Recommendations

I've spent most of the day looking at online literary journals. In particular, I'm looking at what gets published under the heading of poetry. Whenever I do that, I often come away discouraged about the lack of poetry in the poems that actually get published. Today was no exception. I did, though, find a couple of journals I would recommend. One is Boxcar Poetry Review, which has just published it's 20th issue. The other is Blackbird. I'd recommend spending a little time with each of them. And if you do, come back and let me know what you think.

Some thoughts about free verse and traditional form

I've looked at a number of "literary journal" web sites over the last few days reading "sample poems" that reveal the editors' taste. I have to tell you I'm not overly impressed with a lot of what I see. And here is some of my thinking.

First of all, poetry should be something more than prose, or at least something different. And new poetry should do something more than old poetry, or at least something different.

Taking bad prose and breaking it into lines that make it resemble a poem doesn't change the fact that it's still bad prose.

Free verse is not prose broken into lines. Good free verse has structure of some sort and rhythm of some sort.

Free verse means verse that is genuinely "free" to explore language in interesting ways. It should use language in a way that prose doesn't and in a way that traditional form doesn't. It should explore new syntax.

Formal verse and free verse share the same grammar but not the same syntax. But some poets approach free verse as syntax without grammar.

Unless free verse genuinely explores the nature of rhythm of both language and image, it is a lazy approach to writing poetry.

When a person encounters a poem--either through writing it or reading it--that person should ask and attempt to answer -- what is exciting about the poem's language? what is exciting about the way the words are working together?