A rebuttal

[igenlode]

I think
a few words
however deep
however heartfelt
do not transmute
by some newline alchemy
into poetry
merely by layout.

(That may be superficially 'deeper' than the sort of tumty-tum doggerel I can also turn out with slightly more difficulty, but it is so trivially easy that I don't believe it counts.)

Splitting your sentence in lines down the page
And calling it poetry fills me with rage;
I admit the existence of blank verse and prose,
But free verse is more tricky than either of those.

Comments

[pedanther]

Hear, hear!

[igenlode]

It's more complicated than that, because you *can* write free verse that is widely recognised as poetry (the plums in the ice-box being a well-known example).

But the sort of thing that is basically just motivational poster content split over multiple lines frustrates me because it is *so* trivial to pastiche it; the example above took me maybe a minute -- and I did put some thought into the imitation, rather than just rearranging a random sentence.
The quatrain below, which despite my best efforts is still a trifle strained ('rage' is rather too obviously used for the sake of the rhyme, as it wasn't really what I was trying to say) was about ten times harder to construct, and that isn't particularly good poetry either.

It's an argument that has been going on since at least the nineteen-thirties ("Look here, chum, I could do the same by taking any random chunk of a book and spreading it out across the lines"), but I just find it very difficult to accept someone's trite sentence as Art by virtue of a bit of rearrangement.

The example I was given was entitled Please:

Do you think of me
as often
as I think
of you?

and to me that isn't meaningfully a poem; it's a PS on the back of an envelope. There isn't enough *to* it to make it a poem rather than a gnomic utterance... beyond the linebreaks, that is.

[erimia]

Yes, modern American poetry almost entirely consists of bland texts that proudly call themselves "free verse" yet are bad even as prose.

[igenlode]

I think you're right -- it's the platitudes that constitute the content as much as it is the style that irks me.