Poetry is, by definition, undefinable. There is no “one true way” to write poetry. One doesn’t judge a poem based off of the accuracy with which the author met a certain quota of “poetic” elements, but rather one judges a poem based off of how a seemingly infinite number of elements interact within the poem to produce meaning, rhythm, and sound. In order for poetry to truly be poetry, it cannot be held down by any rules: poetry must be free.
No style of poetry better embodies this theory of unrestrained poetry than Free Verse poetry. Free Verse is unmetered, unrhyming, unmeasured, and untameable. A Free Verse poem could take any form: it could read like Ulysses, or it could read like an actual poem. You truly never know what you’re going to get with Free Verse, which is typically why so many poets at least experiment with some form of Free Verse at some point in their career. It’s exciting. Different. Special.
There are sacrifices made in the leap to Free Verse, however. Poems typically lose elements which many directly associate with poetry: rhythm, meter, sound, rhyme. Free Verse can by choppy, with enjambed lines breaking the flow of thought, or read in perfect paragraph format. But it is rare that a Free Verse poem maintains any musical or rhythmic elements.
Carol Ann Duffy dabbles in Free Verse in quite a few poems within The Standing Female Nude. For the most part, the poems that are Free Verse are not overtly so, and contain occasional rhymes, perhaps an odd meter, and overall a general semblance of structure. This is not true for the poem “$.” This nonsensical poem seems to depict a bop–a boogy–a shin-dig–entirely through Free Verse. The musical subject clashes distinctly with the purely Free Verse poem: there no rhymes, no meter, no coherent thought, and lines are broken seemingly at random. There aren’t even any real words within the poem, aside from numbers one to four and the phrase “yeah yeah yeah;” the rest is a jumbled mess of onomatopoeia. Why Duffy would take the least rhythmic and sound-based form of poetry and attempt to describe a lively song through it is beyond me.
Yet somehow…it works. Despite the lack of any form of rhythm, zero synergy in sound, and an overall feeling of chaos associated with the poem, you can almost feel the soul of the song reaching to you from the poem, throbbing through the page. It’s nonsensical. It’s cluttered. It’s confusing. But that’s exactly the feeling Duffy aims for: a crowded party with blaring music perhaps, or a sea of people all discordantly dancing and swaying to a fast paced and excited beat. You can’t hear the poem, but you can feel the song within the poem. You can visualize the emotions of those singing and dancing along to the music through the different tunes being portrayed: somehow, there is a distinct difference between “da doo ron a doo ron oo wop a sha na?” and “urn, didy ay didy shala lala lala lala” (Duffy 41). By using a form of poetry that almost never has any pleasing sound or rhythm, Duffy has managed to present to the reader a musical display, without ever creating a euphonic sound herself.
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