I don't think I can explain my attitude toward free verse any more clearly than I did here. My complaints are not about free verse, but about poetry and theory that deny or deliberately frustrate narrative and the sharing of knowledge and feeling. An epistemological poem from earlier this year, slightly revised:
We Are A Kind Of Map
A buzzer-beating 3-point shot reveals
We're born to know our truths about this world,
But so is everything: a fly conceals
Itself till it's grown wings and they've unfurled;
A virus has the key for just the cell
Where it can flourish; that same cell, in dying,
Creates an army ready to repel
Precisely that invader or die while trying.
Of course that's metaphor, but not a lie,
Not just a way of trying to impose
Some sense on senselessness, a useless "Why?"
We answer till we like what we suppose.
We'll make mistakes — but make them unafraid:
We see the world with eyes the world has made.
6:51:50 PM
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