The Foley Poetry contest approaches, with entries accepted between Jan. 1 and March 31. I know how the outpouring of poems will eventually seem like what Robert Frost describes in After Apple Pickingthe rumbling sound of load on load of apples coming in. (The picker admits he is overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.)

What do I want to say now to improve the harvest? Mostly I want to observe, in the face of relaxed habits, that a decent paragraph of prose is not necessarily a poem. Typography can spread out a text attractively on the page, but that doesnt necessarily make it a poem. Besides pleasing visually, the poem should please the ear. Its intelligent design has to include, above all, a discernible music, some evident or subtle way that the words, phrases and lines are knit together for the ear.

This concern for regularities of sound does not rule out flashes of imagination, eloquence, wit and insight, which are the life blood of poems. But it is a reminder of the ears love of pattern, and that poetic artistry lies in elements, small or large, that repeat. In the older English verse, poetic form meant metricsa controlled alternation of stressed and unstressed syllablesand, except for blank verse, rhyme. Even now, songs, hymns, blues couplets and nursery rhymes hew closely to these standards. But for many writers today the fixed forms, like the rhymed quatrain, which Emily Dickinson managed so brilliantly, have become a straitjacket.

There are many alternatives for patterning sound. Consider the psalms. No one who prays the psalms will claim that they rhyme, but in a larger sense they do, strictly. Each line is immediately matched by another of equal length, which says the same thing in other words, or develops the statement, as in this verse of Psalm 107: God changed rivers into desert, / springs of water into thirsty ground. Shifts of thought and alterations of mood are needed to prevent monotony, but the pattern governs strongly. Also a number of psalms have repeated segments, i.e., refrains (e.g., Psalms 42, 43, 46, 67, 80), which function as echoes. Echoing is a great resource for poetry and song, as it is for rhetoric.

In modern poetry skill lies above all in management of the line. The ear has to be good at tying together sounds within the line, whether by alliteration or assonance (similar vowel sound) or by keeping a key word at the end of the line, which is the most emphatic place. In unrhymed poetry, the slight pause to dwell at the end of a line is a key to maintaining rhythm.

Somber though it is, the poem Driving Home by Charles Simic, (The New Yorker, 8/13), is a classic of intelligent design. Here is the first of two stanzas:

Minister of our coming doom,

The social worker and I belonged to the same parish, but we were merely acquaintances. So I was surprised when she called to ask whether anyone at our farm might be willing to take in a mother who had given birth during the night. There were perhaps 50 committed adults living at Koinonia Partners In

As I laid my cellphone on a bookshelf near the door and stepped outside into the late winter afternoon, I remember thinking, What can happen in just 30 minutes? True, my wife’s due date for our first child was just a few weeks away. It’s also true this fact made me quiver on occasion li

In Matthews story of the birth of Jesus, we learn that we can now put away fear and replace it with joy, because the promised one of God has come to live among us. Like any good writer, Matthew does not merely assert this major theme of his; he shows us what it means in the lives of different charac

On the list of Christ's ancestors, Bathsheba, Ruth & Rahab stand out.

For many Christians it has perhaps become commonplace to view Advent as a season of inevitability, a ritual expectation of the birth of the Son of God, surely, but one that lacks suspense. We already know how the story will turn out, dont we? The Holy Family will make it to Bethlehem; they will find