So much poetry is not poetry but cheaply dressed prose.....

So much that is called poetry today is not poetry, just prose dressed up in cheap skirts to look like poetry. Real poetry has a theme and rhythm and is in essence a 'song' sung through and with words. The first poetry was spoken, not written and real poetry can always be spoken easily and powerfully.

So-called free verse is certainly free, rambling all over page and space and achieving very little. It is not that poetry cannot or should not talk about the banal, the mediocre, the ordinary, the small and the trivial, but that the words which convey the 'story' should not fit the same category.... as so many do.

Yes, it is good that dressed-up prose as poetry makes more people attempt to write - creative expression is always good - but it is no more poetry than the dabblings of most amateur painters is art, however rewarding the exercise may be for painter or 'poet.'

But, if this ease of expression, the fast-food equivalent of Word Work, brings into being a rebirth for poetry then it is all to the good. But let's be more judicious about what we call poetry.


http://www.poemtree.com/articles/PoetryOrProse.htm