Join the Neopoet online poetry workshop and community to improve as a writer, meet fellow poets, and showcase your work. Sign up, submit your poetry, and get started.

POETRY AND TENNIS

Hi Ya'll
I was reading one of Norton's Anthologies on poetry and ran across a quote by Robert Frost..:
"Writing free verse poetry is like playing tennis without a net". And this is from a poet who used free verse lol. Thought you would all get a laugh out of this...................stan

Comments

Without even lines or a court? Where you just try to hit the ball back to each other, co-operatively, not competitively?

It is elegant, beautiful and fun and results in far less tantrums and no line calls.

cheers,
Jess
A new workshop on the most important element of poetry-
'Rhythm and Meter in Poetry'
https://www.neopoet.com/workshop/rhythm-and-meter-poetry

Played a good bit of tennis in younger years before leg was injured. Now I didn't post this to ridicule free verse and I don't think Frost meant to either. In tennis just leaving out the net would still leave a lot of structure in place. There would still be the marked boundaries, scoring system, and other rules. So free verse only frees people from a few rules not all of them. You might notice even this dyed in the wool rhymer jots down a free verse every once in a while lol. PS the line calls would still be in effect sans net lol...........stan

author comment

nor did I think you were ridiculing free verse, though I think Frost was.

You can eliminate more and more rules, the net, the lines, the court itself, play it swimming, whatever. At some point, of course, it is no longer tennis, but on the way many fun and lovely games are played. Especially by eliminating competition, winners and losers, which are inessential in this analogy.

cheers,
Jess
A new workshop on the most important element of poetry-
'Rhythm and Meter in Poetry'
https://www.neopoet.com/workshop/rhythm-and-meter-poetry

Never did think your remark argumentative. And as Frost wrote a bit of free verse himself, I tend to think he was just using it to show that there were still rules although fewer ones. You know, I even ran across a sonnet he wrote(although he didn't label it as such). I guess the thing I admire most about that old Yankee was the way his stuff reads almost as a natural conversation, even the rhyming ones. Rhyming is easy....it's eliminating the inherently unnatural sound in rhyming which is tough................stan Hmmmmm............the tough part of free verse is in including enough structure to keep it from being simple prose

author comment

Rhyming is easy....it's eliminating the inherently unnatural sound in rhyming which is tough

the tough part of free verse is in including enough structure [or prosodic qualities] to keep it from being simple prose

Remember prosody is a confusing word, it actually refers to poetic qualities, not prosaic qualities.

cheers,
Jess
A new workshop on the most important element of poetry-
'Rhythm and Meter in Poetry'
https://www.neopoet.com/workshop/rhythm-and-meter-poetry

One of these days I'm going to get skype. If we can get over the language differences(LOL) we might have some fun conversations..........guess I'll practice now..G'day mate

author comment
(c) Neopoet.com. No copyright is claimed by Neopoet to original member content.