Starting my education in metrical verse
There are three stories in The French Dispatch. The first one is about an artist who's in prison and has a love affair with a guard. There's this scene where he's painting the guard nude and the vantage point pans around to show the canvas and you see that the painting is very abstract—smudges of pink and red.
Somehow an art dealer finds out about this painter in the prison and comes to see him. He sees his abstract painting and says he wants to buy it. Then he brings the painting back to his partners in the art dealing business and, in order to explain why the prisoner is a great artist, he also shows them a "perfect" drawing of a sparrow "drawn in 45 seconds ... with a burnt matchstick."
"One way to tell if a modern artist actually knows what he’s doing is to get him to paint you a horse or a flower or a sinking battleship, or something that’s actually supposed to look like the thing that it’s actually supposed to look like ... The point is, he could paint this [the perfect sparrow] beautifully if he wanted, but he thinks this [the smudges of pink and red] is better."
— Julian Cadazio (played by Adrien Brody) in The French Dispatch
I have no technical background in poetry at all. I'm not even that well schooled in English and literature generally. I took only the required English courses in high school and my college degree is in finance.
When I started writing during my sophomore year of college, it was at the same time that I realized the beaten path for American youth to rise up through the education system to the working class was not the only path. As I began to truly think for myself, and as I had not been trained in music or painting, I expressed my thoughts in the only form I knew: the written word.
Then, when I started writing poetry during my first year after graduating college, it happened naturally as a seemingly logical, natural progression from my prose, especially as I began to write more creatively. The form of verse, especially the line break, started to make sense for certain pieces of my writing, more sense than punctuation and other aspects of prose.
Now, I've written poetry for more than five years. Still, all the while, without following any of the traditional technical rules of poetry, especially meter. What this has allowed me to do is to focus without distraction on the objects of my poems. The words that I choose, the length of the whole poem, where I choose to break the lines—it has all been a direct subjective translation from whatever object I am sensing or experiencing.
With form in all art, but especially with regard to the form of metrical verse in poetry, I believe that the artist's subjective experience of the object can sometimes be cut off at the edges or rounded at the corners because the form itself has a hand in what gets created. A different word is chosen in order to have a stressed or unstressed syllable or in order to rhyme with a word from another line and that word is chosen just to respect the form itself, not to more accurately describe the artist's subjective experience of the objective. Because of this, I am wary of form in art and wary especially of metrical verse for my poetry.
On the other hand, I do believe there are benefits of form in art. At least there are natural reasons why art has grown to take on the forms that it has and, by creating in accordance with the forms, an artist can take advantage of the inclination that consumers have to consume art in its natural and now popularized forms.
I think I heard once that ancient poetry took on certain forms in order to be easier to remember. For example, it's easier to remember a poem or a song that rhymes. And it was important that these poems and songs were remembered because religious texts and other traditions were passed down to generations in the form of spoken word before the written word became widely available.
I have hitherto ignored the technical form of poetry. I have written what is called free verse, though I wrote my poetry this way before I knew it was called that. The only aspect of my poems that really make them poems at all is that the lines are broken without punctuation and without alignment on the right margin.
But I now believe it is time to start my education in the more technical and traditional forms of poetry, especially with regard to metrical verse.
What I suspect will happen is that I will develop a subconscious and intuitive framework for how to write poetry that will begin to affect even my first drafts.
I can also begin to rely on the form, similar to how a container contains a gaseous substance. The gas itself is chaotic and if left in the atmosphere would spread out thin and dissipate. But in a container, the gas is concentrated. The form of metrical verse for my poetry will be like a container for the gas of my inspiration.
Writing a poem in a predefined form will help me to focus when I am choosing any given word in the poem by narrowing the set of words that I can choose from. For example, when I am on the tenth word of the second line and I am writing in iambic pentameter, I will know that it needs to be a stressed syllable. Perhaps it will even rhyme with a word in another line. In this way, the rhythm and rhyme narrow the subset of words that I have to choose from.
This also makes me think of how you could write an algorithm and eventually a machine learning language to write poetry, if the technical rules of poetic form were used as a logic for choosing certain words from the English language, which has a limited set of words. There would be a limited set of values for the variable of any given word depending on its position in the poem and the words that are already added to the poem up to that point. The algorithm could choose from a library of words, each codified as stressed or unstressed, rhyming or not rhyming with other words.
Perhaps there is a balance, between the completely freewheeling way in which I currently write my free verse poems and coding a machine to write my poems for me according only to rules and without any human inspiration. How can I know? I can smudge some pinks and reds on a canvas, but I must now learn to draw a perfect sparrow with a burnt matchstick.