Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Free Verse

What, you want me to use iambs and rhymes and shit? This is poetry, man, it's not supposed to be work. Here's a description of a bird I once saw getting eaten by a smaller bird instead. Also, I don't even like using line breaks so now it's a prose poem.

RATING: Whatever-I-Feel-Like-All-The-Time%

5 comments:

I.J. said...

Scorn not the sonnet; critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honors; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief;
The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faeryland
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains--alas, too few!

I.J. said...

Back when all that fuss over the New Formalism was going on, Denise Levertov denounced Fred Turner's stuff as "un-American," to which he responded that country and blues lyrics, advertising jingles, etc. were all in meter, and it was free verse that was confined to a small, European influenced cognoscenti. And then Genesis got him a job as a NASA advisor and Denise Levertov died.

In conclusion, Gary Soto is the best poet ever. My fave line in "Ode to Mi Gato" is "The brown nuggets".

Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproductions (the band) said...

glen has deid
glen has risen
glen shall come aggain

Viking Andrew said...

I like your Ginsberg.

Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproductions (the band) said...

i like your silverstien