How Free Verse Makes Everyone A Poet by Micheal Ace | Read Excerpt

Gone are the days when poets are bounded by rules; the way you write a Sonnet is different from Haiku, and that is also different from how you write a Triolet. You’ll spend hours studying the history and origin, the rudiments, the guides, you’ll spend time reading poems of the same style before you dabble into it, and also spend weeks to months writing so as to get conversant. Gone are the days when meter and rhyme govern the mind of poets. This is the big time, when everyone can be whatever they want. The is the time when creativity becomes the order of the day, the time when you write your light in dark letters, and your beast in blue ink without being obviously judged, rejected or condemned.

But this is also the time when anyone can string words together, break them into stanzas, make sure they are within readable lines, slots in a title and call it a poem. And they won’t even stop at that, but opens their e-mail to send to magazines for publication, or logs in to Facebook, post, tag and mention and later brag about people’s reactions. This is the time when even someone who cannot write a simple sentence correctly without grammatical errors becomes a poet as long as they have a Facebook or Gmail account.

This is not an attempt to ridicule anyone but truth be told, Free verse as a style has opened door to the crowd, and in my opinion, poetry is a special arm of art that isn’t for everyone. These days, the depth you read in poems is grandiloquence—they cram the dictionary without knowing how the words work—and this often result to conflict in diction but who cares? They are poets. This time, you read a poem exploring imagery without even one simple usage of metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole and the likes, but who cares? They are poets. You read poems that don’t even pass as prose— rigid and watery, sometimes with ambiguity, but… they are poets.