It's an act without a net, and when it fails it's ugly, even crude, unforgivably so. The effect is often too raw, like a one-sided lover's tirade that could end in homicide. In writing the poem, the poet, pressed by a need to incite no less than riot in his listeners, has not only discarded most traditional forms of poetry but anything that even faintly smacks of aesthetic pretense. Nothing can be allowed to stand between the poet's message and the audience's comprehension. Any device that complicates the graphic bluntness of the poem's narrative plot is judged as uselessly ornamental, and trashed in favor of the bluntest words, and dramatic synopsis as terse as a T.V.guide listing.
Poems are shorthand for emotional truth.
Whatever wounds is usable. There's no time when life is intensely felt to screw around with artificial rhyme schemes whose origins are in the oar-pulling rhythms of English long boats. People drive cars today. The air stinks withfumes. Today's rhythm is ninety miles an hour, over the speed limit, with one hand on the wheel and an impulse to cross the centerstripe into someone's headlights.