I can see it in you. It’s there, but…”“But what?” “You’re limiting yourself. Your poetry is so… constructed. The ‘kind’ has to rhyme with the ‘mind’, and the ‘high’ with the ‘nigh’. You see what I mean?”
“No, not really. Isn’t that what poetry is all about— the rhyme, the rhythm, the iambic meters, the quatrains and the couplets?”

“No, not anymore. Nowadays we're more into free verse, because the rhyming kind of restricts you. Sometimes you end up saying stuff you don’t mean to fit the rhyme. Instead now you may just express things the way you feel.”

“But that’s just beautiful thought, not poetry. I think the English language is kind enough to let me say exactly what I want and keep my rhyming too.”

Silence.
“What do you feel today?”
“Today?”
“Yes. What do you feel about it?”
“Oh, okay. I get you. Here goes.”
“Hey, I liked that!”
“Good. Just keep going. You’ll do just great.”

Since then I’ve been playing the game, improvising as I went along, and I have to admit I have enjoyed it.”
But oft when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood, those classic poems flash upon my inward eye…

I come from haunts of coot and hern
To make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern
To bicker down the valley.

Could free verse really replace the rhyming that rolls off your tongue as smoothly as 'The brook’ over the coots and hern? It had been like that for ages, right? They had constructed those lines with such care. Those quatrains, couplets and odes…

Odes, you remember? Those elaborate, structured lyrical poems that are written to glorify? The Ode To The West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley?

Oh Wild West Wind, though breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

And in Asia, in Japan, it had been the tanka and the haiku, those minuscule beauties. Tankas are older than haikus. They contain just 31 syllables.

Symbolism
Tankas were written for every occasion and they had to be musical and aesthetically appealing in both— the way they were written and in the way they were presented. The paper had to be right and the ink and a symbol of beauty had to accompany it, such as a flower or a branch.

The yamabuki blossom has
A wealth of petals gay:
But yet in spite of this, alas
I much regret to say,
No seed can it display.

The Haiku came much later, in the 19th century. This smallest of small poems had the maximum number of rules. It followed a 5, 7, 5 pattern and it had to contain a season word. While the Japanese haiku is written in a single line, the English haiku consists of three lines.

Sleep on horseback,
The far moon in a continuing dream,
Steam of roasting tea.

Besides the tanka and haiku, there was also the renga and the sijo.

In Persia, it was the ghazal. Some argue that the sonnet is just another version of the ghazal.

The ghazal consists of a limited number of stanzas and uses a recurring rhyme. Ghazals are as popular today as they were then and appear in various musical forms, even in the form of modern pop music. They essentially appear to be written to celebrate wine and women and the beauty of it lies in the recurrence of the rhyme.

Love knot
What will suffice for a true love knot? Even the rain?

But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain. They’ve found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these? No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.

The Sonnet too has a repetition of words. Ask Shakespeare— who else but the master himself?

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
“So really, how did we get here this far... or this back?”
“That’s easy, girl. Haven’t you heard of the revolutions?”
“Revolutions?”

Yes, those. The American, the French, the Russian… Each one had people revolting against the existing hierarchy. People were changing, everything about them was changing— their lifestyle, their clothes, their thoughts. 
They were breaking the fetters that bound them, one by one. They were seeking freedom in it’s truest form. And they needed a medium that would allow them to express themselves, their renewal— and what better expression than the language of the soul itself— poetry?

But first it had to be set free too from all the fetters and rules that bound it and made it inaccessible to the common man and stunted it’s own growth— the rhyming, the measuring, the meter, etc.”

“And that’s why free verse.”
“How do you define free verse?”

Free verse is a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but still are recognisable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or the other that readers will perceive to be part of a coherent whole.

Structure intact
Free verse, however, is not entirely devoid of a structural identity.  While it may be devoid of meter and rhyming, the other traditional elements of expression, such as diction and syntax may still be prominent.

Running through a field of clover,
Stop to pick a daffodil
I play he loves me, he loves me not,
The daffy lies, it says he does not love me!
Well, what use a daffy
When Jimmy gives me roses?

Flora Launa
Poetry has now become an accessible tool to even those who profess not to be poets. Words spoken from the depth of the heart is poetry.

Poetry today has become all encompassing. It celebrates the underdog as much as it celebrates the man of letters. Underground poetry, or poetry written by lesser known poets, whose works are thought provoking and bold and who deserve a wider audience, has become a cult.

Another form of poetry that has taken centrestage now is ‘Performance poetry’, ie, poetry composed specifically for a performance before an audience. This began in the 1930s. Prosody with it’s chunking, focus and pitch and Performance poetry with its emphasis on rhythm, hooking and simplicity are all in.

Performance poetry seems to be a direct derivative from pop culture, and academic training in the art of poetry writing is not a prerequisite.

And so if you see Poetry in a queer garb at the coffee house, with the patched up jeans and shaggy hair that zeros down somewhere at the back into a startling little ponytail and ear studs and with the shirt over the jacket, trying to make a 'statement' and struggling for an identity— don’t get up and walk away.

You may be one of those people who likes your steak cooked just right, but just relax, put up your feet and enjoy it, because behind all the external paraphernalia, poetry still remains what it is— the voice of the soul.