Harry's discussion thread has been an epic read and one that has again made me rethink my poetic credentials.
Many of the highly knowledgeable WOL'ers who commented seem to have an almost encyclopedic armoury of understanding of the many styles, poets, genres, etc etc. It has left me feeling very amateur indeed.
Further thought on this leaves me with a choice of two routes to consider.

Does one study further to improve knowledge and therefore become able to explain and illustrate the above?

Or would that shape and premeditate one's own style and influence the individual approach that I tend to take to poetry too much?

In truth I do not study or indeed read a lot of other people's published work (except my occasional commenting on WOL of course).

I suppose then to sum up I'm asking the following question.

Can poetry be too technical?

That's not so much a question, it seems to me, but the voicing of a fear: that by studying the techniques of poetry you might somehow lose your voice. Those old enough to remember the film Never on a Sunday - starring Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri, if memory serves - might remember that someone tells the brilliant, self-taught bouzouki player that he ought to learn to read music, and then he would be even better. As he does so, his playing loses its soul, until he abandons reading music and goes back to playing from the heart. I suspect this is at the heart of your question.
That said, what is wrong with learning techniques as long as you use them to express what you want to? Just don't try using Stephen Fry's book to do so.

Learning the techniques of poetry won't lose your voice but sharpen your craft in the way a painter learns to be paint better by understanding the ins and outs of fine art (sorry for the long-winded response!)

Practising poetry and reading will help develop your voice, too. You'll find out what works for you by experimenting and playing around.

Above all, have fun and enjoy yourself.

Of course learning about the various techniques and traditions of poetry over the centuries will shape and premeditate your own style and influence the individual approach you take to poetry.

I should jolly well hope it should. I've always been sceptical about the idea of 'voice' anyway. Your voice is always something like a conglomoration of all your influences and experiences mixed in together.

Can it be too technical? That depends on you really: form can become a thing in itself. But play with it, muck around with it.

Graham,
The technical description of the forms of the poetry could only be arrived at by looking closely at the already existing poems and establishing a classification of styles or forms...It comes after the poetry - not before it. It can be useful after - or during - the writing of the poem, but too much concentration on it beforehand can very much cock up the inspiration.

My own method is that (even if its on the page) to `read` the bloody thing through my ears. We all like music and all have an almost innate response to rhythm and rhyme - and also to pleasing and well balanced verbal or literary expression.

When I come across a poem which is `jarring` or un-rhythmic I look for a reason in the theme to justify why it should be so. (all poetry is form and `story`)

Rhyme is a huge help in a poem, but it is often a `knack` which some people don`t have...Rhythm and balance, however, are far more in everyone`s power and, thankfully, enable far more people to partake in - and enhance - the poetry scene.

But above all - for me - read all poems through the ear and check up with the technical stuff later.

Of course, there's no such thing as poetry without form, even if it's close to the rhythms of speech. And there's no such thing as poetry without history, however modernist it is.

You could try using extreme constraints as in Oulipo...

I have never understood the concept of the variable foot invented by William Carlos Williams but I love his poetry. I agree with Harry about the importance of the ear but am less concerned about rhythm and rhyme.
Listen to this poem

The Act

There were the roses, in the rain.
Don’t cut them, I pleaded. They won’t last, she said.
But they’re so beautiful where they are.
Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said,
and cut them and gave them to me in my hand.

William Carlos Williams

It is so simply constructed yet I keep returning to it and still find it pleasing.

Technical skill is relevant but only insofar that it enables use of
language in a particular form or setting. If the meaning of the words is lost - or the intended
allusion lost - then the technique
used is irrelevant. It provides a framework, if you like, for its
content, essentially an exercise to that end.
There is a danger in falling
in love with style and form for their own sake and you have to be on top of the game if you are not to fall victim to their seductive
appeal and lose sight of the point:
to reach out and share...and, hopefully, add something to the sum
of worthwhile human experience.
Possessing technical prowess is an asset in poetry, but care should be
taken than it doesn't become an end in itself and foul the waters of
creativity.

I'd agree with you MC - but there are plenty out there who wouldn't. For me, meaning is of utmost importance. If I can't understand what a poet is saying, I totally lose interest in the poem. A technique or style that distracts from the message can also turn me totally off.
There are plenty of people out there however, who can appreciate a poem for sound alone and plenty of people who just seem to enjoy identifying the style.
I think it is inevitable that we will overlap other discussion threads with this one, but hey ho...

I don't think it can hurt to learn a little about different car engines, if you aspire to build the best and most original car engine ever to be built - and so it is with poetry. Surely it is better to understand the rules before you go ahead and break them all.

I quite like owning Stephen Fry's book. If ever I'm not sure about a style, I can look it up. It is a useful reference book - but I don't necessarily aspire to write poetry in the vein of 16th Century poets.

I'll just add that occasionally challenging yourself to write to a strict form is a good exercise in discipline - and it makes you appreciate just how skilfull those classical poets were.

Isobel - I know someone who is the owner of a state of the art high fidelity sound system. The equipment is something to behold, yet I often tease its owner that listening to and enjoying the music it plays has become of secondary importance. A wry smile is, more often than not, the response. I take a similar view of the relationship between poetry and the technical use made of the means by which it is presented to its audience.

am a believer in trying out some of the different forms but i tend to write blank verse as it suits me best.. although i am generally not keen on lots of forms of poetry - i can see the merits it does for other people..

To Isobel: I'm not quite the opposite to you; but I do feel that if I completely understand the poem on first reading, I abandon it as not worth bothering with. "A poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully" as Wallace Stevens said. That "almost" being the apposite word: a poem that is completely incomprehensible however many times you read it, is pretty pointless to this reader. Though, as a fan of 'sound poetry' and 'concrete poetry', what's comprehensible to me is probably total gobbledygook to other people!

But a poem can be "understood" in all kinds of ways. I remember reading The Love Song of Arthur Prufrock by TS Eliot, not understanding a word of it, but loving it immediately just because the sounds of the words insinuated their way into my head. It was the music of that poem that hooked me, not the meaning initially.

A great poem is not one I completely understand; I'm not reading an instruction manual. It's one where there are layers and layers of meaning, and some of the meaning is at a non-verbal level. Sound, shape even, all contribute to the meaning.

That's probably why form is so important: because meaning is more than intellectual and isn't always logical. It's emotional and physical as well. It's about making connections, sometimes obvious sometimes not so obvious. Even in free verse that's true: true free verse means creating a new form every time you write.

I shall look on the bright side then Steven - we agree that meaning is of some importance :)

I understand what you are saying about facile/telly poetry not floating your boat - I think there are many who would agree with you. For me, it depends on the skill of the poet and whether the poem moves me.

I also like poetry that makes me think - that doesn't hand its message to me on a plate. I just can't abide poetry that has nothing to say - so ties itself up in clever imagery that leads you nowhere.

That is a my very personal opinion though. I have a busy life and I just don't have the time to bash my head against brick walls of words...

'Meaning is more than intellectual and isn't always logical. It's emotional and physical as well'

I like that thought - it's got me thinking. A poem that followed that principle would, for me, be a mood poem - an expression of mood - where there is no meaning other than disconnected emotion. That in itself would be meaning for me - anything that I can identify with, put a finger on, is meaningful.

I have no problem with free verse, by the way.

I'd rather see free verse - where the structure follows the way I would speak and perform something - than a convoluted form that hampers the message. I think it may be the bad examples of classical and contemporary that that make us all overly prejudiced one way or the other - or at least our own subjective opinions of what is good and bad...

Just a couple of quotes:

"If you want to send a message, go Western Union." (Sam Goldwyn)

"I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry." (John Cage)

Or in other words, you don't have to have a 'message': you can just muck around in the playpen of language if you want. It's allowed.

Or you can be terribly political, or personal, you can try to put your point across, you can praise God, the Lake District or pretend to be a cat. It's all allowed.

Not everyone will like what you do; but so what? Sometimes I like to play in the playpen, sometimes I like to say something.

Usually what people mean when they say a poem is meaningful is that it has axiom that they can take away.

Y'know, like "life is short and then you die"; or "aren't kittens great?" or "Behave."

There are some very thoughtful comments in this thread; a lot to agree with. Not only is there a long history of written poetry of which most of us have only studied a small part, but there is also a history of literary criticism, which is full of its own technical terms, clashes and disagreements, for those who have the time and inclination. Some poets like Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins have set up their own plan of how to describe their metre, while others leave that to the critics. I wrote for many years on the strength of what I had absorbed at school and at home- the Romantics, Shakespeare, translated Greek plays, Chaucer, WW1 poets, a real mix, together with the idea that 'modern poetry' had dispensed with strict rhyme and rhythm, so I could write how I liked, so I did. Then later I got to Uni and studied Stylistics. It was so analytical that it was some years before I found a way back to my poetry brain. But when I did write for myself and had a meaningful theme, I was aware of the way I was using language, and it gave me more options.
I think, Graham, you could dip a toe in the technical water by taking one technique and learning the ins and outs of it, and writing a sort of 'homework' poem using it, then put it away and write something entirely freely. Later you could look back and see if your learning changed the way you wrote, but you wont see it at once I suspect.

Steven
My very first job was as a fourteen year old was as a uniformed Western Union cablegram boy in Liverpool (I actually delivered cables to the Western approaches Atlantic headquarters)

Here`s the message:

My computer being on the blink (again) I`ve just re-read Milton`s L Allegro...which made me think about style. In substance and content the poem is (as universally acclaimed)
superb...But, looking again at the style, something struck me: The poem is a sort of `peasant pastoral` and is obviously meant to light heartedly `skip` along. But - for all its brilliance - it doesn`t - for me - so much `skip light heartedly` as select deftly all the right classical pastoral notes and `play` them all for our admiration(and what a performance!)But...He doesn`t seem to have the `soul` of pastoral as Shakespeare does - it`s brilliant poetry with a tad too much of performance in it.

The relevance to the discussion is that even a genius can over egg thestyle.

Hmmm... having just gone back to read it (it's online like a lot of things these days) I can't help but agree with you. Milton trying to be light-hearted - it just doesn't work, does it? He's trying to force out a smile...

And his rural idyll feels like a Hovis advert, it doesn't seem to have any connection with the real world at all. Compare to, say, Clare, or even Wordsworth when he was good, and you can see the unnaturalness. And Shakespeare too - Midsummer Night's Dream is so much more real. You can tell that Milton's always had a privileged lifestyle. And his Puritanism is baulking at the very idea of pleasure.

Thanks for setting me off to reading it, though.

I'm curious about the use of the phrase "the real world" - often found in posts. I recall the Hovis advert - a charming pastiche of how we would like to think of a past age in a picture-postcard environment. But as a teenage boy, my real world was a home on top of Bowden Hill, just beyond the Wiltshire village of Lacock, and the trips - up and down - that my bicycle and I would regularly make. I can still recall those many occasions - but especially going UP - bridging the placid River Avon and climbing that winding steepness to sunlit uplands some 500 feet above sea level - to a cottage without central heating and mod.cons. but with so much more to look forward to.
"Real world"? That was my real world then and I miss it still.

Well, actually, Milton's pastoralism is unreal because it's actually like no rural scene that ever was. There really were no nymphs and swains etc; and while with other pastoral poems you get the impression that, if even if they didn't believe in it, they could at least let themselves wallow in the fantasy, Milton's just seems like he positively dislikes it, but is playing along with it for convention's sake. It was never his real world, and he'd turn his nose up at it anyway.

Graham, you don't need to be an expert to write poetry dictated by your feelings or perceptions and if you already have a 'style' your instincts will lead you back to it. But it is nice to know more about one's craft and even, as Isobel suggested, have a go at a particular style or genre. Stephen Fry's book is useful for dipping into ( or even ploughing straight through)-not that I remembered much but I was then aware of the plethora of styles, genres, technical strategies available.
Poetry could indeed fall prey to the Technical God although I suspect that you would be resistant to that as you already have a feeling for words in your own style.
Your new knowledge ( should you choose to increase it )may also enable you to appreciate poetry on different levels and perhaps colour your comments on other's poems.

My eyes screw up and my erection droops at the thought of yet another technical analysis and the image of greasy hands pulling apart the carburetor and then staring at the spark-plugs twixt thumb and forefinger while holding it up to the sun- better to drive 100 mph down the open road without a fallen tree or hairpin to force a red-flag-waving white track-suited official to encumber ones dash to an uncertain outcome.

I watched an expert violinist play a technically perfect piece but there was something missing-a certain carelessness or insanity perhaps?

Neither carelessness nor insanity. Just the ability to know when to improvise and when not to improvise. Just a complete absorption in the moment of the performance. Just a confidence in the use of your materials/instrument that comes from practice, practice, practice.

One thing I like about Shakespeare is that he showed an enormous amount of freedom within the conventions of drama at the time, because he hadn't had the correct way drummed into him by academia (he never went to university.) He was certainly never insane, though, nor was he careless. When he broke the rules, he knew what he was doing.

When it comes down to it, a technique is there to convey more of what you want to convey than the words alone can do. If you are part of a literate world that shares a set of conventions, poetry is a bit like playing bridge, you share a common set of codes and signals. If we don't belong to such a coterie, we can feel alienated by these codes, which are meaningless without the shared agreement. On the other hand, some techniques work for anyone who knows the language because they are the sound and rhythm of language. Some metres feel very forced except in the hands of an expert, while others read easily because they are natural to spoken language.

Up until the age of forty, I doubted very much that I could ever write poetry. What I subsequently produced was without any instruction or background in verse. So like many others who have nervously trod the same path, we lack self belief. For the brave there is the ruthless verdict of the competition where one is put to the test against trained word-smiths. Then there are the open mikes where one tries to gauge what entertainment are you really providing. Now I feel that I have to "learn music" because there may be fundamental flaws in my presentation. But like the bouzouki player mentioned above, I will keep a close eye on my spirit.

Don't know if you'll ever read this Emlyn, but I'd just like to say this...

I've seen you perform on one occasion and would say that you were a brilliant performer with great memory, stage presence and delivery. I can recall not understanding what the poem was about though - so perhaps, for you, it is more about tailoring the message.

What was a poem,
before it was a form.
What was a meaning,
before the thought was born
should I write, just to conform.
.............sorry Guys, I just can't help myself.

Form is a challenge.

There's a good book called How Poetry Works. I think the author is Phillip Davies. It explains in ordinary language some of the concepts which are you see expressed in ways that leave people who just write feeling like amateurs. Don't be intimidated, get the book, learn about form and sharpen your craft.

I just remembered the advice Simon Armitage gives to would be poets.... read, read, read!

I think the most import thing is that it flows well.