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Hey @emily-waldorf , welcome to the discussion! I think you raise an interesting topic for discussion. What is the heart of poetry? I think it’s a good question to be asking ourselves and I’ll pass the question along to anyone else in this thread as well.

I don’t know as though I would say that genuineness is the heart of poetry; but I have heard complaints that there seems to be an apparent lack of authenticity of voice in today’s Christian poetry (I wrote a fairly lengthy paper on this for one of my master’s degree courses), if not other areas of Christian literature in general (which it seems the overcoming of which is one of Story Embers’ stated missions), so that’s why I brought the topic up for discussion. To be clear, the majority of contemporary Christian poetry may be authentic, but the complaints are that it doesn’t sound authentic, and one of poetry’s traditional strengths is its sound. So what makes for a more authentic sound? I tend to think an everyday cadence, a certain vulnerability, and a healthy dose of specificity could go a long way, but I didn’t start this thread just to hear myself type. So, to anyone who reads this, what do you think makes for an authentic sounding poem?

Now in defense of free verse, I’ll appeal to those more experienced and respected than myself in laying out its standing as poetry as well as its roots in the Bible. From Edward Hirsch’s “A Poet’s Glossary” in the section on free verse:

“[Free verse is a] poetry of organic rhythms, of deliberate irregularity, improvisatory delight. Free verse is a form of nonmetrical writing that takes pleasure in a various and emergent verbal music…The term free verse is a literal translation of vers libre, which was employed by French symbolist poets seeking freedom from the strictures of the alex­andrine. It has antecedents in medieval alliterative verse, in highly rhythmic and rhymed prose, in Milton’s liberated blank-verse lines and verse para­graphs. But the greatest antecedent is the King James versions of the Psalms and the Song of Songs, based in part on the original Hebrew cadences.”

In other words, free verse finds a relative in the poetry (unless of course you would argue that it isn’t actually poetry based on the fact that it doesn’t follow English metrical or rhyming norms) of the Psalms and Song of Songs. So I think a legitimate question would be “should the Psalms and Song of Songs have been written as prose when they were translated?” If not, then what makes them poetry when translated into English and what value is added in their being structured as poetry in English translations?