For a natural and a skilled poet, rhyme and meter are the very opposite of constraints. The way in which a great poet uses rhyme and meter is entirely distinct from the way in which an amateur poet uses rhyme and meter.
An amateur will “set a form” and use it as a guardrail, when all of the great poetic forms are discovered organically as methods to consciously explore certain tracks of thought and feeling.
A novice does something worse, which is to abandon meter and rhyme altogether. Now, everything has meter and rhyme in some sense, just as everyday speech also has melody hidden within it. But the abandonment of ‘metrical consciousness’ DURING composition is disastrous for today’s novice poets. As a result, they all-too-often produce nothing more than enjambed prose. To their credit, this does allow them to focus the bulk of their craftsmanship on thought-provoking enjambments.
The novice poets (instapoets, Rupi Kaur, the St. Mark’s school, etc.) have a certain respectable disdain for those I call the amateur poets. This is a very small group of unpaid civilians who, lamenting the decline of American poetry, have taken to reviving antiquated forms, styles of diction, and thematic concerns. What is respectable about their disdain is that it stems from their perception of the real weakness of ‘amateur verse’.
But what is laughable about the arrogance of the contemporary novice poets, and this for me includes almost all of academia and the whole pedantic global literati as it stands, is that they are blind to the reality that they are far inferior to even these amateurs. For while the amateurs are like people who are starting off at learning an instrument, practicing basic scales over and over again, the novices, on the other hand, are like people who, never even picking an instrument up, both mock the beginner and even go so far as to pick up his instrument, play a bunch of random notes, and then boast about the virtues of their playing—without even having the conceptual vocabulary to really make such boasts in any comprehensive way!
Now, we all know this general trend in 20c. art. But there were certain figures who straddled the line between mastery of their craft and ‘unlimited expression’: Picasso comes to mind in painting, Pound in poetry.
Go and read the Cantos. Now, compare the irregular line-breaks and indentation in Pound to later ‘postmodern’ poets. I want you to see how much more in control of the musical unfolding of the verse Pound is than later poets, even those who ostensibly write here and there with more conventional structures (say, Crane or Lowell). Only Frost is Pound’s equal in this way, but for very different reasons.
What makes Pound the most important poet of the last century is that he wanted to take these new ideas in verse, and put them into the service of the ancient tradition. Highly abstract enjambments, indents, big spaces, fragmented content—for Pound, these were not, as they still are for my belovéd amateurs, rejections of the Old Ways, abandonments of the craft. They are things that have to be HARMONIZED with these, in order to produce the verse of the future.
Now, the amateurs are the true hope for the future of American verse. All that is necessary for them to develop a subtler grasp on rhyme and meter, to understand its function in verse on the deepest levels.
A few suggestions:
First of all, two on rhyme:
(1) While masculine rhyme has its place, feminine rhyme is vastly underused. A poet whose rhyme-consciousness is only focused on the last syllable of a line is extremely limited. The same goes for the possibility of two, three, or four syllable rhymes, rhymes of words with phrases, etc. This brings me to
(2) While end-rhyme has its place and wonderful incantatory effect (perhaps why it was the Church who largely brought it into western verse), internal rhyme, cross-rhyme, and ‘random rhyme’ (rhyming with any word in the previous few lines with any other at any place), doesn’t just refine the music of the verse; because of the way that rhyme works, i.e., certain words are tied to others by sound and thereby suggest marvelous things to the poet (things they would not ever conceive of if they were simply trying to ‘express their thoughts’ in prose), working with a sensitivity to rhyme that is expanded to every syllable of every line opens up a whole cosmos of fermenting linguistic possibility.
Second of all, one on meter. I’m going to rave a bit before I get to the suggestion:
There are very few great poems with absolutely fixed meter. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are not all iambs.
The idea that an epic must be hexameters is an overstatement. There is a more fundamental idea behind this, which is that, the longer the line, the more serious the subject matter. Beowulf was not in iambs but it did have long lines.
What did Pound really mean when he said to compose by the musical phrase and not the metronome? There is this whole notion of quantitative vs qualitative verse, but the fact is, either way the line is a matter of duration; it takes X amount of time to say.
That’s one thing. The other is the rhythm and melody of the line. How many stops & starts and falls & rises does it have sonically? Quantitative verse is a way to formalize the temporal aspect of a line, and qualitative a way to formalize the rhythmic aspect of a line. But they’re always both there.
Now, the suggestion: study poetic feet, specifically with an eye to understanding how they speed up, slow down, intensify, and relax the music of the verse.
Study rigorously, but when you compose, don’t use this knowledge to write uninspired exercise-poems with it.
Moving on…
The idea that a poem’s lines should all be the same length is a sensible one insofar as a poem needs form to be a good poem. But it is altogether possible that there are cases where the musical form of the verse requires a long line followed by a short. However, these must be kept in the sort of exquisite balance wherein they equal the solid form of the equal-lengthed-line poem. For instance, imagine a 9 line poem of 9 syllables per line; and then imagine, to see what the sort of thing I’m talking about, an 82 syllable poem broken up into 7 lines varying from 3-18 syllables.
…
The reason the amateurs are in a better position than the novices (academics, New Yorker Poets, instapoets, Columbia and St. Mark’s poets) is because their passion for order in verse combined with a sincere reverence for the western poetic tradition as the transmitter of a divine and living spark. Despite their naïveté about the ultimate ends of order in verse, they are in a better position to transmute their love of traditional verse-forms into a higher-order competence with the underlying principles of which those forms are manifestations, and to thereby begin to conquer the stale and dying world of American poetry.
…
We have to study Pound closely. We have to study Frost closely. But we have to do better.
love your passion for poetry, and I can tell you work really hard at understanding it, subscribed!!