In further news from the front line, Kasey Mohammad has promoted a comment from William Watkin to an entry. This remark from Watkin is particularly interesting:
These innovative poets have tried to liberate the poem from the line using prose, attenuated lines down to one word or phoneme, extended the line beyond the brain's ability to see it as a single unit, split it into two using columns, scattered lines across the page, turned them upside down, written one line on top of the other in palimpsests, renounced the page altogether in favour of performative and talk poems, and are now radically altering the limits and potentialities of lineation using html and java coding.
How "liberating the poem from the line" leads to a "golden age of lineation" in the next paragraph is problematic, to say the least. In fact, it seems rather to make my point: machine replication has enabled kinds of poetry in which the line all but disappears. And when were poems oppressed, anyway?
But I don't think, as Kasey suggests I might, that meter is "the essential index of the poem." It's a tool, certainly more important than capitalization of initial letters, but only a tool. I don't even think metrical poetry is "better" than non-metrical poetry. I don't know what the hell that might mean.
I do prefer to read metrical poetry, but certainly not exclusively. I'm interested in poetry as mimesis, as a representation of human speech and action, though of course poetry does other things. But if any of us could live long enough to know the result, I'd make a five-dollar bet: simply because metrical poetry is more memorable, any given competently made metrical poem that has been published in a "respected" venue has a better chance to be read by non-scholars a hundred years from now than any given similarly competent and similarly published non-metrical poem. That's not a bet on the "goodness" of either poem.
8:14:14 PM 
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