16 December 2004.
Yet Another Poem About Poetry
It isn't difficult to build a line
or two in meter, such as these of mine;
it's much more tricky pinning rhymes to them
for which your readers will not you condemn.
Words, simply words, are what count
in the best poetry, though:
words that can slow up to domains
that heighten a reader's senses away
from the long-unhued
one-layered, overrun surface
that received reality is.
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This one was inspired by a silly but sometimes provocative discussion at New-Poetry about what poetry is. One participant claims it is metrical verse only. Another seems to hold likewise. The latter unsurprisingly denied that my first lines were iambic pentematers. He described them as bad syllabic meter. The other thought I proved how bad I am at writing in meter because of the inversion in my fourth line. Marcus Bales. He's written some fairly good specimens of light verse, too. (Note: I could have made my third and fourth lines, "it's much more tricky getting them to rhyme,/ at least a fair proportion of the time.") Is my poem a great poem? I doubt it although the second part isn't bad, especially for a rough draft. Draft number two follows:
Yet Another Poem About Poetry
It isn't very hard to build a line
or two in meter, such as these of mine;
it's much more tricky pinning rhymes to them
for which your readers will not you condemn.
But words, simply words,
are what count
in poetry at its best:
words that can slow up to domains
that heighten a reader's senses away
from the long-unhued
one-layered, overrun surface
that received reality is.
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