ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

The only friction I am seeing Terry is a few (very few) comments from less than half a dozen of our poets - in relationship to the number of members we have on our books that barely rates as a ripple.

Again - why does it matter - a section for some free verse Australian themed poetry is in no way whatsoever detracting from the main aim of this site which is bush poetry - I don't know about the rest of you mob but I like a bit of Tomato sauce on my pies but occassionally a bit of sweet chilli sauce is nice for a change.or if you like another analogy - football, meat pies, kangaroos and holden cars

If this was a purely bush poetry site
you’d have to be certain to get it just right,
insisting that anything other than rhyme
would have to be seen as a serious crime,
which means that you wouldn’t be printing all those
submitting their comments in boring old prose!

David

Well folks I guess this just goes to show; that what seemed a good idea at the time was in fact a stupid one - again

It's pointless making changes unless you have have at least some sort of agreement from all interested parties.

Terry

The only friction I am seeing Terry is a few (very few) comments from less than half a dozen of our poets - in relationship to the number of members we have on our books that barely rates as a ripple.


Perhaps if our membership base was tidied up we might get a better idea.


Bob

"…that barely rates as a ripple".

I think we all like that line, Maureen. Very poetic.

G'day David and everyone,

I spotted your ruse by the first rhyme I encountered and read the paragraph as a rhyming poem. Then I looked down the post and saw the other presentations of the same words.

David, your skill with words made this demonstration a very pleasing read.. I would like to see some of the 'nay-sayers' turn some of their 'poems' into rhyme. I don't think they would take the time and possibly also lack the skill to do it. Oh how I wish one of them, one day, would prove me wrong!

I have suffered that withering look as they lift their noses and turn away, often accompanied with something like 'Oh, you write rhyming verse." I feel like they have shoved me into a corner and put a sign saying something like 'Dodo' around my neck.

I have stopped going to 'University sponsored recitals' because they aren't. They all read their poems. I have taken my turn and given a performance. I have memorised my poem, complete with appropriate emphasis and expression, gestures and emotion but have been ignored time and again, only to see the accolades go to verse that seems to have little meaning and also, to my ears, to break every rule of grammar in the book. So I stay away and save myself the frustration.

Thank you for the tutorial but, no thanks. I'll stick to writing the type of poem that the man in the street can recognise as poetry.

Zondrae’s comments raise a couple of issues that have been referred to before, but are worth revisiting. She picked the rhymes immediately in the 'prose' version of the poem, but it’d be interesting to know at what point others realised. Is there anyone who didn’t notice it was rhyming verse until they read the second version? I ask this because I’ve recently tried to provoke some interest by posting a lot of rhyming verse on a popular non-poetry site. A few contributors have shown appreciation, but most have just ignored it, and, as it was conversational and topical, I wonder if they even recognised it as poetry. Or perhaps they did, but didn’t consider it a legitimate form of communication.

Which leads to a general question: Are the prose and free verse versions of the poem unacceptable here as rhyming verse because they’re not set out in the traditional way?

Following this theme, Zondrae suggests that the free verse enthusiasts could learn from bush poetry, and it’s a valid point, but I’d argue the reverse is also true. Bush poetry has frustrating limitations, particularly when it comes to indicating pauses, and there are free verse techniques we could profitably borrow. Unfortunately, the technical layout restrictions that seem to operate on this site don’t allow me to do what I would have liked with the free verse version of the poem. Everything automatically aligns to the left, which means that flexible spacing doesn’t work...thus rendering this site (for those concerned about an invasion from the dark side) pretty limiting for free verse anyway. For example, with the part about tossing the words around it could have been set out something like this (using dashes as a poor substitute for a space):

Who toss their words around--------at random
--------like a winter wind
-------------------------------spreads leaves
------------------------------------------------------across the ground.

This gives an enhanced visual (and hence reading) guide on the page to the image being described, something we could do, but don’t, in rhyming verse. We simply use standard punctuation (full stop, comma, ellipsis etc) to indicate pauses. And we write in ‘blocks’ of verse that leave it pretty much up to the reader to figure out how it goes. Why couldn’t something like this, which is a common free verse device, be used with rhyming poetry? For example:

a bunch of arty-farty types who toss their words around
at random---------like a winter wind------spreads leaves-------------across the ground.

I reckon this would force the reader to slow down and insert brief breaks of varying lengths that help to convey the idea of the leaves being spread randomly by the wind. Free verse challenges you to think about line breaks and pauses, instead of just waiting for a comma and/or a rhyme at the end of a line. For example, look at the free verse version of these three lines:

And I would say they both have faults, but that should never be
the reason to just walk away, for then you’ll never see
what each can offer to us all, the chance to look and learn

Would you normally pause after “just” and “offer” to stress “walk away” and “to us all” respectively? Probably not, but the free verse version suggests that. It makes you think a little differently about how it might be read and what might be emphasised, thus lessening the dum-de-dum temptation. Surely it’d be a good thing to give as much assistance as possible to anyone reading our poems, which is why I’d contend that there are things we can learn from free verse that could be useful.

David

You make some very interesting points, David. (Yes, I did spot the rhyming verse in the prose, but C. J. Dennis had conditioned me to look for it...)

Dennis wrote a poem for children, "The Axeman".

It has a recurring line "Chip! Chop!" - two syllables. However, he expects the reader to work out for himself that there needs to be a pause the length of a syllable following each word, as every other line contains four syllables. Unfortunately, not all readers of the poem do work this out. I have heard that line read without the pauses, and it sounds absolutely terrible. With them, it sounds great. (The poem "Hist!" is similar in this regard.)

I have not read enough free verse to be aware of how its layout can help the reader, but anything that helps the reader is, at least from a theoretical viewpoint, a good thing.

Musical notation offers detailed instruction to the singer/instrumentalist, as I have noted before, but conventional English prose offers very little by comparison.