POETRY, AND POETRY

My apartment mate admits, not shamefacedly, that she finds poetry on the whole to be a load of bollocks, most especially modern "free" verse. Which is marked by an absence of any rhyme or metre, frequently pretentious and meaningful, and so damned high-fallutin' as to be beyond us mere mortals.
Both I and Lord Drummond (nickname of one of North Beach's rare intellectuals) agree in that estimation.

All three of us are, in our own ways, heartily sick and tired of poetry that sends a message, as well as mentions of flowers, butterflies, and precious little orphans.

And similar "meaningful" twaddle. Especially if the rhymes are laboured or utterly non-existent, and the rhythm is ridiculous. As a rather old-fashioned man, I would also ask for alliteration, and a mirroring of images and ideas.

Poetry has to catch you by the mind-hairs.


One of the pieces I cannot get out of my head, along with a lamentably large amount of Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats (not nearly enough Alexander Pope, Joannes Six van Chandelier, Brederode, and Lear) is something from Robert Browning.

Or who in Moscow toward the Czar,
With the demurest of footfalls,
O'er the Kremlin's pavement white,
with serpentine and syenite,
Steps with five other generals,
That simultaneously take snuff,
For each to have pretext enough,
And kerchief-wise unfold his sash,
Which, softness self, is yet the stuff,
To hold fast where a steel chain snaps,
And leave the grand white neck no gash...

Translation: they're gonna whack the despot by strangling him, and leaving no obvious signs of violence. It paints a picture of the world as it should be.


Another stellar bit of verse:

A talentless poet from Putten,
Could never find suitable rhymes;
Metre proved problematic,
Caesuras? Purely hypothetic
Al; And the last line seldom made sense.

Can't remember the author. Sorry.


In that vein, and of that ilk, a reader here recently gifted me a poem:

The boy stood on the burning deck
Picking his nose like mad;
He rolled it into little balls
And flicked them at his dad.


Which is truly a classic of its genre.
It's Shakespeare, man, Shakespeare.
Far better than Alice Walker's crap.


I am glad I never had to suffer through American High Schools.


Please note: Overmuch rhinotillexis often causes epistaxis.




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