Poetry when unstructured?
Like most kids, I went through the All Poetry Must Rhyme phase.
Then a little later in school, rhyme was less essential (especially in English, a less rhyme-compatible language than many other Romance ones) -- it was all about Meter and Structured Forms.
But I know there's more than that. Some people focus on crystalline imagery and perfect words. Often it seems to be "all about the line breaks."
But if I typically write precisely, with a bit of internal flair, what differentiates
- me writing up about dream for a casual blog post,
from
- me writing about a dream to be one poem in a collection in a chapbook (or submitted to a magazine or whatnot)?
(Similar to What makes a poem a poem? , which seems about the continuum between prose and poetry - looking mostly at formal, pre-published works. My question aims more at the casual side: how casual can it be and still be a poem?
Related -- I don't think "amount of effort" is what counts -- oral tradition built on rhyming units or phrases with distinct rhythmic value (rose-fingered dawn), and rappers/lyricists are similarly immersed in rhyme and meter, so work that would be hard for me could be easier for them; and others struggle with academic writing, but in undergrad, I could do that 20 minutes before the paper was due.
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