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poetry time
Oct. 22nd, 2002 11:19 pmwhy, yes, fox is avoiding her work again. :-)
i read this in high school, and it's my most favorite example ever of Why You Shouldn't Just Go Ahead And Write Free Verse, Darlings. when artists of any sort -- painters, sculptors, writers of poetry or prose -- depart from form, it works precisely because it's a departure. if you don't know how to write a sonnet (which is not to say you have to be able to write a good sonnet, but you ought to be able to identify one from sixty paces), then when you spit out some words and call them free verse, what they are is lines on a page where you messed with the line breaks because you thought it looked cool.
yeah, i get a little conservative sometimes. :-) this here is -- if i'm remembering my high school french lit rightly -- alexandrain verse, in which each line has twelve syllables (giving final "e" the weight of a syllable). but the last line, "calm. he has two red holes in his right side.", only has ten.
ten syllables! twelve syllables, with two holes! that doesn't happen accidentally. i wish more self-styled poets got that. (i'm sure many more self-styled poets agree with me.)
( 'Le Dormeur du Val,' by Arthur Rimbaud )
i read this in high school, and it's my most favorite example ever of Why You Shouldn't Just Go Ahead And Write Free Verse, Darlings. when artists of any sort -- painters, sculptors, writers of poetry or prose -- depart from form, it works precisely because it's a departure. if you don't know how to write a sonnet (which is not to say you have to be able to write a good sonnet, but you ought to be able to identify one from sixty paces), then when you spit out some words and call them free verse, what they are is lines on a page where you messed with the line breaks because you thought it looked cool.
yeah, i get a little conservative sometimes. :-) this here is -- if i'm remembering my high school french lit rightly -- alexandrain verse, in which each line has twelve syllables (giving final "e" the weight of a syllable). but the last line, "calm. he has two red holes in his right side.", only has ten.
ten syllables! twelve syllables, with two holes! that doesn't happen accidentally. i wish more self-styled poets got that. (i'm sure many more self-styled poets agree with me.)
( 'Le Dormeur du Val,' by Arthur Rimbaud )
