Garcia Villa and What Poetry

Enough, then, of this nonsense, although I could write a lot more; but you get my drift: these writers over the last fifty years have a created consensus that have driven out real poetry, and allowed anyone and his dog the opportunity to stand in the street and howl (yep, allusion intended) and bark and pretend this pile of poo is poetry. And that's where Villa's brilliant book comes in; indeed, addresses at the end of the book, exactly this tragedy. Quoting Jay Parini, we learn, "Most poetry written after the mid-twentieth century is 'free verse', as anyone will know". But as Villa brilliantly observes, "when you begin a poem with a meaning in mind, that meaning - instead of building the poem up - undermines it, pulls it down and it has a birth defect." What a superb image of all free verse, which by its nature has to begin with meaning, since it cannot possibly, by definition, begin with form as it has none, that it has a birth defect. In most instances the birth defect is fatal, although a great poet can produce a free verse poem that lives - TS Eliot did it, but it is not the norm or even normal.