Jake Adam York points out (and reflects on) a response by Anthony Robinson to a remark on craft in poetry by Jonathan Mayhew (see #8). At first glance it's remarkable that none of them actually pointed out any examples of craft or attempted any definition beyond some vague relation to "style," especially "period style," or that a well-crafted poem is one which embodies the "suppositions and realizations" which generate the poem — which isn't much different from "well-crafted is what I like." But, in fact, it's very hard to talk concretely about craft in the dominant free verse mode of contemporary poetry, and there are poetics, such as flarf, which deliberately reject any notion of craft in the punk spirit of no more guitar heroes.
In poetry, painting, carpentry, pottery, saxophone-playing, or basketball, craft is merely the set of technical skills which allow a practitioner to achieve some desired end in the chosen medium. It is what allows competent work, and has very little to do with artistic excellence, which is nearly always mysterious. That's not quite true, of course: when Homer nods it's his craft that keeps things moving.
But just what are the technical resources of the English language free verse poet? All the tools of rhetoric (though they are unjustly despised by too many, especially those leery of any "statement" in poetry), various sound techniques shared with all poetry in our language, and, pre-eminently, the line break (I love many things called prose poems; poetry they ain't). But getting line breaks right is damned hard, and damned hard to talk about.
Traditional meters and forms (including their rhyme schemes) provide an additional layer of technical skills — craft — which can support the poet's work. They are eminently teachable, and flexible enough to accommodate all the period styles you can shake a stick at. As Christian Wiman said in the workshop I attended at West Chester last weekend, they should be the default mode of poetry because of the additional craft support they provide. It's possible to write a good sonnet with far less genius, in the old sense, than one needs to write a good free verse poem.
In that workshop, basic metrical craft was assumed, and we focused on line breaks. Wiman explicitly noted that metrical poets need to pay as much and the same kind of attention to line breaks as do free verse poets. We looked at poems from Lorine Niedecker, Robert Lowell, George Mackay Brown (I've got to find more of him), James Schuyler, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, George Peele, Thomas Gray, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Kay Ryan, Thom Gunn, Louise Bogan, W. H. Auden, and more — in four hours! — with the general rubric of thinking of the poem's structure along a continuum between sentence-based and line-based. It's a fascinating way of thinking about my own practice, which I've already begun to incorporate in to new work and revisions of old.
7:44:24 PM 
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