Linda Pastan (who has won many awards including the Dylan Thomas Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and who served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995,) just how incompetent and untalented a poet she was for writing this unrhymed piece    
   
Eve on Her Deathbed    
   
In the end we are no more than our own stories:    
mine a few brief passages in the Book,    
no further trace of plot or dialogue.    
But I once had a lover no one noticed    
as he slipped through the pages, through    
the lists of those begotten and begetting.    
Does he remember our faltering younger selves,    
the pleasures we took while Adam,    
a good bureaucrat, busied himself    
with naming things, even after Eden?    
What scraps will our children remember of us    
to whom our story is simple    
and they themselves the heroes of it?    
   
I woke that first day with Adam for company,    
and the tangled path I would soon follow    
I’ve tried to forget: the animals, stunned    
at first in the forest; the terrible, beating wings    
of the angel; the livid curse of childbirth to come.    
And then the children themselves,    
loving at times, at times unmerciful.    
Because of me there is just one narrative    
for everyone, one indelible line from birth to death,    
with pain or lust, with even love or murder    
only brief diversions, subplots.    
   
But what I think of now,    
in the final bitterness of age,    
is the way the garden groomed itself    
in the succulent air of summer—each flower    
the essence of its own color; the way even    
the serpent knew it had a part it had to play, if    
there were to be a story at all.      
   
And how about telling off National Book Award and  PulizerPrize winner Mary Oliver  for not adhering to your claims about what a writing must have to be a poem when she wrote:    
   
for forty years    
the sheets of white paper have    
passed under my hands and I have tried    
    to improve their peaceful    
   
emptiness putting down    
little curls little shafts    
of letters words    
    little flames leaping    
   
not one page    
was less to me than fascinating    
discursive full of cadence    
    its pale nerves hiding    
   
in the curves of the Qs    
behind the soldierly Hs    
in the webbed feet of the Ws    
    forty years    
   
and again this morning as always    
I am stopped as the world comes back    
wet and beautiful I am thinking    
    that language    
   
is not even a river    
is not a tree is not a green field    
is not even a black ant traveling    
    briskly modestly    
   
from day to day from one    
golden page to another.

“The rhythm of the poem is mostly irregular with several lines not following a consistent metrical pattern”

Really?  

Here’s how the submission scans:

How ODD it IS to SEE
that IF you WANT to GET
subSCRIBers HERE
to READ and SCORE
as SOMEthing WORTH a COMment 0N
your SMALL atTEMPTS at POetRY,
you HAVE to LABel THEM
a WRIing FORGED “erOTic’LY”.*
And AN y THING you LAbel AS
a POem LESS exOTic IS,
from CRICKets THAT it EARNS
apPARentLY a CAUSE
to BE igNORED.

I can only surmise that you claim what you claim above – i.e. that the rhythm of my submission is irregular, let alone mostly so, and that there are lines there that do not display a consistent metrical pattern – that you do not know how to scan lines and/or that you are unable to see what constitutes the rhythm and the meter of my lines.

** https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/erotically?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=e&file=erotic03

“The rhythm of the poem is mostly irregular with several lines not following a consistent metrical pattern”

Really?  

Here’s how the submission scans:

How ODD it IS to SEE
that IF you WANT to GET
subSCRIBers HERE
to READ and SCORE
as SOMEthing WORTH a COMment 0N
your SMALL atTEMPTS at POetRY,
you HAVE to LABel THEM
a WRIing FORGED “erOTic’LY”.*
And AN y THING you LAbel AS
a POem LESS exOTic IS,
from CRICKets THAT it EARNS
apPARentLY a CAUSE
to BE igNORED.

I can only surmise that you claim what you claim above – i.e. that the rhythm of my submission is irregular, let alone mostly so, and that there are lines there that do not display a consistent metrical pattern – that you do not know how to scan lines and/or that you are unable to see what constitutes the rhythm and the meter of my lines.

** https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/erotically?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=e&file=erotic03

The rhyme scheme is irregular overall, with only a few lines rhyming (see, poetry, erotically) and most not (get, here, score, on, them, as, is, earns, cause, ignored).

"The rhyme scheme is irregular overall, with only a few lines rhyming ".

So what?

The rhythm breaks primarily in lines 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12 where the syllable count or stress pattern does not match the other lines.

Where do you get the rule that given lines in a poem have to have the same syllable count as any other?

You would do well to read through  _All The Fun's In How You Say A Thing: An Explanation Of Meter & Versification- by Timothy Steele to see that this isn't so.

You're correct that poetry doesn't have to adhere to strict syllable counts for each line. However, consistent meter and rhythm can enhance the readability and flow of a poem.

"You're correct that poetry doesn't have to adhere to strict syllable counts for each line."

Who, besides you, said anything about "syllable counts"?  Did you mean line length?

"However, consistent meter and rhythm can enhance the readability and flow of a poem.".

Who said otherwise?

And you have yet to demonstrate, rather than just assert, that the meter of my lines, let alone the "rhythm" in them is inconsistent.