🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 9:50:14 AM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
> Michael Pendragon wrote: 
> 
> > On Tuesday, May 3, 2022 at 6:14:34 PM UTC-4, george...@yahoo.ca wrote: 
> >> On 2022-05-02 6:56 p.m., W.Dockery wrote: 
> >> > General-Zod wrote: 
> >> >> George J. Dance wrote: 
> >> >> 
> >> >>> Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog: 
> >> > 
> >> >>> Always Marry an April Girl, by Ogden Nash 
> >> >>> [...] 
> >> >>> April golden, April cloudy, 
> >> >>> Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy; 
> >> >>> [...] 
> >> >>> https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2022/04/always-marry-april-girl-ogden-nash.html 
> >> >>> 
> >> > 
> >> >> Cool, second read 
> >> > 
> >> > 
> >> > Nash definitely was the master of his niche in poetry. 
> >> Oh, yeah. As an example:I remember one textbook I picked up in the last 
> >> half of the last century. It was very modern in its approach to verse. 
> >> First, it ignored rhythm / meter completely. Second, it pontificated 
> >> that rhyme was good only for humorous effect; 
> 
> > What an appallingly horrid little work that must have been. 
> 
> > And a textbook, yet (implying that it was actually taught in classrooms). 
> 
> > One need look no farther to understand why poetry has become a dead language and an obsolete art form. 
> 
> > And, yes -- I would consign that book to be burned along with
> Your burn list includes some of the best poets: 
> 
> Allen Ginsberg 
> Charles Bukowski 
> Jack Kerouac 

I don't see any poets on that list -- let alone any good ones.

> Your agenda seems to be motivated by jealousy, Pendragon. 

Only to someone like yourself who thinks with the mind of a child.

I still remember the first time I was confronted with "modern" poetry (long before I ever dreamed of penning any poetry of my own), and my inability to understand how it was supposed to be the same literary form as the poetry I'd known and loved since early childhood.

Poetry had always been defined as having rhyme and meter.  Blank verse, which kept only meter, was a sub-division of poetry.  But modern verse, which eliminates both the rhyme and the meter no longer has either of the defining characteristics of poetry.  

This does not in any way imply that modern verse is inferior (or superior) to poetry.  It is saying that they are two different literary forms.

Unfortunately, by appropriating the name of "poetry" for itself, modern verse rendered traditional poetry obsolete.

If you look at any of the poetry journals at your library, you'll find that traditional (rhymed-metered) verse is nowhere to be found.  

Modern and traditional verse should have existed side-by-side, as related forms of literature  -- as they do in "A Year of Sundays."  However, in the academic and literary world, the former has entirely supplanted the latter.

That readers still appreciate traditional can be determined by the fact that traditional poetry collections by Donne, Shakespeare, Keats, Poe, et al., are continuously in print.  Yet the academic prejudice for modern verse has blocked any new traditional poetry from being published -- effectively killing it as a literary form.  

When I talk of metaphorically burning books (and/or poets) I am not speaking out of jealousy, but out of a desire to bring about a literary form of enantiodromia wherein traditional verse is re-established as poetry and modern verse is removed to its proper categorization of "poetic prose."

Ideally, I would like both forms to co-exist -- but until such a time comes about, I shall continue to advocate the "burning" of texts, journals, and poetic forms that prevent traditional verse from flourishing.


Michael Pendragon
"Sure, I can accept it, and also identify it as a lie and misrepresentation."
-- Will Dockery, unsuccessfully denying that he's in denial.