I propose that no person can write really good 'free poetry' without first being harnessed by the disciplines of the art form.

You can harness and discipline my body anytime but my poetry will always be free although cash payments are appreciated

What are the disciplines of the art form, Cynthia, and how does one go about learning them?

Many great early/mid twentieth century poets moved from strictish closed forms to the open free forms that made them famous: Plath, Roethke, Lowell etc.

W. H. Auden went the other way. He experimented with free verse early on then decided to try virtually every closed form under the sun.

I write both but only ever feel satisfied with my closed forms, even if it is just blank verse (10 syllables per line). It isn't just cryptic crosswordism. I actually believe closed forms induce the best work from most poets. I have have great admiration for those who can excel in open form but they are usually 'time-served' formal poets.
Good free verse is incredibly difficult to write but very easy to imitate badly. Poetry is not just fractured prose. It must have music, rhythm etc.

'I would no more write free verse than I would play tennis without a net' - Robert Frost

Anyone for tennis?

understand Heaney's feelings

make friends with Larkin's eyebrow

embrace the wit of Oscar dear

and pay attention to Eliot (TS) and his keeper

oh ... and above all pay lend your senses to Cooper Clarke, Sissay, LKJ and the many layered sounds being released daily at poetry readings in your area...

you can't expect to play the piano - be it ragtime, Rach or the wombles theme tune without first learning the notes, the scales and those infernal pedals of sustain...

Siren says:

Good free verse is incredibly difficult to write but very easy to imitate badly.

Poetry is not just fractured prose. It must have music, rhythm etc.

For example...??

Poetry isn't tennis.

Sure, it's good to have a go at writing in traditional form. I went through a period where I taught myself how to write it. At least I did the basics; I didn't go into the intricacies of it, and I stopped counting sylables a long time ago.

Only the English would think that going backwards will help you go forwards. No French poet has written in alexandrines for 150 years, though it used to be as ubiquitous in French poetry as the iambic pentameter is in English.

Good prose is better than bad verse anyday.

For once I''m inclined to agree with you Steven. I am still in the 'counting the syllables' stage cos I've had so many comments re my lack of structure that I'm starting to doubt myself. Not sure how long I can go on though - it makes writing poetry agonising and ends up changing the feel of what I write. Maybe I'll dabble with both styles, be a Jack of all trades and a master of none.

A bit like me then Isobel. :-)
One day i might go into the intricacies of writing poetry but for now i just want to continue enjoying the writing.
It does come across reasonably well when performed because of intonations and dialect but i'm beginning to see where improvements can be made for it to look better on the page.

At the end of the day, there are so many people who didn't set out to get any of it published so didn't think it mattered. As for me, i am slowly but surely becoming more aware of the finer details in writing and i don't post stuff on here as quickly as i used to but sometimes i need some encouragement and some tips for improvement. I still find it difficult sometimes to stand well back and be brutal to leave out the emotive content which is personal to me.

If i may add a quote here:-

'Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by the imagination.' Voltaire.

At present i'm in the position where i don't want to discipline my imagination. It has been reigned in for far too long. :-)

Hello Gus,

You asked for examples regarding my comments about good or bad free verse. The three poets I mentioned at the start of my post would provide numerous examples of great free verse from their later works. As for the bad ones...well, as I have said many times on this site, I refuse to go there. I will neither disparage the work of individuals nor provide examples of my own work as 'bad' poetry. I try not to write the stuff and if a work seems not to be up to standard I scrap it before it is finished; often before the stage of putting pen to paper.

A short quote from an essay I wrote last year reveals Ezra Pound's reaction to writers of poor free verse....

Although Pound precipitated a rush for poetic heterogeneity he was by no means enamoured with the efforts of many of the poets who followed his lead. He complained that: ‘The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound.’

The idea that you have to do some kind of apprenticeship before you can write poetry is anathema to me. You may well need to develop skills in order to be a good poet - in fact I'd say that was a given - but actually to write poetry, all you need is the initial inspiration. It's not like school; it's something you learn by doing, and by reading; if you read closely the work of other poets, you pick up ideas of how to do things. If it becomes more than an occassional hobby, you start to learn a self-discipline, you start to criticise yourself more. You start to listen to the rhytmns of your own voice.

i second that Steven

What is discipline, and what is free poetry ?
Did no-one write good / free poetry before the days of creative writing classes and university degrees?

Thank you for your reply Siren

Bill ..to which days do you refer?... Universities and creative writing tuition has been with us, certaily since Claxtons press and probably somewhat before...

Is any poetry really free? Do we all not think about rhyme and rhythm, and timbre etc etc etc, and work and rework pieces. I did untill I discovered this site a mere week and a half ago. I hadn't written poetry or songs for near on twenty years, i didn't have degrees and such stuff then, and i worked and re-worked untill i lost what the poem was initially about. Now I just try and capture a moment.

The discipline helps me cross my t's and dot my i's and hopefully
put my apostrophe in the correct place ( 90% of the time).

Dear Steven,

In response to your remark about French poets and the Alexandrine, what about the Parnassians Leconte de Lisle and Theophile Gautier, and more recently: Henri Mechonnic.

Personally, I think the best thing is to write what you want and let the reader decide.

Thank you, Alex, for pointing to a few late dinosaurs, but the vast majority of French poets (Eluard, Aragon, Appollinaire, Reverdy, Peret, Queneau, Bonnefoy, Khoury-Ghatta, Mansour, Char, Vian, Breton, Albaich, Leiris, etc etc, etc) seem to have abandoned it a long time ago. Though I'm sure the ghost of it still exists, as does the ghost of iambic pentameter in free verse.

My point, though, stands. You don't need to know the whole of poetics to write it. You need to read and learn from others to write it well; and it helps to gain a little knowledge of what people did in the past, but it's not like learning accountancy.

free verse, free verse,
it is just good to see
free speech. Keep it up lads