A ODE TO MY DEAR FRIEND NATURE

<p>Have you ever had the experience of picking up a poetry journal in a magazine<br/>or book store reading a few lines of very un-poetic or incomprehensible<br/>poetry and then saying to yourself That's not poetry!You may have even<br/>wondered to yourself What has happened to poetry?If so this anthology is<br/>for you. I had that experience dozens of times during the 70's 80's and 90's<br/>and the journals I looked into were some of the country's most prestigious.<br/>The poetry I read usually had no meter rhyme or alliteration the elements<br/>which in my mind make a poem a poem. Invariably I would walk away<br/>feeling incredulous that such artless poetry would be printed by anybody<br/>much less the country's premier journals.In the 1970's when I was in my 20's<br/>I was smart enough to figure out that I was witnessing a trend. But what I<br/>didn't know was that the trend had started almost a century before in the mid1880's when poets &ndash; possibly following the example of Walt Whitman and to<br/>lesser extent Henry David Thoreau &ndash; abandoned meter in droves. Critics at<br/>the time thought it was a fad but it wasn't. For the first time in the history of<br/>English non-metered poetry became the norm.In the early years of this trend<br/>the free verse being written retained the rhythmic echoes of metered<br/>poetry</p><p></p>