POETRY...

                                                         Poetry



                              To you my friend whom may write poetry
                              and so often rhyme  avalanches with  knee ,
                              maybe you should look, on a dictionary, let’ s say,
                              called “Pai dos Burros”  on a country far away,
                              to really understand what poetry means,
                              and then, by thinking or reading, to glean
                              words that will, on the right way convene.

                              Po.et.try: To write on emotional form,
                              experience in language must also be norm,
                              words to be arranged creatively to compound
                              beauty in meaning, of rhythm and sound.

                              Maybe if you try somehow harder next time,
                              you’ll be a poet and your lines would rhyme.
                              Oh! Let me tell a wee secret to you:
                              metric is also very important too.

    I wrote this poem years ago and sent to a radio talk show host to make fun of him, whom used to air "poems" with no rhyme.
   Days latter, while driving to work, I heard him reading my poem, on air, and thanking for the "contribution"...
     A few months later I sent it again, this time to enter a contest on a “Poetry Society” in America, which used to publish every kind of nonsense... It was my way to say that, if there’s no rhyme is not a poem... Not to say that “prose” has no literary value but, it’s “prose”, not “poem” and, just between us, a lot easier to write... Of course they deleted my entry.

   Days ago, reading a British Newspaper, I came across with this article from 2008.

   The Queen's English Society demands rhyme and metre in poems...

   The Observer on Sunday 13 April 2008 wrote:

   Sunday 13 April 2008.
   When Oscar Wilde argued that a 'poet can survive everything but a misprint' he had not foreseen the formation of the Queen's English Society.
   Members of the group, set up to defend the 'beauty and precision' of the English language, have turned their attention to contemporary poetry and poets, arguing that too often strings of words are being labelled as poems despite the fact they have no rhyme or metre.
   The campaigners say that there should be a new definition of poetry, outlining the characteristics needed before a piece of work can be called a poem.
   'A lot of people high up in poetry circles look down on rhyme and metre and think it is old-fashioned,' said Bernard Lamb, president of the QES and an academic at Imperial College London. 'But what is the definition of poetry? I would say, if it doesn't have rhyme or metre, then it is not poetry, it is just prose. You can have prose that is full of imagery, but it is still prose.'
   The campaign is being spearheaded by Michael George Gibson, who said it was 'disgraceful' that the Poetry Society had failed to respond properly to his demands for a definition. 'For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure and, second, alliteration and rhyme,' said Gibson. 'Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems.' True poems, he said, gave the reader or listener a 'special pleasure'.
Carefully structured verse is relatively inflexible to change. (For example, if an editor/director wishes to alter a passage of prose, it may be easily done; if the passage is written in verse, the task may be more difficult).

   It was like they’ve had read my lines and wrote about them...
   Well, at least I’m not alone on my “crusade”! And what “partners” I have, setting the guides for poetry...







Copyright 9/2018 Eugenio Colin