Some publications will not publish negative reviews. I, however, believe that negative reviews serve a worthwhile purpose. For one thing, an insightful poet can read the review and learn a thing or two – not necessarily the poet being reviewed, but any poet reading the review. If anything, a good negative review (I’m not saying my reviews are any good) can cast some light on the subject of poetics and lead readers to a deeper understanding of the issues that poets have to deal with when crafting their poems. And if that leads to better poetry being written overall then I say bring on the negative reviews in droves.

Still, I’d much rather write positive reviews. Even middle-of-the-road reviews.

Why I Offer To Write Book Reviews
I initially offered to write poetry book reviews because I wanted to share insights into poetic philosophy with my readers. I believe there isn’t enough honest discussion about poetics, particularly among independent poets who publish their own work. I thought, when I started reviewing books, that most of my reviews would end up being of independently published authors, and I was right. I was hoping they’d end up being better poets. But one doesn’t always get what one asks for.

Occasionally, however, I do find that rare gem of a poetry book that I love to tell people about. And that’s why I write reviews.

For instance, Jeff Rath’s The Waiting Room at the End of the World is one such book, though it isn’t a book of sonnets nor is it self published. Patrick Carrington’s Thirst is another book (actually, a chapbook) of non-sonnets I can recommend.

As for books of sonnets, The Poets Don’t Write Sonnets Anymore by Robin Ridington is an excellent book I don’t mind recommending, not so much for the poetry, but for the commentary that goes along with it.

I wouldn’t exactly call Ridington’s sonnets “sucky”. But they don’t make me kick my heels together either. Nevertheless, I loved reading the commentary/memoir mixed with thoughts on a myriad of topics important to Ridington that encompassed the poems. I think Ridington did well in putting together his book of sonnets and prose lead-ins. It’s a great book if not great poetry.

One Sonneteer I’d Recommend For The Poems
Truth be told, the sonnet is not exactly my favorite form. I’ve never been really good at writing them myself. That may be because I just haven’t taken the time to honestly practice the form. There are other forms I’ve done well with because of the practice. But the sonnet isn’t one of them.

Still, I love reading a good sonnet when I find one. And one person who writes sonnets that I think are just golden is a poet by the name of Barry Ballard.

Barry Ballard’s Green Tombs To Jupiter is an amazing collection of Petrarchan sonnets written in blank verse. They cover a wide range of topics, but they remind me of the metaphysical poets, only they deal with subject matter from the late 20th century, subjects that John Donne would not have imagined.

I used to read with Barry in Fort Worth, Texas when I lived down there. His delivery is as astounding as his pen and that’s another reason I’d recommend his poetry. I don’t know why his book sells for $173.91 at Amazon. That must be a typo, but it is definitely worth a read if you can get it for less.

If you’re going to write sonnets, it helps to read a few from classical and contemporary poets who write them well. Barry Ballard should be on your reading list.

1. The struggle is in maintaining a balance between the narrative and the poetics
2. Too much narrative and the poem becomes prosaic
3. Too much poetry and the poem will lilt into lyrical patterns that kill the narrative
4. Employment of fiction writing techniques are necessary, but they can get in the way of the poetry if you let them
5. Double risk of saying too much or leaving something out

The essence of narrative poetry is such that you have a story to tell, but the way in which you wish to tell the story is not traditional. In other words, the poem becomes a story without becoming fiction. If it were fiction then it wouldn’t be a poem, but it must contain fiction, or fictional elements, in order to achieve the narrative effect. Even lyric narratives must incorporate some element of fiction telling or the narrative is no longer narrative.

I am currently struggling through an experimental narrative poem that is causing me to think more deeply about what a poem is, how a poem should be structured, and why the narrative form is necessary. The poem is based on my experience as an Iraq War officer who was against the war on moral grounds but chose to participate rather than break the law in an act of civil disobedience as so many others have done. The story itself is fictional; the “truth” part is the emotional-philosophical basis upon which its message is communicated.

My Current Narrative Poem Struggle

Initially, I wrote the poem in three-line strophes and it felt contrived. I thought the poem was too stilted and therefore restructured it. I am now taking it into a totally different direction, using experimental techniques, backward lines, angled verses, concrete elements, and formal line units interspersed between free verse lines. It’s working much better, but I’m still not satisfied.

I have a particular style of writing that is unique. I didn’t develop it. It comes naturally. I’ve always been able to tap into this style in one way or another and draw from different parts of my being (intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and intuitive) in such a way that they play nicely together. Sometimes they struggle against each and sometimes they compliment each other, but they are always all involved. What I’m trying to achieve with this poem is a message, a philosophical proclamation that doesn’t come out preachy or didactic. That’s a tough thing to do in any work.

The narrative is necessary for POV, a fictional technique embodied in my natural lyrical style. But it’s a long poem.

As it stands now, the poem is 13 full 8 1/5 X 11 pages with normative 1-inch margins all around. Some of the lines are short, some long. Some are merely one word in length. The stanzas are all different lengths and there is no set metrical pattern throughout the poem. The meter often changes and changes often. Furthermore, there is a setting as in fiction and several characters, each with their own POV and developed personalities. Then I toss in some metaphors and traditional poetic devices like rhyme, near rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition, synecdoches, etc. You get my drift.

The problem I’m having is this: Keeping the narrative moving through execution of action (both narrative action and action of language) without making it look and sound ridiculous. I suppose it’s the same struggle that many fiction writers find themselves in when they reach a chapter or a point in their story where they don’t know where to go with it any more. You know it’s not finished but you’re not quite sure what it needs. I’m at that point.

I think it may actually be that I know what it needs. I just don’t know how to give it what it needs, if that makes any sense. Like a man who knows his wife needs a hug but he is incapable of allowing himself to give into the temptation to share that emotional moment with her, be it out of pride, insecurity, or just lack of know-how. I am there and I’m not quite sure why. The poem needs an injection of something but I cannot say what kind of injection because I haven’t diagnosed the problem properly. Have you ever been there? What did you do?

The Too Much-Too Little Dichotomy

I am trying my hardest to maintain a balance between saying too much and telling the whole story. With any narrative, whether it be fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, you have an obligation to the reader to tell everything that is important. You don’t have to tell everything there is to know, but you must tell everything that is important to the story. Otherwise, the reader won’t have a good experience.

Nevertheless, you’ve got to keep it short. Brevity is key in any writing. Say what needs to be said and get out. So my struggle is there, how do I keep it as short as it needs to be and still say everything that needs to be said? In general, a story should tell itself. I’ve always believed that and still do.

I’ve had hard poems to write before. I’ve have some poems so easy to write I couldn’t believe they were actually poems. But this poem is hard. I think it’s hard because of the narrative imperative. It won’t work simply as a lyrical poem, but as narrative it works splendidly. I just wish I could get it off my chest and get on with living.

Before I share the poem with you I’d like to tell you what a Twitter poem is or may be. But first, what is Twitter?

Twitter: The Who, What, When, Where, And Why

Twitter, by all accounts, is a social media application that allows multiple people to carry on an extended conversation and various cross-conversations simultaneously. It’s like the party version instant messenger. You can type a message of up to 140 characters (that is the limit, no exceptions) and anyone who is following you can read that message.

It’s really very simple. But there are some complexities that go beyond the mere communication aspect of Twitter. I won’t get into those. Suffice it to say that Twitter is a means of communicating with a mass of people at one time through ultra-short messages.

Before you can follow someone on Twitter, you have to have an account. You simply fill out the application, fill out your 140 character profile and start finding people to follow. But why?

There are likely as man reasons to follow someone as there are people on Twitter. It’s whatever you want to get out of it, but generally people follow people they have an interest in or that typically post messages that are of an interesting nature. I follow several poets and publishers, business people, other Internet marketers, and some famous people I admire. Some of them follow me back. I also have a following of close to 170 people, some of whom I follow back. At present, I have 163 followers and 139 people that I follow.

When you log in to Twitter you see a simple screen with a write box at the top. That’s where you type your messages. Below that, you can see the messages of the people that you follow in an aggregated rollup so that there is no common thread between them. Those followers may or may not be following each other, but it doesn’t matter. They all have one thing in common: You are following them. Here’s a screenshot of my write box and a few messages from the people I am following.

My Twitter Poem – The Method Of My Madness

The method of writing this poem was fairly simple. It wasn’t difficult and didn’t involve some elaborate scheme. There really wasn’t much “craft” involved in a traditional sense. I’m not even sure it’s any good. Just a little tinkering.

Each page of Twitter features 20 messages. So I went back two pages and copied the messages from the people I’m following – each 140 characters or less – and pasted them into Notepad. I started with one line per strophe and carried that out until I found a tweet that was naturally two lines long. I then made each strophe two lines in length even if that involved two tweets. I maintained that rhythm until two-line strophes only consisted of one tweet, then I added another tweet to make that strophe three lines. I did that until two tweets produced four lines and continued this pattern until the end of the poem and it played out. I made no revisions to the tweets themselves.

I had considered, initially, of taking out the @ replies and just using the tweets themselves (I did, by the way, delete all URLs included in tweets, with one exception). The @ replies are replies that I or another Twitterer made in response to someone else’s tweet. Chances are, you have no idea what the original tweet was because all you see if the @ reply. That means the person who made the original post has no relation to me whatsoever, but the person who replied is someone that I am following.

You will notice a connection to some of these lines. That’s because the same Twitterer is the author of those lines. But none of the tweets by the same Twitterer are back-to-back.

Does a Twitter poem necessarily have to be done this way? No, not really. It could be done any number of ways. This is simply the way I approached this one and decided to leave it at that. It’s only an experiment. I’m sure there will be readers whose response is “WTF”? Others will likely consider it genius. I’m OK with either response. I’m just doodling. Nothing serious. And I don’t mean that to be any pejorative slap at Flarfists. It’s just the way it is.

Social Media Poetry – A New Form?

Flarf has managed to gain some notoriety since its inception. I’m not sure why. The few Flarf poems that I’ve read are a bit senseless, much like what you’ll read below. But the way you should read this poem is not as one line of thought as you would much of contemporary poetry, or classic poetry for that matter. Rather, it should be read as multiple one-sided conversations going on at once, for that is precisely what it is. Imagine yourself at a party and hearing multiple conversations taking place throughout a crowded room, but you can only capture snippets of each conversation. That’s essentially what this is.

Could this be the advent of a new type of poetry? I don’t know. I’m sure someone will have an answer for that. But I do see where innovative poets could take this idea and run with it. Not just with Twitter, but with any social media tool. The idea of a social communication poem strikes me as more valuable than Google sculpting, a practice taken up by the Flarfists. One could classify this type of poem in the Flarf category. Google sculpting relies on one’s ability to search for key phrases and use snippets of conversation or content from websites, forums, blog posts, and other website content to create a poem. But the social communication poem has a different approach and focuses instead on a different aspect of human interaction. It involves taking snippets of written communication from the above-mentioned content publications and using those to craft a poem. How many ways can this be done? I think the possibilities are limitless.

But without further ado, I give you this, my first Twitter poem. Love it, hate it, throw verbal insults at me if you will. I don’t think it’s much, but it was interesting just to experiment.

Man pays electric bill with spider

wow pownce was aquired by six apart

Learned that in middle/HS culture getting your house TP’d is says “you are admired!”. Wouldn’t a Hallmark card been cheaper and less work?

i wonder why sixapart would aquire pownce and then close it down
How to tell the difference between a recession and a depression;

holy carp this is a good heroes. gripped for the whole thing. if you stopped watching the show (I’d understand why), start watching again.

Bet you they’re going to fold Pownce into Vox.
I think they plan to role the technology into their own micro-blogging platform

Looking for a picture on my computer. I have about 20000 ugh I am looking through
WOW!! I received ‘The Arte y Pico Award’, which is for writers, to inspire others with creativity by @debgallardo

So my Twuffer ‘future tweets’ actually went live 30 minutes early…..
@Kimberly_Bock Thanks for the warning. Didn’t realize that would jack with the stumbles. TY for the Stumble.
Accidentally put on the christopher cross SAILING – still an awesome song – so much testosterone! Hard core.

Ha and it uses the triangle. Even less popular than COWBELL
common consensus from y’all is that Six Apart bought pownce and killed it for talent/developers and the IP/technology.
plus…. Pownce was probably going cheap…. was anyone still using it?
Jonathan Coulton performs Code Monkey Unplugged

Creepy Doll – Jonathan Coulton
Someone opened Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville
Dont miss it! You can get the notification w/password (free) by registering at http://www.selfstartersweek…
@remarkablogger Wish I knew how to do that. I hate Vista SO much.

funny how much talk there is about Pownce on Twitter. There’s a little on Pownce but more here – guess that says something
4 Cool Resources You Need to Check Out –
The skies are not happy
@Allen_Taylor you’re welcome. going to comment after i write this post…

Shall we play a game?
Gotta run out and do an errand. Keep it up everyone.
I am better now listening to some yelling and atonality
just tried to log into pownce and got an error –
@problogger I’m with the consensus
you are not expendable.

this takes a lot for me to tweet, but with the holidays nearing, I wish I was more spiritual. I’ve got good morals, values, etc. but…
@Kimberly_Bock Thanks!
The State of the Micromediasphere. Wanna join in and be a guest on the show DM me!
Please keep praying for Zoe http://www.zoesheart.com/ @Nikki_s just told they found her a heart.

@amyderby I got this week off!
Flogging Molly – Death Valley Queen
Flogging Molly – Another Bag of Bricks
@Kimberly_Bock Nice heart.

Well, that’s it. Any suggestions for a title?

Epics have always been thought of as tales of heroic deeds, but that is really a narrow view. Not all epics are heroic in nature. You can also have epics of time, epics of place, and other types of epics as well. But most epics are long narratives. Even if the poetry is lyrical in nature as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” or “Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” there is still a narrative strain throughout the poem. It is an essential characteristic of an epic in my mind. The narrative is meant to tell a story.

An epic poem, however, need not be long. Homer’s Iliad and Oddyssey, of course, are epics. The Aeneid and The Divine Comedy are epics, but so is Kubla Khan. And as far as epics go, Kubla Khan isn’t very long.

But just because a poem is long and narrative in nature, that doesn’t make it an epic. An epic must also possess some significant cultural myth. I don’t mean myth in a “non-true” sense. A myth may very well contain some truth, but it is a story of a culture’s core beliefs. And an epic tries to tap into that in some way. The culture can be a local culture or it may very well be a global culture, but whatever is the common myth of that culture, that is the backbone of the epic story for that culture. An epic poem plays into that whereas a narrative poem may just seek to provide an anecdote or to give readers a glimpse into a slice of life or a person’s character. Or it may be an essay on the human condition.

Epics do not generally content themselves with being narrative myths. They tend to explore what is spectacular about the common myth and may be take a myth and “blow it up” so that it can be seen with great glory or scrutiny. The narrative poem only wants to be good at sharing a tale.

Many modern narrative poems are not epics. They may be very good long narratives, but they aren’t epics. And this is not to say that an epic need be in some traditional form or structure. An epic may very well be experimental in nature, or contain experimental elements. Of course, this can also be a prominent feature of a long narrative poem except that the epic contains the elements of the common myth, which the long narrative may not strive for.

Whether a poem is an epic or a long narrative non-epic poem, it must be judged within the school or movement to which its author subscribes as well as be treated as an individual poem in its own right. For this reason, a poem may be considered an epic if it follows the traditions of one school and not an epic if it falls into another movement. That is, if, say, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” were rewritten as a New Formalist poem then it wouldn’t be considered an epic at all, but as a Postmodern reflection of art it could very well be classified as an epic of self, or an epic ekphrastic poem.

To be sure, there is some crossover between the two forms. An epic by definition is a long narrative. Many long narratives are epics. But the classification of each may be disputed among poets from various schools and traditions. I am a firm believer that a strong epic is the highest achievement that a poet of any culture can create. A successful epic is a blessing to its audience.

The Epic Is Not Dead (Thanks Walt Whitman!)
Epics are not dead. But over time there have been changes in form or mode of expression. We’ve talked about some of those changes. If my discussion of the literate age seemed more sketchy than the first post in this series, that’s because there is much more ground to cover for that age. I tried to stick with the highlights and the major divergences. These divergences are important if we are to make predictions.

There are two primary points that I was making with the last discussion, namely, that there have not been too many sweeping changes in the forms and structures of epic poetry over time and, secondly, most of those changes that have occurred took place in the last 100 years. But even those changes were made possible by the one shining example of American epic that came before: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I purposely left Whitman out of that last discussion because I wanted to backtrack just a little to lay the groundwork for what I’m about to unleash.

Whitman, with Leaves of Grass, borrowed from the past to propel poetry forward into the future. More than any other poet before or since, his innovations were extraordinary and sweeping. You can call him a Romantic and that would be true, but it’s just as true to say he was a Realist. His epic poem is not one long poem as most epics are; rather, it is an epic of multitudinous proportions. Parts of it could be called an epic within an epic.

Unlike many of the epics that followed, Leaves of Grass is not an epic of place and unlike many epics that preceded it, we cannot really call it a heroic epic. It deals with the traditional subject matter of epics, but it also deals with subject matter not typically associated with epics. Later epics of place such as Williams’ Patterson and Olson’s The Maximus Poems owe a debt to Whitman for, essentially, inventing the American epic form.

I would prefer to call Leaves of Grass an epic of form because, while it does cast Whitman himself as a sort of larger-than-life literary hero, and while it does give voice to a brand new American national literature, it also establishes a new mode of expression and invents a new poetic form, what has come to be called “free verse”. While Leaves can be called a national epic, a personal epic, an epic of place and time, a new twist on the heroic epic (with the self as hero) or given any other distinctions that could be true, by calling it an epic of form we can give it due honor as all of the above.

But what is an epic of form? Well, an epic of form is an epic work that relies mostly upon its form and structure for effect. In other words, the form itself is intrinsic in the telling of the story. If we study other epics before and since, there is really no other epic anywhere whose form is intrinsic to the story. Whitman’s Leave of Grass is the only one. Take Homer and change the structure but keep the story line and you still have a good story that can be told in any form. Take Milton and change the blank verse to iambic pentameter without touching the story line and you still have a fantastic tale. Take Paterson or The Maximus Poems and change the form – you still have the same story. I’m not arguing whether the story would be just as good or not, merely that the stories’ basic elements wouldn’t change. But if you take Leaves of Grass and change the form and you don’t have Leaves of Grass any more. It would be fundamentally different.

Imagine “Drum Taps” written as a sonnet, or “I Sing The Body Electric” in trochees. Much of Leaves of Grass relies upon Whitman’s sense of urgency, his wild and frantic paces and pitches. Take that away and you simply have a dead lawn.

The Epic’s Future Through The Soul Of A
19th Century Wild Man
Why is this excursion into Whitman important? Because I believe that, going forward, the epic will be much more experimental than it ever has been before. In all of the experimental verse of the 20th century, and there has been a lot of experimenting, the future of poetics has some exciting possibilities. The epic, in particular, can stretch out in ways that it never has. All we need is our modern-day Whitman, ready and willing to take poetry where it’s never gone before.

One of the chief ways in which poetry in the third millennium will advance experimentally is in form. Not just the epic, but poetry in general. Contemporary poets do not care to be painted into holes. Younger poets today would prefer to create and to do away with the lines in the sand. One day, the poet may write a sonnet and the next day she may write a free verse confessional. There is no clear commitment to any one form or structure.

Still, there will be more to inform the poetics of the 21st century than simply personal preferences. That has always been a part of the poetic experience, but there have been other influences as well. And so shall it be in the future.

The Birth Of Gutenberg’s Grandchild
The last time communication media has seen a serious revolution was in the 15th century when Gutenberg printed an edition of The Bible with moving type. Before that, poets and other communicators in written form worked by hand exclusively. Gutenberg’s press allowed, for the first time in history, for mass communication. People in the 20th century were huge beneficiaries of this technology as the proliferation of newspapers and magazines all over the world – but particularly in the West – grew by larger percentages than ever before.

Much of the growth of printing in the 20th century came as a result of widespread use of computers. Much of that growth occurred in the latter half of the century after IBM became a huge force in the industry. Many people contributed to the rise of the computer as a work tool, but another development, which occurred in 1969, led to what will become as big a revolution as Gutenberg’s printing press. The ARPAnet was born.

By the mid-1970s, home computers were beginning to hit the retail stores. Then, the 1980s came, the decade that I would come of age. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started their competition for dominance in the home computer market. By 1990, it was pretty clear that Gates had won. Then, in that same year, Tim Berners-Lee (with Al Gore’s help) created a hypertext language, which led to the start of the Internet. Yahoo went online in 1994 and by 1995 speculators were throwing money at www dot coms faster than a Las Vegas hooker makes a sales pitch (I’m assuming that’s pretty fast). Suffice it to say, the revolution had begun.

How The Internet Has Changed Poetry
While Gutenberg’s press was a powerful invention, it was still only available to a few people at a time. There has always been an economic hurdle for certain classes of people to jump over before they could acquire the same technology as the privileged. The personal computer made it possible for people on the lower end of the social strata to be creators, but even as late as the 1990s there were economic hurdles for the lower class even if the middle class had knocked down its own barriers. The Internet, however, has eliminated almost all of the barriers – even for the poor.

Poets have always been resourceful self-publishers. Alexander Pope was an 18th century self-published author. Lord Byron published himself. Edgar Allan Poe published his first work himself. Walt Whitman was a self publisher. African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar published his own work in 1893. But perhaps the most famous self-published author in history – though not often thought of as a poet, he did write some hymns – Martin Luther, as early as 1517, not long after Gutenberg stunned the world with movable type, published 95 theses and nailed them to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

But the Internet Revolution is a bit different than the Gutenberg Revolution. The first person to profit from the latter profited from religious texts and the revolution was expanded and hastened by religious innovators like the aforementioned Luther. The early adopters in using the Internet for commercial publishers have largely been pornographers and technology geeks with no particular religious bent. The Internet Revolution is largely an agnostic revolution, agnostic in the sense that a belief in God doesn’t matter. (Pardon the diversion.)

Pornography and technology aside, poetry has been very prevalent online. There has probably been more self-published poetry online in the last 10 years than in print throughout the 20th century. The chief reason for this is because of the breakdown of the economic barriers mentioned earlier. The Internet is accessible like Gutenberg’s press was not. It is accessible to more people, to a wider selection of people from different backgrounds, and it’s accessibility is growing.

Much of the poetry you read online, like a lot of the self-published books on the market today, isn’t worth reading. But that doesn’t stop poets from writing and publishing. They have the ability and the technology is available and accessible, therefore they use it.

Despite the negatives, however, there is still a lot of good poetry online. Many traditional poetry publishers, journals, and publications have their own websites and some of them are publishing material from their print editions. The Kenyon Review is just one example. There are many others.

Many other journals have online versions but no print journals – and the list is long and getting longer. New forms have been invented that can only be produced on the Internet – Flarf and Hypertext poetry are two examples. I expect this to continue and grow.

Not only is the Internet a powerful medium for publishing poetry, but it’s also a powerful medium for marketing it. Resources like Duotrope’s Digest allow poets to research markets online and find publishers to send their work out to. And it’s free (though they’d accept a donation). Many poets online are very capable of marketing themselves through digital delivery systems like e-books, podcasts, and videos.

As an aside, I am not particularly fond of the poetry by Billy Collins, but I do admire the video productions based on his poems. The animated interpretations of his poems are very appropriate for his voice and style. They are complimentary and do not take over, which is how a good poetry video should work. The poem is the original entity. It is the script. The visuals that go with it should enhance, not control. Collins’ videos are some of the best poetry videos that I’ve seen simply because they are not simply a poet standing at a lectern reading from a page. They possess interpretive images that compliment the poetry.

Billy Collins is not the only poet to produce solid poetry videos online, but he is the most prominent poet to have done so with any skill. That is very significant.

Will These Changes Affect How Epics
Are Produced?
Poets have always been innovators. From Homer to the late 20th century Language poets and New Formalists, poetry’s advancement has relied upon innovation and experimentation. You may hate the innovators, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t done their jobs. They have. And if that sparks enmity then that’s as it should be. Poetry is about catharsis and scorn is as legitimate a cathartic reaction as anything else.

Looking back at the 20th century again, the epic stories that have captured the imaginations of audiences in wide numbers have mostly been on film. The Star Wars trilogy sparked a whole new genre of epic science fiction movie-making that has led to some great movies. Prior to Star Wars, other epics captured the popular imagination on film – Spartacus, Ben Hur, The Godfather, just to name a few.

21st century citizens are highly visual. Visual poetry has not captured the popular imagination, but it is one innovation within poetics that has stuck around. In fact, in the Internet age, it has exploded. Online visual poetry is all over the place – in hypertext and in video.

Digital books have not caught on too well. Except for the Kindle, which Amazon introduced last year, e-books have not sold real well. The ones that have sold have primarily been informational in nature, not as entertainment. Videos, however, are very popular online as is evidenced by the success of YouTube and the value that Google has placed on it. While no one has yet figured out exactly how to make money from the production of online video – aside for advertising purposes – it is still a powerful medium for communication.

The success of video soaps like lonelygirl15 proves that there is a market for video entertainment. It’s just a matter of time before someone learns from these early successes and produces something truly magnificent.

Poets who write the epics of the future will have these online tools at their disposal and will be able to rely on the technology of the day without the huge barriers of the past. A little skill and some creativity coupled with the willingness and drive to learn will allow poets of the future to take visual poetics to new levels. I can envision a Shakespearean production on the scale of Hamlet or Macbeth in video form, incorporating elements of poetry, stage production, and 20th century film making – all on a shoestring budget.

Does That Mean Print Will Go Out Of Fashion?
No. Quite frankly, there will always be an element of print production. We still listen to radio, don’t we?

While print production will continue, the best innovation will occur online. There is no reason why the traditional strain of poetry carried over from the 20th century cannot learn from the avant-garde strain – the parent as well as its growing number of children – and use the Internet for production and marketing. Many traditional poets have already started using social networks like Facebook for marketing purposes. But most are still using the traditional tools for writing and creating. I can see vast potential for this to change.

Poets of the future will continue to borrow from the past. The 20th century forms and the many strains that have splintered from Pound’s Modernist mind will continue to splinter and divide, but the best of each strain will be able to reach more people in more places than ever before. The capillaries of poetic thoughts will influence each other, both online and off line. While the near future will favor the short forms, the long future will look to the past – the pre-literate past, the literate distant past, the late 20th century past of film and print production, and the near future past – and take poetry to places that the ancients could never have imagined.

Every strain of poetry has potential with online delivery systems. I can envision an epic collection of sonnets in video, or a New Formalist poem written as hypertext. I can see epics of form, epics of place, traditional heroic epics, personal-narrative epics, ekphrastic epics, hypertext epics, and epochal epics, or fill in the blank, existing in various forms online as well as cross-pollinating into print and when all is said and done we owe a huge debt of gratitude to a few of our poetic forebears for their pioneering spirit.

Thank you Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Pope, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, Whitman, Pound, Williams, Ashbery, Notley, and many, many others for their ingenuity and their creative imaginations. Let’s carry it forward. The epic is not dead. She is only sleeping.

Did you miss the previous two posts in this series? Don’t fret. You can go back and read them here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Reprise

For the purpose of this discussion I’m breaking poetic history down into three periods: The pre-literate, the literate, and the post-literate. The pre-literate period refers to the time in prehistory when poetry was an oral art form and not written. The literate age consists of the bulk of history when writing and reading has allowed for the production and enjoyment of literature as a written art form. The post-literate age is now in its infancy and represents a decline in reading for pleasure and therefore a decline in producing written works (yet to come).

I believe it is necessary to discuss the epic past before getting into the epic future so I will digress to a lengthy discussion on poetic history, in particular, the epic. Most of this first post will be nothing new to most of my more savvy and learned readers. If you don’t want a brush-up, feel free to skip it and wait for the next installment.

Ancient Epics And Setting The Rules
In the pre-literate age, the epic was the preferred poetic form. Because there was no writing, entertainment came by way of those who were willing to perform for others. They sang, danced, chanted, told stories, and re-told the popular and familiar. This was their craft.

When men started writing and creating a written language they naturally took the popular songs and chants and put them on the page for people to read. At first, few people could read. But over time more and more people learned to read and eventually reading became a popular form of entertainment.

It’s interesting, though, that when we examine the ancient epics they all have a few things in common:

• There is a larger-than-life hero
• Action begins in media res – in the middle
• The hero must overcome insurmountable odds to eventuate a victorious outcome
• The hero is rewarded for his courage, strength, and/or heroic deeds (the rewards can be material or immaterial, but often come from the gods)
• Usually, the hero is a warrior, but at times we also see an adventurer-hero
• There is usually some element of romance or a hint of sexual relations between the hero and a maiden or beloved, and often even with a god or two
• The gods often get involved in the affairs of men (and that’s not a sexual reference)

Because performers recited the poems before audiences they needed to remember the lines and most epics were huge. Homer’s epics were quite long so trying to remember every line became a chore. That was the purpose for the rhyme. It was as much a tool for memorization as anything else. Nevertheless, the definition of an epic came to be a story or narrative that told of a hero overcoming grand obstacles to reach a worthy goal. Usually the hero was one person but there have been instances when the hero was a lovable beast or a group of people, a nation even.

The movement from pre-literate storytelling to literate storytelling was a bit subtle in terms of forms. They didn’t change much. The forms and methods used by oral storytellers were the same forms and methods used by those who wrote them down. Initially, written works offered nothing new. They were simply a written re-telling of the stories that had been passed down orally for centuries.

In the next installment of this series I’ll discuss the literate age in depth, though not as in depth as possible (that would take a book). I will cover some highlights and mostly discuss the 20th century. See you then.

The problem with didacticism isn’t that you take a position, it’s that you take it from the start — maybe it’s as simple as the reader’s trust, and being suspicious of rhetoric. Although I think it’s more than that — I think it’s hard to write a poem that isn’t dull without surprising yourself.

Bear in mind that didactic poetry is instructional and, as such, its purpose is to teach. Now, I come from the position that there is a place for didacticism in poetry. I think that all poetry is, in some sense, instructional, but the problem with much of the poetry that seeks to be instructional as an end in itself is that its instructions are preachy and detract from the poetry. I believe that poetry must always strive to be poetry first and anything else secondarily.

That said, however, I take issue with Tim’s opening statement here. He likely didn’t intend it the way it sounds, but this is how I took it. Where you start out with a position that you believe and you write a poem to defend that position. Tim’s statement makes me think that he believes that isn’t appropriate, but I think otherwise. There are many great poems that do just that. One such poem is Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica.”

In “Ars Poetica”, MacLeish sets out to tell us what a poem should be. Right from word one he takes a position and he sticks to it. All the way down to his final line, that poem makes one point. Every line contributes to the point. It’s a fabulous exercise in polemics. He doesn’t say what he needs to say in every way possible, but he does say it in every way that it needs to be said in order for the poem to make its point. And he took his position right from the start.

I think that’s what good poetry does, but I also agree with Tim’s last point. It’s hard to write a poem that doesn’t surprise yourself. I think Archibald MacLeish would honestly say that he did surprise himself in writing “Ars Poetica”. The lines are surprising, not for what they say, but in how they say it. Again, that is a mark of good poetry.

Pardon Me For Being A Wise Ass
I’d like to thank Jim Murdoch for his response to my last blog post. I think anyone who reads my blog long term has figured out by now that I don’t believe that a poem is a poem just because somebody decided to throw some lines on a page and call it a poem. My point for that post was two-fold: No. 1, I just wanted to be a wise-ass and make fun of myself a little bit, and, secondly, just prove that I’m a bit of a contrarian on these matters. I don’t follow rules too well. I prefer to deal with principles because principles are flexible; rules are not. That doesn’t mean that everything is equal. To echo the words of the Apostle Paul, the author of much of the Christian New Testament, all things are permissible, but not all things are profitable. In other words, anyone can call himself a poet and just toss words onto the page, but the real test of one’s work is not what he himself thinks of it, but what the aggregate of posterity thinks of it.

The Many, Many Types Of Poetry
I’d like to issue a third thank you. This one to G.M. Palmer who writes the Strong Verse blog. He’s drawn a bit of a line in the sand over there about what constitutes good poetry and what doesn’t. I certainly give him credit for his passion. I like many of his ideas and agree with them. But he’s got a few as well that I think are a bit stuck in the barn.

What I do like about him is his willingness to promote narrative long-term poetry. I too believe that it’s time to bring back the long form narratives, though not necessarily in the traditional rhyme and meters of old. Nevertheless, his passion is commendable.

Where I do take issue with him is in his insistence that avant garde poetry and Spoken Word forms are not poetry. While my readers know that I’m not preferential to the avant garde, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss them on the basis that we don’t like them. Just because I don’t like somebody’s style or techniques doesn’t mean that what I do is superior to what they do. Palmer’s polemics leave much to be desired and I’ve found that, by reading his blog, he often contradicts his own principles.

For example:

1. In his “Modern Aesthetics As Sola Fide” post he criticizes contemporary poets for their “it’s poetry because I say it is” position then he turns around in less than one week later and makes the argument that Language Poets, Spoken Word poets, and avant gardeists are bad because he says they are. Well, I think he owes it to us to defend his position with some examples rather than saying Google will lead you to the self-evident truths. Sorry, bad positing.
2. In his bio he says his favorite book is The Divine Comedy by Dante then he says in “Why I am a Skeptic” that he dislikes anything trendy or experimental. This is really quite laughable. Dante himself was an experimenter. All great poets are. Dante’s experimentalism is evident in his use of the terza rima, which was never used before he employed it in The Divine Comedy. Dante’s work went on to inspire Petrarch and Chaucer, who borrowed the form for English literature. Other English language poets followed, all the way down to William Carlos Williams, who is perhaps an iconic figure in the avant garde traditions. Personally, I’ve got no use for any poet who doesn’t step outside of the ranks and do a little experimenting. Who wants to read the same rehashed lines over and over again?

Rather than wear myself out poring over every word of his blog, I’ll just stop right there. I am not setting myself up as opposition to Palmer’s ideas. I simply think he should communicate them better. I like what he has to say in “A Declaration on the Revision of Poetry”, but we can’t get too wrapped up in the language of forms.

To say that no one reads poetry today because “artsy journals” publish crap is ludicrous. People stopped reading poetry when they could just flip on the channel and watch Uncle Miltie wearing a dress and smoking a cigar. Poets have to stop dreaming about the future halcyon days when poetry makes a big comeback. We should instead put our overactive imaginations to work and produce good, imaginative literature for the people who appreciate it. What do I care if my audience is 500 or 5 million? I hope, of course, that it’s 5 million, but I’m not holding my breath.

While Palmer’s declaration has merit, I wouldn’t expect it to revive interest in poetry. People just aren’t going to flock to Borders Books to buy the latest issue of Palmer’s grand opus. They might, but they’ll only do so if their friends tell them it’s good enough to spend their money on. Otherwise, they’d rather watch Homer Simpson.

Poets have got to quit blaming each other for the problems that we find. It isn’t Ron Silliman’s fault that your books don’t sell on Amazon. It isn’t some vaguely-defined School of Quietude’s responsibility to ensure that the avant garde poets are represented in the great poetic pantheon. These kinds of ridiculous assertions are just rhetoric that gets us nowhere. If you don’t like concrete poetry then don’t read it. Someone else may love the hell out of it. That’s their business. Leave it alone.

Today, there are more poets writing poetry than there ever have been in U.S. history. There are also fewer non-poets reading it. Dana Gioia noticed that 20 years ago. He wrote a manifesto and it was widely distributed. Still, even after the New Formalists waged their hostile takeover and ransacked the halls and walls of academe and the NEA, fewer people care about poetry. I’m not going to cry about it. Ultimately, poetry will live on in some form. If it’s a form that I don’t appreciate then at least I’m glad that it’s still alive.

How Many Types Of Poetry Are There?
The answer to the question, “How many types of poetry are there?” is this: As many as people read. The poetry tent is big enough to hold the Language Poets, the New Formalists, and everyone in between. It’s big enough for lyric poetry and narrative poetry. It’s even big enough for a few lyric-narratives. Perhaps we’ll all have to tolerate a little bad poetry in order to enjoy the good, but the good that is there is really good so why let the rest get us down?

This isn’t some “live and let live” manifesto. It’s a hope that poets will take the time to learn from each other. I think you can learn good poetics from bad poetry. I also think you can pick up bad habits from good poetry. The real issue is, What are you doing to make yourself as good a poet as you can be? And don’t spend all your time fixating on the different types of poetry. Rather, take some time out to invent a type of your own.

Seriously, if I were to answer yesterday’s post with a rebuttal, I’d say there are three types of poetry where appositives are a positive. They are:

1. Prose poetry
2. Narrative verse
3. Language poetry

Differences Between Prose Poetry
And Prose Writing
In prose poetry, you essentially are writing in the same manner in which you’d write prose non-poetry. Therefore, the rules are essentially the same, right? Well, it would seem so, but I don’t think so.

I think the purpose and intent of prose poetry is different than that of strict prose. Strict prose writing is usually concerned with thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In other words, you are moving from point A to point B using arguments along the way to facilitate a particular train of thought. At least, that’s what prosaic nonfiction is all about. In terms of prose fiction, you are essentially doing the same thing but using more creative devices and imagination. Facts are still facts, but in fiction those facts may consist entirely of myth and could make no sense to the real world, but make perfect sense to the world of prose that is being created by the author. Prose poetry, on the other, could just be a scene with no particular movement from one point to another. Such is the case with parts of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Here’s a sample poem:

Antique

Gracious son of Pan! Around your forehead crowned with flowerets and with laurel, restlessly roll those precious balls, your eyes. Spotted with brown lees, your cheeks are hollow. Your fangs gleam. Your breast is like a lyre, tinklings circulate through your pale arms. Your heart beats in that belly where sleeps the double sex. Walk through the night, gently moving that thigh, that second thigh, and that left leg.

Narrative Verse Redeems Itself
Narrative poetry is defined as poetry that tells a story. Robert Service is no friend of academic verse, but if you read his poetry it all does one thing well. There is always a story to tell.

Service was popular among rustic Americans in the early part of the 20th century. It’s easy to understand why. His poetry about the wilds of the Yukon, with their humorous twists and catchy rhyme schemes could hold simple imaginations spellbound for several minutes. And I understand that Service himself was quite a performer and entertainer. To have written the kind of poetry that he did, he would have to be.

The argument that narrative verse, like narrative fiction, should adhere to the same styles and devices is a compelling one. After all, if your aim is to tell a story then you want to use every possible device to help you do that effectively. Appositives are great for helping to vary the sentences, are they not?

Yes, certainly. But narrative verse must also rely on something else which is traditionally the purview of fiction. That is, it must “roll out” the story a little bit at a time. It’s called exposition. I’ll come back to that a little later, but for now, suffice it to say that any narrative writing must rely on exposition for effect and for effectual storytelling.

Language Poetry’s Natural Habitat
Language poetry is one of the most interesting developments to hit the world of poetry in awhile. Firmly entrenched in the avant garde tradition, its aim is simply to “play” with language. The main aim is to allow the reader to participate in creating the meaning of the poem. Therefore, the writer is not telling the reader what to think or how. Rather, he is simply offering the poem for review and analysis and leaving the rest to the reader.

Because of the philosophical underpinnings of the language poets, much of the writing appears disjunctive and unmeaning. That is, anti-meaningful. But the point is to facilitate the reader finding his or her own meaning in the poem. Devices are used to help the reader do that, but those devices are rendered flexible enough that the reader can act as co-creator. Appositives serve a useful purpose in this kind of writing because you can write entire poems with nothing but appositives, or nothing but verbs if you wish. Language poetry tends to “break all the rules”, or rewrite them. And that’s OK.

How The Three Forms Shun Apposition
For Exposition
While appositives can be a positive in any of these types of poetic environments (or any, I suppose), the underlying purpose for the appositive is much more important than simply employing the device to “see what happens.” Even when poets use an appositive, there should be a greater purpose at stake. That purpose should be to “move the poem along.”

Careful, Exposition Doesn’t Mean What You
Think It Means
By exposition I do not mean what is traditionally thought of as exposition. In fictional writing, exposition is moving the story along either through characterization or scene development. In nonfiction writing, exposition is moving the reader to your grand conclusion through a discussion of certain points based on factual findings and research. That’s not what I mean by poetic exposition.

In poetic exposition, it could mean either of the traditional definitions of exposition, but more often than not what it really means is a “driving” of the poem to its final aha! Whether you’re using elements of prose, narrative, or language twittering, the end result is to always get that poem to do what it’s supposed to do. Even if its only aim is to make the reader go, “Huh?”

Sometimes, the purpose of the poem is to get the reader to think. Other times it may be to get the reader to feel a certain way. Maybe it’s to show a traditional element of culture in a brand new light. Or to scare someone. Whatever the case, even if it’s to “redefine the rules”, exposition drives the writer, and the reader, to that place where discovery can be made. If you need an appositive to do that then don’t dig the knife in just yet.

But that has changed since those days. Rhyme is back in. But why?

Good question, but before I answer it let me just say that rhyme is en vogue now in ways that you might not imagine. It isn’t a traditional rhyme. We don’t use the ab ab ab iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and Donne, but we do like rhyme. Today’s rhyme, however, comes in one of two forms:

1. End Rhyme Cleverly Disguised – You’ll find writers of Petrarchan Sonnets writing in traditional rhyme schemes, but the poems are so conversational you just skip over the rhymes without noticing them there. Other poets also have learned to cleverly disguise their end rhymes by using enjambment and other devices such as hyphenated words that flow from one line to another where the syllables at the ends of the lines rhyme. These are clever uses of rhyme and I’m glad to see poets using this device more creatively.
2. Internal Rhyme – Another type of rhyme that is very popular now is internal rhyme. Today’s poet is not afraid to rhyme three or four successive words, sometimes separated by punctuation but often not, or twisting the internal rhyme into a near rhyme. And many crafty poets will use internal rhyme and near rhyme together very effectively.

I must say that I like both of these types of rhymes and I’ve been employing these devices since I’ve started writing poetry in the late 1980s. I’m glad to see that other poets agree that rhyme is not so bad after all. So why has poetry started to pick up on rhyme again as a useful device?

Paradigm Shifts: The String Of The
Postmodern Revolution
I think the answer might lie in a parallel to what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift, aka a scientific revolution. I believe, as Kuhn believed, that knowledge does not progress in a linear fashion, but that new developments in any field, be it science, philosophy, business management, or the arts, arise as a result of periodic transformations. In other words, it is largely generational.

But these revolutions do not necessarily spring up over night. They are not volcanoes that just suddenly erupt. They are more like seething cauldrons that well up over time. Generally, previous ideas give birth to new paradigms that later become accepted by a few then eventually enter into general acceptance. What was once the enigmatic becomes the cultural norm. But this happens like a slow flood rising.

As an example, Postmodernism rose out of the ideas of Modernism, but it came later really. It was Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams who most influenced the Postmodernists, mostly through the Black Mountain School of poetics. The seeds of Postmodernism in poetry were borne out in the philosophies of Williams. He was a precursor.

While you can measure the trends in poetry and poetics through the 20th century, the underpinnings of Postmodernism are really philosophical. Philosophy has always been the cornerstone to the building of art. Jacques Derrida is credited with being the person who coined the phrase “Deconstruction,” the movement that popularized Postmodernism in art and literature, particularly literature. The year was 1967 and from then on through the 1980s, and perhaps midway through the 1990s, Postmodernism (i.e. Deconstruction) was the dominant theme in literature. That’s about par for the course because paradigm shifts occur about every 20 or 30 years.

But where did Derrida get his ideas from? Largely from philosophers such as Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Foucault, and Levi-Strauss. But who were they and when did they reach their peak of influence?

• Heidegger – philosopher, authored Being and Time (1927), field of hermeneutics, existentialist
• Kierkegaard - Christian philosopher, existentialist, authored Either/Or (1843)
• Husserl – Philosopher, phenomenology, authored Logical Investigations (1900)
• Foucault – Philosopher, epistemology, authored several notable books between 1961-1966
• Levi-Strauss – Anthropologist, authored The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

You can see that some of these influences upon Derrida are his own contemporaries, but a few are not. In fact, the most interesting of these are Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger, who himself was influenced by Husserl, who was Heidegger’s intellectual mentor, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. If you see a common strain here then you’ve done more than pay attention. There is a philosophical string that runs from the unorthodox religious ideas of Kierkegaard and from the nihilistic ideas of Nietzsche through time to Derrida. The seeds of Postmodernism as a philosophy were planted with these two 19th century thinkers and were watered by Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, but they didn’t bear real fruit until 100 years after the planting when Derrida and Foucault reigned and ushered in the era of Deconstruction.

So what happened that led to the acceptance of rhyme again in poetry? If the Deconstructionists were afraid of rhyme then why do their children and grandchildren embrace it? I think it may have something to do with a different philosophical string that has run through the 20th century but from a different list of philosophers.

The History of Rhyme
Even while the harvest of Postmodernism was running its course, there was a more conservative and traditional road moving through the wood, almost parallel to the other fork. That road led to the garden of the New Formalists, who started to gain recognition in the late 1980s and really engaged the culture of poetics and American life in the 1990s. Among these poets were Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Frederick Turner, and others who believed that traditional rhyme and meter was natural and the “right way” to write poetry. Dana Gioia has been the most influential of these and currently serves as the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts.

Rather than trace the history of philosophical thought under the respectable veneer of the New Formalists, I’ll simply trace their influences back to a root – not “the” root – who was a contemporary of Williams. Contemporaries to Gioia and Jarman include Howard Nemerov, Donald Justice, and Richard Wilbur. All of these are fine poets in their own right, but they are the core of the modern New Formalists. Preceding them, in the 1970s, was a man is perhaps best known for his children’s verse, X.J. Kennedy.

Wilbur, born in 1921, was the U.S. poet laureate from 1987-1988. Nemerov served in that position from 1988-1990. Anthony Hecht, who was popular from the 1950s through the 1970s and wrote a type of light verse that included double dactyls, for which he is well known. Allen Tate served as poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress, the forerunner to today’s poet laureateship position, from 1943-1944. He was very popular and widely read in his time and was friends with Robert Penn Warren, Hart Crane, and John Crowe Ransom, previously mentioned as the seed of the New Formalists.

Ransom is not really a major poet, but he influenced some major poets to include W.H. Auden, Tate, and Warren. He founded the school of New Criticism and has been a huge influence upon the conservative literary schools of the 20th century, the type of schools that Ron Silliman calls “The School of Quietude.” Ransom may be best known today for his essays than his poetry, but he has been influential in both regards.

So What? So Rhyme Is ‘Back In’
Today’s poets – and I am one of them – care much less about drawing lines in the sand than do either the New Formalists or the Language Poets, who might be said to be the two opposite extremes of the Right Wing and the Left Wing of American poetics. They are like the Dick Cheneys and the Dennis Kuciniches of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. But poets of the 21st century, at least at this juncture – I’ll say the post-911 poets – which I prefer to call Millennials, do not care about left/right distinctions in terms of what we can read and learn from. Today I might write a sonnet or a sestina, but tomorrow I may relish in a Beat-like political rant. There are no more boundaries.

I see this as a positive. There is no reason to place mumbo-jumbo on a pedestal above everything else. Likewise, it makes equally less sense to catapult rhyme and meter to a level of worship and adoration reserved only for the gods. Certainly, rhyme and meter and fun word games are both very good devices to be used in poetry (sometimes together). What today’s poet must do is study all strings of philosophical thought and poetics and take from them what is best suited for one’s own voice. The primary concern should be to offer something unique, but to do that you must know what has been done in the past, by whom, and for what purposes. When you nail it down (which you won’t) then, and only then, will you be able to offer your own sacrifice to the idols of device, rhyme or no rhyme.

Gary read from his recently self-published chapbook Meditations from the Mid-Atlantic. As he states in his introduction, Gary is from Pennsylvania – born and raised – and has spent most of his life here so he’s a bit of a regional voice. But he’s also a philosophy professor at several of the colleges and universities in this area, including Gettysburg College. And one of his biggest influences is Jack Kerouac, and you can see the strain of Kerouackian wry humor that runs through his verse.

I read from a new poem, unpublished, titled “Coup D’Etat”, which utilizes a pseudo-form that I invented, though I haven’t officially given it a name. I think I’ll call it a Crescendant. I like that as a name because the poem plays off of a building crescendo where each succeeding line is longer than the previous one until I get to the climax then the poem decrescendos to a rapid close. The poem can be any length as long as it follows this basic pattern. To illustrate, I’ll share this off-the-cuff piece, which I will title “Ode To Frederick”:

Ode To Frederick

Yes.
We read.
Poems at that.
In the most unlikely
place. Frederick, Maryland,
a place some call the land of
Frednecks. And when they ask
us where we are from, we will nod
and say, “From nowhere, which is some-
where, and where some might say is every-
where. But where? In Frederick, everyone is some
one and no one is alone.
That is. Until
Now.

This is a rather raw hack piece, but it illustrates the Crescendant very well. The form can utilize any combination of poetic devices as long as it sticks to the basic rubric of lengthier lines up until you decide to close it out, at which time you will shorten the lines but at a much more rapid pace than which you built them up. What do you think? Does it work as a form?