Oh no problem about that. I’m in Canterbury for three months so I’ll probably be coming to London a few times. We can plan for it next time.

@t: Oh good, hope to see a post from you on that. It would be nice to compare… and we should meet up soon!

My-own-ist has not been developed sufficiently. It’s not very different from my talking/blog voice, and that’s problematic, I think, because I come off snarky far too often.

Re: Anton Ego — His character works for the movie, but he’s cliche if there ever was one. We have to move away from this idea of the critic as someone waiting rain on someone’s parade.

Re: the poem — Someone called it doggerel, I think. I don’t think it’s doggerel. It’s simply one of those poems I don’t like to read. It feels too heavily worked upon, like here:

Slap! voice muted mid-gabble,
back livid with the sting of dying.

And this reminds me, I rarely appreciate the dropping of articles and other tiny helpful words. Have they been sacrificed to the metre, I wonder.

There is also something bathetic about the poem, not helped by that ending.

All in all, I don’t have many problems with his craft. It’s more a matter of taste.

On a side note: I wonder if those lines are meant to be double spaced. I sense that these are not single lines on their own, but one large stanza, or four stanzas of six lines each, in which case The Hindu has messed up badly.

A poem should have some qualities that appeal to the reader: if it lacks form, it must compensate strongly in other ways, it seems to me.

Now, you may like to read and write both forms of poetry, but you are a prolific writer and reader of both, and therefore not representative of the public. The question is how to make the audience larger…

I’m not sure why you would connect my concern with the small and incestuous world of poetry with my unwillingness to prefer formal poetry (including metric forms) over free verse or vice versa. I like to read and write both. The subject of a poem often calls for a certain form or freeness. And I wouldn’t judge how good or bad a poem is based only on that aspect. That’s what I was saying, probably a bit casually.

It is easy to say “if you like it, read it, if you don’t like it, don’t”. But that is not compatible with worrying about the small and incestuous audience for poetry, I believe. There is a reason Larkin was more popular than, say, his contemporary Ted Hughes…

I’m not terribly affected by this form versus free verse thing. If you like it, you like it. How does it matter what the form is? Form / technique is only a tool finally. I read the post attached to the comment you linked to, and the other comments. Lots of interesting stuff there. But I find the endless defining of what ‘poetry’ is a bit tiring. (I also have some thoughts on self-identifying as a poet but that’s a separate discussion.)

Coming back to the obscure debate — You see to be saying that free verse is obscure. But maybe you mean post-modern poetry? I don’t find Larkin or Yeats obscure at all for example. It would be nice to identify specific poets or schools in relation to the obscurity argument, which might help make it more specific.

Will look forward to that post.

The reason I’m thinking of expanding the thought is that the “breaking the rules” thing applies to science too: I gave an example in the comment linked above, but there are many others.

@Vivek: You’re welcome. Please don’t apologise — it was interesting. You were taught scansion in school –? I was taught it only in college as part of the lit degree course. I must say thought that Sophia College was not too bad at all and I, at least, thought they made it interesting.

@Rahul: Thanks for all your thoughts. It’s terrific to hear from a avowed non-poet, as Vivek says. I take your point about sounding dismissive. It’s important to figure out how to offer criticism, even negative or half-formed, and I have to work this one out. We need to talk about the obscurity thing one of these days. I’m really interested to know what you feel because you’ve mentioned it more than once.