Poems should be composed of words. Visual poetry tells that rule to suck it. Poems should be restricted to one or at most two languages. Boom - high modernism, where's my Sanskrit dictionary? Done with that. Poems should have rhyme, meter or at least funny spacing. Prose poems give that the kibosh. Poems should have some form of order or organization. Aleatory like poetry that no.
Really, it's not about the rules. It's about decisions. The rules, any rules, only exist to give you a framework to operate within. Art is a game, and there's only one game without rules: it's called the human condition. (Although it sometimes goes by "Australian-style rugby.")
Rules guide the decision-making process. The more familiar you are with them, the less you have to think of them, and the more internalized and natural it will be to follow or break them.
But if pressed to the wall to pick a rule to follow, it would most likely be, "Sound like you're living and writing in your own century." Here's what I mean.
The Voice of My Heart
Judith Bronte
Dedicated to the LORD's servant, Dumitru Duduman
"Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth
the Spirit of His Son into your hearts,
crying, Abba, Father." ~ Galations 4:6 ~
The blanket of night I used to dread,
But now I talk with my God instead.
He speaks with me as a dear sweet friend,
And with my heart, our voices blend.
The voice of my heart is not just mine,
It's the Holy Spirit and I combined.
A voice so gentle, so quiet, so still,
My poor heart He does throb and thrill.
I know that my Lord in me abides,
As sure as the coming in of tides.
My spirit with His, does sign and show,
Our great love for each other I know.
God and I ... truly, what a wonder,
No power but His can saw asunder.
My heart and His forever and ever,
He is faithful and leaves me never.
"And with my heart, our voices blend." "My poor heart He does throb and thrill." That's a terrible phrase even without the archaic grammar. And then you've got "abides," "asunder," "leaves me never." (Incidentally, must you use the word "heart" 4 times in 8 stanzas?)
If you're Charles Wesley I'll cut you some slack since that was the fashion of the day. Although it was a stupid fashion, since it was a revisionist romanticized past they were harking back to, and it was already old and tired in the late 1700s. But it's just inexcusable around the second millennium.
Sucky poetry has entertainment value to me, but it's always most entertaining when you can do a post-mortem on it, murder to dissect. Since it's such a lifeless, flaccid thing anyway it's not going to hurt anything. When there's something you can get out of terrible poetry it's effective as well as can't-look-away horrendous a lá Cake Wrecks, Failblog or There I Fixed It. (In the unlikely event you haven't been introduced to one or more of these websites, you're welcome. Productivity ending...... now.)
I guess even the above rule can be broken, but you nearly always want to do it purposefully - for mock-comic, tongue-in-cheek effect like Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock"; for nostalgic, highfalutin' rhetoric like Robert Browning could sometimes lapse into; even just for a change of pace. Can't have too many thees and thous in my free verse beat jazz improvisations.
But "in me abides" instead of "abides in me"? "Leaves me never" in place of "never leaves me?" And then to throw in a sentence fragment in the next-to-last stanza... Too much, man. Unless you're trying to compose a heroic epic homage to the movie "Kate and Leopold," do try to keep the textspeak and the hymnody rip-offs separate.
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