They teach us that poems come in all forms and need not rhyme. But I feel that there are rules.
It’s a little like modern art — you can throw a pile of garbage on the floor, splash blood on it and call it art, but is it? I think there is some minimum level of aesthetic that must be met. Art not intended to evoke pleasure should come with a warning label. There’s a phenomena known as the ‘uncanny valley‘, where a human replica (say, a robot) actually evokes revulsion the closer it looks to human while being recognizably not. I think some modern art lies in that uncanny valley — looks like art but it’s not.
Back to poems — even poems that don’t rhyme have recognizable patterns: line length, verse length, rhythm. It’s hard to argue that a news article or reference passage is poetry. I’m working now on a poem that, by design, doesn’t rhyme — but currently also has varying line length, and even varying line count per verse. I’m struggling with how much I need to bully it into shape to be (recognizable as) poetry (nudging it out of the uncanny valley) while trying not to lose some of the existing wording that I like. I don’t want to waste too much time on it, but I also don’t want to abandon it prematurely.
🙁
ADDEMDUM: I finished the problem poem ‘Starlight‘. It came out okay — phew!.