Ah, The Years Go By ...

When you ask yourself questions about poetry first, do you then just go ahead and start writing?

Like, (er, excuse me, "as in the case of") when you think things through, decide on a few issues and then start a poem draft. Is that a good idea?

I don't think so. You're still "Spontaneous Me" at that point. (Did you really think I was not an Elements of Style guy? But I'm also a Spunk and Bite guy -- that's why I blog, friends.)

The purpose for "asking yourself questions first" is, at the end of it, to decide on a personal aesthetic. An aesthetic, to me anyway, is a philosophy of art (actually, a philosophy of beauty, but you get the idea). And poetry (as we're discussing it today, anyway) is a fine art. So you've got to have a working philosophy before you can write any, successfully.

The problem is, you've already got one -- you just may not realize it. That's what the "question-asking" stuff is for (for the most part).

The reason I'm going into all this (remember, this is a blog about traditional verse) is because a working aesthetic is essential to the pentameter/ABAB stuff. Like using logic, it wouldn't seem to be the case, necessarily. But it is, IMHO.

What some poets may have forgotten in the nearly 100 years that free verse has reigned supreme (OK, technically about 90 -- since the end of WWI) is part of the aesthetic of free verse: its very logos is unconscious, which springs to the light of conscious day from the very process of writing free-verse poetry.

This has been understood for a long time. In fact, using it as part of a common understanding for free verse before even entering the "tennis-without-a-net club" was at first an essential requirement. And it remains that way, but it's assumed rather than understood.

My previous posts have been aimed at other assumed facets of this "common understanding" (that modern poetry is a flowering of the unconscious aesthetic impulse outside the usual rigors of traditional logic, classical rhetoric, standard practice and performance, etc.).

If all this sounds like I hate modern free-verse poetry, then it's coming out wrong: I love it. I love the process of it, the "playing" of it in public, the sense of shared result (even when privately held) that comes from it. In my roughly half-century of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain (not very successfully, I'm afraid), nothing else comes close, for me at least.

But I think it's because I've failed to avoid pain so often that I've become equally attached to the "trad" approach.

It doesn't dull the ache: it gives the ache its meaning.