In Loving Memory of our wonderful Nans, RIP – I chose this photo from the few I’ve taken so far this morning to accompany my poem posted here today.
If rhyming couplets had their day
and free verse won the New World Order
I’d bet the Limericks sure gonna stay
the best remembered by the poetry hoarder.
A sonnet! A sonnet! I hear ye bequeath
but I have to confess I’ve not written one yet
as inherited form it somehow falls beneath
my aspiring limits, still I fear no regret!
Heck who says a haiku’s not poetry! Why?
It’s much more than maths, did you give one a try?
It’s only a literary game – write a motto –
It will soon multiply, makes – vice versa, then ditto…?
A pantoum’s not a pantun unless it’s in French
and a villanelle’s form in binary rhyming to be wrenched
is quite a far cry from the original verses –
the audacities of lit’rary High World, and so, curses!
A ballad is too sing-song? Too remind of native tongue?
Best to say it’s French derived, for all it’s said and done?
And please speak in iambic – don’t be so anapest!
When dactylls bring such terror, poetry sure needs a rest.
You said, ‘pick out a spondee’ – I went looking for a sponge
to set about pot-washing, ‘cos there’s plenty to be done!
Should I spend my days in dribs and drabs some hip-hop to try then scrawl?
Just to please MIssieurs Academia? I beg, I’d sooner crawl –
for that would be pretentious, quite obscene and frankly, lame
to jump on that cool bandwagon claiming all’s Poetry’s fine game!
© Colette Bates, August 2017 All Rights Reserved [usual Fair Use terms apply]
I wrote this poem with four line stanzas and the final stanza of six lines for practise extension freewriting during week 3 of UIowa’s IWP MOOC Power of the Pen (Poetry and Playwriting), unsubmitted and previously unpublished. We were learning about the pantoum in particular for poetry that week. I’d submitted a quite dire pantoum effort and decided to play with the villanelle form and free forms… sadly I fizzled out and didn’t complete my MOOC work for that course, although I achieved the creative writing unit in July. I’m having dreadful difficulty obtaining my poetry certificates for neuro-burn-outs and failing my third try at ModPo so going with SloPo again and hoping to achieve that NEXT year now! If it even continues that far. Fingers crossed it will!
(NB: Be aware, (an)other person(s) has been gaining access illegally and unauthorised to my home and very recently stolen my current account debit card and recent utitlities documents. For some reason the card stolen from me last year has been actively used by someone else unknown to me (including abroad and in France last Autumn according to my bank and that card should have been cancelled by my bank once I was aware it had actually been stolen from under my bed by an unauthorised trespasser and not simply misplaced and had reported it and it should have been cancelled by my bank!) and this old previously cancelled card has been replaced to my purse in place of my actual debit card and it has been used locally as my own receipts have been removed from my purse after my last essential outing and replaced with another persons’ transactions for prepayment electricity to a nearby household. Either that or I’m having cognitive processing faults and hallucinating visible words and numbers on personal effects and suffering extreme paranoia. My automatic/direct debit/bank transfer payments should still go through as my bank account so far still functions and I have not moved from my home address nor do I have any plans to. Hounds of hell and their bitches can take a running jump and have as nice a life as they like anywhere else in the world that they please, as they aren’t actually local residents and have their own homes to return to! I happen to live HERE at home! Air B&B should be made illegal and criminals should be prevented from entering our country and from travelling abroad when they stir up such vendettae against innocents. I’d bet 95% of criminal convictions are so circumstantial and SOC instigated that I don’t believe barely a word of most news reporting for a good many years now! And no, masons are not allowed their crimes scotfree nor for all the money in the world! Twots!
ColetteB.... 