I like my bacon crispy, my coffee hot, and my poetry in rhyme. I will never understand anyone preferring chewy, limp bacon over the kind you can snap in your fingers and crunch with your teeth. Nor do I have any sort of appreciation for the crowd allowing Starbucks to sell them on the notion that coffee is just as well iced as hot. They are not right in the head.
Furthermore, just because you take prose and break it into pieces, putting one word on a line by itself, followed by a consciousness stream on the next line and three words on the line after that, jerking the reader about like they are the unfortunate victim of a rickety old wooden roller coaster, bruising ribs and raising eyebrows, that does not make it poetry.
Poetry rhymes.
OK, I get it. Not all poetry rhymes. I do love Robert Frost’s “Birches.†Still, I contend it is a story broken up to look like a poem, not actually a poem. It has no rhyme or rhythm. Poetry puts the art in Language Arts.
“Poetry treats language as an art form. Rhyming poetry takes this to the next level, as one word selected to end a particular line may affect a word selection on a subsequent line. Yet despite the challenges they pose, rhymed poems have endured for untold centuries of human civilization.”
You can have your coffee shop poets with their disheveled clothes, unruly hair, and coffee bean breath. You can have their anger and angst, their laborious meandering through a wilderness of words in search of enlightenment…or applause…or an iced coffee on the house.
Give me Rudyard Kipling’s “If†as a prime example of the beauty and indelible mind stamp of poetry.
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”
Or Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beautyâ€â€¦
“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!”
When you can take so much meaning and lend it cadence, rhythm, and rhyme, that’s poetry, man. That’s art. That’s real. That’s real good.
I first stumbled onto the satisfying stimulation of rhyming words when I was four years old. I would throw couplets at my invisible friends, Big Ricky and Little Ricky, all the live-long day and they approved.
My Dad would sometimes overhear our conversation and say, “Boy, you are a poet and didn’t know it, but your feet show it.†Whereupon, my quizzical gaze would evict the punchline, “Because your feet are Long, fellow.â€
Well, my feet weren’t long and I had no idea what he was talking about until I discovered Henry Wadsworth and remembered Dad and his smirk.
Oh, Henry! The great American poet whose haunting poetry included “Haunted Houses.â€
“All houses wherein men have lived and died
__Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
__With feet that make no sound upon the floors.We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
__Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
__A sense of something moving to and fro.”
I am a writer because I write. When I write, I mostly write prose. I pontificate and prattle on about this or that. I spin tall tales and sometimes tell the truth. I write stories. I write commentary. I even write the occasional sermon or devotional. But when I am really feeling it, I write poetry. If I like what I wrote, I put it here. Check it out.
Be warned! Most of it rhymes because “I do like green eggs and ham. I do like them, Sam I Am.†I say most of it rhymes because I like to break rules, even if they belong to me. Especially then.
I also like hot coffee and crispy bacon.