I have been told
that my poems
don’t have meter
and rhyme,
that all verse
should have such pillars
to keep the
words from falling over.
But I agree with
literary billy goats: nay.
I mean, I know
how to use them,
but I don’t do
so unless my brain
is jumping over
regularly-spaced hurdles
on a day when
the world is too much with me
and I am
constrained to toe the line
at the grocery
or the bank
or use the menu
options
when calling my
internet provider.
I learned how to
punish my words
back in the days
of graduate school,
when I dissected
poems and epics
and studied meter
and form,
tetrameter and
pentameter,
trochees and
dactyls and terza rimas,
back when I used
yellow pencils
and leaky ball
point pens
and filled
spiral notebooks—
three-hole, lined
loose leaf
with cursive and
cursed abbreviations—
each floppy
collection, semester by semester,
becoming the
latest manuscript
in a rambling,
floppy bible
that was my
academic oeuvre.
These days I
store them in my cerebral cortex
where they can’t
do much harm,
and besides,
there’s no one
looking over my
shoulder,
no one grading
me off the curve
on whether my
iambic line
stumbled and
suffered a broken foot.
I write the
words as they come,
letting them
wander where they will
through meadows,
back alleys, or
a train bound
for Istanbul,
occasionally
reprimanding one
or giving
another a parole.
The meter these
days is mostly intuitive,
there but not really there,
like the flakes
in a Christmas snow globe.
I really don’t
want to associate
with the old man
from Nantucket.
I get published
easily enough,
though
admittedly The Barracuda Review
isn’t The
Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker.
But that’s okay
because I’m the judge and jury.
because the
waters of Lake Ponchartrain,
tell me that
it’s time for another poem.
As for rhyme, well,
that’s a different story.
I use it
sparingly if at all.
It was good
enough for Shakespeare,
though not
always—he often opted out—
and also for Homer
and Chaucer and Milton
and all those
big wigs, authors of the greatest hits,
with whom I
palaver in a tavern
in my more
interesting lucid dreams.
After all is
said and done,
not that it ever
really is,
I usually don’t
use rhyme,
don’t even
bother my brain
with searching
for those sound-a-likes
except from time
to time.
~William Hammett
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