Forget The Form

Poem Hunter does not require you to identify the form of your poem, so why should you bother to do so? If you don't try to identify the form, you can't possibly get it wrong! On a recent Member Poem of the Day, the poet said the poem was blank verse. It was not. It was free verse. Blank verse and free verse are not the same thing! If you don't know the difference, why should you try to label it one or the other? Even if you do know the difference, why bother? Your readers will know what the form is, or if they don't, they won't care one way or the other! If I write a villanelle but don't tell you that it's a villanelle, you will either like the poem or you won't, but You will not care that it is or is not a villanelle. There are certain poets on this website who always say that their poems are Rime Royale or Rhyme Royal. Not one of those poems that I have seen so far has been. Ted Kooser, Who was U. S. Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006, said: "I've never seen any advantage to calling attention to the form of the poem. I want MY … reader to be experiencing the poetry, not drawing back to think about the form and to wonder if Kooser's got all his rhymes in the right places." For that matter, why does Poem Hunter require us to list a TOPIC for the poem? Can't the reader tell what the topic is? Poem Hunter used to have a box for the reader to fill in that said "What do you think this poem is about? " but I think they have got rid of that box since they started FORCING us to supply a topic for our poems. I just looked and I don't see that box anymore. One poet (and you probably know who this is)almost always selects "green" as the topic for his poems, even though most of his poems have nothing to do with "green"! Is he just rebelling at the fact that we have to supply a topic? If I write what I think is a love poem, but you don't recognize it as a love poem, have I really written a love poem? If I write about the garbage collectors or their trucks but label it a love poem, is it now truly a love poem? I'm not sure what to put as the topic for this. "Diatribe" is not a recognized topic, and neither are "harangue" and "tirade".