Reblogged from Tallis Steelyard… the story begins (and will continue here tomorrow…):

Andeal Willnoton Quillabin is an artist; a painter admittedly but still an artist. Purely between ourselves, he’s rather a good one. If you look at one of his paintings, you’ll almost certainly recognise what it is he’s trying to depict. The issue is he seems beset with problems and a few of us who regard him as a friend felt we ought to help out.

Some of the problems are a little esoteric. When you see his paintings he doesn’t just paint in one style. Apparently with painters this is important. Frankly as a poet I find it ridiculous. Imagine if I was to be restricted to the sonnet form. Folk would doubtless say, “Why I go to young Steelyard for all my sonnets.” But to be trapped into the fourteen line form, never to extemporise free verse! Surely it must be a nightmare for a painter, having to remain enmeshed forever within the cloying conventions of one style!

That being said I must confess that the poetry world is not without pedants. I remember well the outrage when I produced a collection of sonnets which had anything from eleven to eighteen lines! One would have thought I advocated an anthropophagic diet, or practicing polyandry, (whether serial or simultaneous), rather than merely showing that an artist has a duty to toy with arbitrary forms.

Continue reading at Tallis Steelyard.