Which poetry form is better: free verse or metered verse?
Maja: Depends for whom: it is all good, if it is well done. As a poet, I like writing in free verse, but it has to be “metered” in a way – without rhymes, but with some sort of rhythms, repetitions of refrains, or assonances that make it “poetic” and transcend what’s written beyond being disguised prose, simply divided into short lines. I really do not like the genre of “prose poetry” at all; neither do I write long rhymed poems. My non-Polish favorites are Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, and e.e.cummings, so this taste informs what I like writing. But rhymes are good for humor. I love limericks of all sorts! Sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, are just too formal to my taste. I started writing haiku and haibun, having so many friends involved in those art-forms. Alas, it is not a natural outlet for me.
