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| "Hark! she speaks" On poetry My first love was the freedom of unrhymed poetry. After writing thousands, good and bad, I rarely indulge any more. As I sat in a class once, listening to a professor recite the ludicrous "poetry" of Gertrude Stein, a classmate thrust up his hand. "What I want to know is," he began, "with all those 'sittings' and 'not standings' and 'is is is,' how can you tell when she's made a mistake?" No one could answer. Poetry is, of course, a very subjective art. There is little consensus, especially between learned authorities and me. I find most poetry to be tedious and indulgent. Too many poets are too concerned with breaking the mold, that they don't even recognize that they are trapping themselves in a mold of their own. Many seem not to realize poems should be about something, even if that something is quite small, or not entirely original. They think that obscurity equals depth, and illiteracy equals feeling. I know this, because I was such a poet. That isn't to say that poems cannot be dense, that they shouldn't challenge the reader, or ought not have hidden or doubled meanings. But standing on a stage mumbling "Sturgeon, sturgeon, sturgeon" is gibberish. Even Alice B. Toklas might agree. Criticizing the freeform poet is like licking a hedgehog. The defenses are up from the start. The freeformist can claim, when her artistry is questioned, that that's her style. That's what she meant to do. How utterly provincial of you to notice! I flatter myself that I've written some acceptable freeform poetry. I've won some awards, and been approached for publication. But I cannot escape my contention that the majority of those who claim to admire my work might also admire "Sturgeon, sturgeon, sturgeon." They might belong to the "I don't know what it means so it must be good!" school of poetry criticism. So I do not allow them to publish. The paradox for me is that the rigid structure of rhymed, metered poetry frees me to develop my content, unconcerned with how archaic or traditional I may appear. I stand firmly inside the mold, embracing rather than breaking. I have a tradition of sonnets to which I can compare myself, and find me lacking. Sonnets are the most objective of poems. There is a right way, and a wrong. And it is liberating to know that if I make a mistake, a child of five can say, "But that doesn't rhyme."
Judge for yourself: My sonnets
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