It can be free or white, broken or reported, or even saturnine.
Posted by Michel Morvan on
It can be free or white , broken or reported , or even saturnine , but nothing and no one can define it!
It is about the verse! The one that poems are made of. We know it well, we even recognize it, and we are comfortable with the alexandrine or the octosyllable, but despite everything there is no intrinsic property that allows us to distinguish, infallibly and for all cultures, the verse from the "non-verse"!
Free verse , for example, has no regular structure; blank verse is a verse whose meter is regular, but not the rhyme. Saturnian verse is the oldest form of verse in Latin poetry. Others are more complex: reported verses are verses whose elements, in addition to their ordinary "horizontal" relationships, maintain other, "vertical" ones, with their correspondents in the preceding or following verse. Finally, broken verses are verses that hide a text . To discover the hidden meaning of these verses, you must divide the poem into two columns, and read first the left column and then the right column. Here, for example, is a poem from the Resistance, with a double reading:
Let us love and admire Chancellor Hitler!
Eternal England is unworthy of living.
Let us curse and crush the people overseas
The Nazi on earth will be the only one to survive.
So let us be the support of the German Führer
Boy sailors will finish the odyssey
To them alone belongs a just punishment.
The winner's palm awaits the swastika.
In her collection Terre nouvelle , Anne Reyjal, a contemporary lyric poet, makes wonderful use of it ! From the ancient city to the contemporary city, from tropical humidity to the aridity of the moor, from her heart to that of the other, her sensitive poetry explores places and beings with a delicate sensuality . Sea salt joins that of tears and bitterness, sweetness, for a captivating swirl of desire and nostalgia . The poet's fingers caress us as her pen has slid over the sheet, and here we are moved by this privilege : to travel with her this new Earth.
