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Unread 04-30-2021, 11:48 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Location: San Diego, CA, USA
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Well, yes, rules are made to be broken, or to be riffed on in a transgressive way. The only unbreakable rule in poetry is Does what I'm doing work in this particular poem, for this particular audience? What flies in one circumstance falls flat in another.

That said, poets who keep maneuvering the same parts of speech to the ends of lines, over and over again, should probably expand their syntactical pattern book. Which is done by reading (and memorizing) the work of other poets they admire. (Or even other prose writers they admire. Or other wordsmiths, such as preachers.)

Many newer poets lack the patience to wade through contemporary poetry magazines to find the needles of modern poems that move them, among the haystack of modern poems that leaves them cold for various reasons. (I typically only like two or three poems in an issue of a form-friendly poetry magazine. It took me a long time to realize that this is normal, and that I'm actually paying my annual subscription to read just a handful of poems that move me.) So these new practitioners of formal poetry end up only reading poets from other centuries, and then they complain that modern readers won't let them get away with using exactly the same syntactical patterns that worked for Shakespeare.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 04-30-2021 at 12:11 PM.
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