Saturday seems as good a day to unveil new Iambits, thus do I slappeth up my first offering. It is merely meant as an introduction to the form, such as one might find wherever bits of related poetry appear in multiples. I’m not going to get into the habit of commenting too much about what I put up, as I don’t want to give anything away that might hinder the creation of any post-modern theories on the text.

I have looked at one or two poetry type blogs over the past few couple of days, and I have to say… with the utmost of politeness and respect… that in my personal view, you can’t just slap down a bunch of words with no heed to form and call it poetry. It seems that a lot of poets simply clump together a bunch of related thoughts in a ‘form’ intended to make a few halting assertions sound profound. The sum total of this may contain some deeper meaning in the poet’s head at the time of creation, but to most readers pretty much appears to be complete drivel.

The blanket term for poetry presented without any sort of meter or rhyming scheme (the exact subset of which is quite vast,) is free verse, and it seems to be most popular poetic form these days. It is perceived by many to be the easiest way to get some poetic thoughts down, as one doesn’t have to concern oneself with mundanities such as coming up with appropriate rhymes or how a stanza sounds when read aloud. Indeed, it appears many people view such limitations as old fashioned and an unnecessary constraint on one’s creative voice.

I do not subscribe to any of these notions. In my opinion, free verse is hard, and doing it properly is far more challenging than simply going with a recognized structured form. Its freedom is why it ends up being so widely employed. And it’s this same total fredom that causes 99% of the free verse poems out there (as the quality of blog poetry seems to suggest,) to turn into the adolescent sounding drivel. There are relatively few poets in the canon who’ve done it with consistent success, and many of them would have been conversant in more traditional forms before starting to experiment.

It’s not my intent to go into too much detail on this, as poetry is probably the most subjective thing on the planet. This is merely my opinion, and is only meant to give a bit of an introduction to my personal writing approach. I try to fall into some sort of metric structure as I create something, because I believe it makes things easier for me, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to fit words and sentences into patterns while maintaining the meaning. It’s kind of akin to putting a tight piece of code together, which is probably one of the reasons I enjoy doing it.

I’m partial to sonnets these days, but this particular Iambit (I’m going to keep using the noun till it sticks in my head) isn’t a sonnet. The original work from which the form of this one is ‘borrowed’ should be fairly evident, and a bit of googling around should reveal the original.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Iambits. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.