Demode

if rhyme was good enough for shakespeare’s sonnets, then it’s good enough for me     :)

Aye!

And three huzzahs!

Ok, but listen, most people have ass for vocabulary and don’t meter consistently. All of the rhymes are banal and monosyllabic. There are like four exceptions.

I will read the fuck out of classic lit. Whitman? Brilliant. Frost and Burns? Gods. The Bard… mixed emotions. Poe? Yas boy, more.

We don’t have vocabulary, linguistic dexterity and command of form. There are like four rhyming poets I truly admire. You are one of them. For your trope and lexical limberness alone.

It’s easier to connect to a story if I don’t have to pretend like the meter was consistent and every line didn’t end home, gnome, roam.

So free verse! Because we suck — as a society —at grammar! And free verse makes the suck look like art!

Well that has got to be the best and most honest apology for free verse that I have ever laid eyes on, and resulted in the best hard core belly laugh in ages, and just when I needed to work my core the most.

I'm an atheist, by the way, but I will say god bless you anyway.

Just your first line had me in long overdue stiches!

It shames me to say I've been in secret agreement with the fuddy duddies about old school poetry, but like I told Ahavati, I'd rather hang with the sinners than the saints...so to speak.

I can only hope that they will at least occasionally...TRY...to reach for the rapturous payoff that formal poetry offers.

I'd say to think of a successful sonnet in climax terms, but I resign myself to the realization that the kink may be mine alone:)

Your comparison of rhyme to a cosmetic is certainly an apt one, with neither being a requirement for what they are applied to, and begs that we ask why the decoration was bothered with at all, and no doubt not to appear as a clown.

And yet what would Christmas look like without ornament?  

I don't think good poetry is ever really able to escape its non-essential nature, which is just what makes it so essential. Imagine living in a world where everyone sounded like Hemingway. There the rebel spirited would do the utmost to emulate the rococo lingo of the 18th century fop, where rhyme ruled the aristocratic roost as much as marble nudes and a gilded frame for the paintings.

But as we master something as spectacularly unnecessary as rhyme we mustn't lose track of what we are doing with the rest of the line, where the syntax is critical to the reader ever having a chance in hell of being able to comprehend what the devil the poet is going on about.  

And there we arrive at the real reason to emulate Shakespeare, who rarely rhymed outside of his spectacular sonnets. He and his fellow writers were willing to mix and match phonemes to an ideal sonic and syntactical distribution. This is something a seasoned Shakespearean actor will come to be aware of, but they don't often move on into poetry, where the application of meter is a big part of what a poet will bring to bear on their formalist attempts, which as Betty suggests, can be a beastly thing to try and tame. Shakespeare made it look easy, but he was working at it full time.

But it can be done. And when it gets done well our language comes alive like Frankenstein's monster with a fresh bolt of lightning in its veins!

Alive! Alive! It's alive!

My main complaint about free verse is that i see a lot of it that's so cryptically or enigmatically written that there's no hope of ever deciphering the point of the write.  

Life is short, so I will immediately stop reading anything that starts to seem like psychosis salad or LSD mish mash.  

Nevertheless I regularly encounter some writers here who stay on topic all the way through, like Betty usually, even if I sometimes have to wince at the anatomical mayhem. Doctor Frankenstein would be proud though.  

But all that can be a problem with rhymers too, and I'm no doubt occasionally guilty of it as well. I suspect it's a side effect of the creative process.  

Speaking of bad rap, that's always been a big motivator for me to rhyme every OTHER line, rather than wear out the jackhammer all at once. Plus, there's something to the reliance of rhyming every other line that seems to tease out more content than the way raps work. That being said, the freestylers are very impressive.

Won't find me trying to keep up with that:)

When I used to get punished as a kid, I'd spend hours reading the thesaurus just to expand my vocabulary (English is my second language) but I often misused words simply because they sounded good and not for their definition. Once in college I began to understand it better, I appreciated more poets, I looked for artists and lyricists who knew the art of wordplay. Sometimes I write for myself than for my audience, adding humor and that same wordplay just to keep myself entertained.

"But that's what sells the clicks today"
Sex appeal has a lot to do it with it in recent years. Everyone has a right to express themselves in their unique way relative to their own experience, but sometimes I'm baffled by what I read

My ultimate goal, is to write poetry so witty and smart, that it will make milk (or coffee) come out your nose as you read it.

Aye! That's the spirit.

I'm in it for the laughs 😂

I'm astonished that you are an ESL human because I couldn't pick up even a hint of that from your comments.

You must be a quick study 🤓