I'll just pick something randomly of my own to offer up: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1291368/

One of the prototype "fursona reference poem" things I've attempted from time to time.

I'm down. I'm concerned that the diversity of forms may cause reaction to the set-up, as opposed to the content. Great literature of all cultures is in the back of my mind as I write, but I'm a post-post-modernist (near-apocalyptic!) so I take my cues from Virgil & the Bard, and then from Hart Crane, William Logan, Maya Angelou, Henry Rollins, and Reginald Shepherd. Meaning: I tend to flirt with form, seeing unadorned free verse as dangerous, and structure-bound verse as artificial.

That said, I'll up this one, since it fits what you did with yours. You wrote about someone's character. I did the same thing in my poem Savioress.

So my defensiveness is up front: if someone doesn't like allusions that assume the audience is well-read (or wants to be inspired to be), and if someone dislikes free verse, they might not dig my stuff.

p.s. modern structure-bound verse, that is. Virgil's poetry had all the rules of Classical Latin verse to deal with, and the Bard of course wrote with structure. But such thing are not as natural in our modern parlance, and thus many poets attempting sonnets or such find themselves beholden to rhyme and meter and produce something stiff.

Not always, I just wanted to make sure folks know that I know that Virgil & the Bard were structure cats.

Well, I suppose it's good to have this out in the open, at least. Let me see how exact and terse I can be with a definition:

Poetry; An artform in which steady rythms (of stress and/or syllable length and of word sound-- meter and rhyme, aka prosody) structure speech in order to make it more arresting to (penetrating of) consciousness, and more memorizable. Also known as auditory driving (of trance).

Prosody, or structure, in speech is something that's spontaneous enough that children do it in play, and I think calling it artificial is far off the mark-- it's no more artificial than drumming a drum at 150 bpm-- which likewise all humans react to in a very characteristic way, despite the fact that none of us are born with drums nor an instruction manual that says "your brain will trip out to rythmic sounds at 150 bpm."

I don't have any issues with very referrential poems, so long as I don't think the poet is confused about who his audience is. Hell, I like Joyce, and that without always getting him. OTOH obviously I think free verse has a real struggle to be meaningful, as poetry goes.

But you know-- you critique per your standards, I'll use mine.

Whoops, maybe "artificial" is the wrong word.

Let me clarify:

Semitic verse of ancient times didn't have rhyme, or often meter. It used repetition and parallelism to create structure. Latin verse didn't have rhyme, it had meter - and despite the strict nature of meter, syllables were divided as short & long, which meant lines could have an extra syllable from our modern perspective. If Virgil didn't need it, why do I? If Martial didn't need it, why do I? If Solomon didn't need it, why do I?

However, many great English poets were devoted to rhyme - and some would have mourned the rise of blank verse. It's got meter, but no rhyme! Others, like the Bard, embraced it for some work. Others wrote just in that mode.

In modern times, many rhyming poems I read seem so dedicated to either rhyme or meter that they sacrifice a natural flow, a judicious use of language, a depth in meaning all to pursue the rhyme - resulting in horrors such as "love/above," "heart/start," etc.

Meanwhile, there are awful free verse exercises as well. Without structure, sometimes free verse allows one to say too much, whereas a modern poet trying to write in strict rhyme or meter - no longer the dominant musical tongue of our verse or narration - will say too little, or say something for sake of structure, not meaning.

Free verse through the work of Eliot, Crane, Frost, etc. has established itself as the dominant voice of American poetry for some time, but this doesn't mean it's the only type. Pale Fire by Nabokov was a novel featuring a hilarious commentary on a poignant set of four cantos written in rhyming couplets, in iambic pentameter.

My definition of poetry lines with #2 at Merriam Webster's:

"Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm."

There're so many things that can be a disaster for writing poetry, that clumsy and short-sighted adherence to meter or a rhyme scheme are lost in the crowd.

Nor do they furnish an argument against meter or rhyme, which are spontaneously recurring properties of speech. Yes, vernacular & classical Latin poetry lacked rhyme. Yes, there's sprung rhythm poetry that's not conventional meter (though it's still accentual meter).

BTW, how ancient Hebrew was spoken is poorly understood. Modern Hebrew is an invented langauge like Esperanto.

Obviously, different languages bring different tools to the task of composing speech that is structured. But poetry is, inherently, rythmically structured speech.

Not that dictionary definitions are ever the final word, but I consistenly cringe at Websters, and since we're comparing, my OED unabridged, aside from usages marked as archaic:
3. The art or work of the poet;
a. With special reference to its form: Composition in verse or metrical language, or in some equivalent patterned arrangement of language; usually also with choice of elevated words and figurative uses, and option of a syntactical order, differing more or less from those of ordinary speech or prose writing. In this sense, poetry in its lowest form has been identified with versification or verse.

b. The product of this art as a form of literature; the writings of a poet or poets; poems collectively or generally; metrical work or composition. Verse.

c. With special reference to its function: The expression or embodiment of beatiful or elevated thought, imagination, or feeling, in language adapted to stir the imagination and emotions, both immediately and also through the harmonic suggestions latent in or implied by the words and connection sof words actually used [etc ad nauseam].

Also, I've read a lot of Frost-- I don't remember him ever writing in free verse. I've read that he described free verse as "playing tennis without a net," and if you read his "Ten Mills," you come across a little gem:

V. Pertinax
Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.

Three lines of uniformly rhymed iambic dimeter (named after a Roman Emperor with a background as a grammar teacher, who was slain after bravely trying to reason with his underpaid palace guard), is I think as complete a comment on structure as one could hope to make.

Anyway, back to reading poetry.

Whoops on the Frost as free verse, more than his use of rhyme wasn't always in standard structure. I think of "The Mending Wall," which has meter but occasionally spreads it across two lines.

There's also a philosophical edge to where poetry is going. I meant look at the rhyming Latin of High Church songs and find kinship to its rhymes, but I think it's inferior to the non-rhyming meter of Catullus and Virgil.

Walt Whitman's rejection of prevailing structures, much like French poets of the era, was a reaction also to the dominant philosophy and theology.

One could argue (indeed, many have) the strict meter and strict rhyme often reflect cultural inclinations. As the 20th century progressed and many poets either questioned religious narratives of a purpose to the universe, or turned toward dark incarnations of their faith (Eliot's Christianity, Crane's mysticism built on Greco-Roman and Christian allusions), they abandoned much of the structure of previous eras.

Ayn Rand and atheist Objectivists would argue for strict structure, I would presume, much as they deride non-realistic visual art. But this is almost an imposition of values as much as an aesthetic.

Your Oxford definition seems harmonious with Webster's. But "beauty" is almost another imposition of values. Henry Rollins' poetry is far too unstructured for me to imitate, and it often dwells on the ugly side of human nature, which I applaud. Catullus used his mastery of the Roman tongue to write both odes to sweet Lesbia, and to threaten to do horribly sexual things to his rivals and critics.

An extreme unadorned free-versifier like the high-selling Billy Collins might argue that his line breaks, which may seem arbitrary, are simply his way to differentiate his poems from naked prose. Many free verse writers since the 70's seem to be trying to unify poetic thought with other modes. That may not be everyone's goal, but poetry is open-ended enough to accommodate it.

Dictionaries, as you noted, are never the final word because they are inductive creations. They reflect how the words are used. Thus, what society considers poetry is poetry, in a linguistic sense.

The impulse at the base of poetry isn't philosophical or a constructed nuance of culture. Nor does its variance from culture to culture prove otherwise. For closely related reasons, all human use of language is fundamentally the same, despite variance in details in place and time. Those variances are in well-understood bounds and rely on very specific faculties that every human being is born with.

Ever read Whitman, by the way? Interesting writing, but freaking awful poetry. I'd be embarassed to read it aloud. I hadn't read that his work was a reaction to anything political, but I guess I'm not surprised. Some of the other early modernist poets really did explicitly drag politics into questions of artform. And it all makes exactly as much sense as saying: "I must be free of all restrcitions! So I will compose atonal music that is free of rythm!" Throwing away the essential tools of poetry to prove a political point is fail.

The legitimate reason in that period to object to traditional english verse was that it had taken unnecessary features like variant syntax and pronunciation, and, as my OED puts it, "elevated" langauge, to absurd extremes. Frost also gently mocked that, I believe he referred to it as "churchy langauge." Dealing with the frailties of inbred English verse did not require throwing away meter and rhyme.

>>Ayn Rand and atheist Objectivists would argue for strict structure, I would presume, much as they deride non-realistic visual art. But this is almost an imposition of values as much as an aesthetic.

Little though I care to cozy up to Rand, this'd be one point on which she's right. There is something which imposes an extensive set of specific aesthetic values on every human being born, and it would be meaningless to try and escape them. They don't derive from culture or religion, and are the same everywhere-- they derive from human nature. E.g., you have an eyeball, and moreover, a visual cortex that is pre-organized to process the signals from your eyeball in specific ways.

>>his line breaks, which may seem arbitrary, are simply his way to differentiate his poems from naked prose.

In other words, an effort to be poetry in name/appearance/affectation only. Why is that worthwhile? There's nothing bad about prose. If you're making prose harder to read by splitting it out into meaningless lines so it can be classified in a different genre, what's the point in that besides selling books in a different section of the store?

>>Thus, what society considers poetry is poetry, in a linguistic sense.

In Reality, there's a thing: rythmically patterened speech (RPS). It has characteristic effects on people, and spontaneously recurrs in cultures arbitrarily distant from one-another, because of inborn traits we have including the use of langauge, the possibility of altered and ecstatic states of consciousness, and the tendency for rythmic patterns to drive us into them.

In English, RPS is called poetry. Society may later start calling hubcaps poetry. But that doesn't mean hubcaps are RPS, and it doesn't mean that any reasonable person would start taking a big interest in RPS and hubcaps.

p.s. browse my gallery for "the only blaze in the dark," "Synoikismos," "One Lament" and "the pack" to see lines that may fit your desire for discrete thoughts, and a use of rhyme (not always strict) or structure. I don't want to link to each because one this page, I assume we want just one per poet.

You can critique on this if you so will :) I am confident in it, but I'd really like to know your opinion.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1933943/

Arg, I'm outta time tonight, but I look forward to reading it this weekend.

Sorry for the late entrance, but I'm TOTALLY down with this. =P

Once a month sounds like a pretty good time-frame; though, I must say that I usually only write a poem when I'm inspired by something. (usually a breathtaking piece of artwork RIGHT HERE on FA, but I can get some pretty random inspiration from other things too) ^^

Well, I guess I'll post my newest piece here for the month of February! =D

"Memories of a Fragrant Heart": http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2017068

It's my first shot at a love poem...sorta. =3

I hope you all enjoy it. ^^

Also, I SHOULD indeed be watching you Furthling. Such a silly wolfmur I am! xD

Hey! I will get to this soon, but am embroiled in a rather long discussion ATM.

Meanwhile, maybe I should just open March early. Thoughts? If I do, it'll still won't be before thursday.