Post
by David Campbell » Fri Mar 27, 2015 9:55 am
Zondrae’s comments raise a couple of issues that have been referred to before, but are worth revisiting. She picked the rhymes immediately in the 'prose' version of the poem, but it’d be interesting to know at what point others realised. Is there anyone who didn’t notice it was rhyming verse until they read the second version? I ask this because I’ve recently tried to provoke some interest by posting a lot of rhyming verse on a popular non-poetry site. A few contributors have shown appreciation, but most have just ignored it, and, as it was conversational and topical, I wonder if they even recognised it as poetry. Or perhaps they did, but didn’t consider it a legitimate form of communication.
Which leads to a general question: Are the prose and free verse versions of the poem unacceptable here as rhyming verse because they’re not set out in the traditional way?
Following this theme, Zondrae suggests that the free verse enthusiasts could learn from bush poetry, and it’s a valid point, but I’d argue the reverse is also true. Bush poetry has frustrating limitations, particularly when it comes to indicating pauses, and there are free verse techniques we could profitably borrow. Unfortunately, the technical layout restrictions that seem to operate on this site don’t allow me to do what I would have liked with the free verse version of the poem. Everything automatically aligns to the left, which means that flexible spacing doesn’t work...thus rendering this site (for those concerned about an invasion from the dark side) pretty limiting for free verse anyway. For example, with the part about tossing the words around it could have been set out something like this (using dashes as a poor substitute for a space):
Who toss their words around--------at random
--------like a winter wind
-------------------------------spreads leaves
------------------------------------------------------across the ground.
This gives an enhanced visual (and hence reading) guide on the page to the image being described, something we could do, but don’t, in rhyming verse. We simply use standard punctuation (full stop, comma, ellipsis etc) to indicate pauses. And we write in ‘blocks’ of verse that leave it pretty much up to the reader to figure out how it goes. Why couldn’t something like this, which is a common free verse device, be used with rhyming poetry? For example:
a bunch of arty-farty types who toss their words around
at random---------like a winter wind------spreads leaves-------------across the ground.
I reckon this would force the reader to slow down and insert brief breaks of varying lengths that help to convey the idea of the leaves being spread randomly by the wind. Free verse challenges you to think about line breaks and pauses, instead of just waiting for a comma and/or a rhyme at the end of a line. For example, look at the free verse version of these three lines:
And I would say they both have faults, but that should never be
the reason to just walk away, for then you’ll never see
what each can offer to us all, the chance to look and learn
Would you normally pause after “just” and “offer” to stress “walk away” and “to us all” respectively? Probably not, but the free verse version suggests that. It makes you think a little differently about how it might be read and what might be emphasised, thus lessening the dum-de-dum temptation. Surely it’d be a good thing to give as much assistance as possible to anyone reading our poems, which is why I’d contend that there are things we can learn from free verse that could be useful.
David
