January 22, 2013
Tuesday Poem
Red Glove Thrown in a Rosebush
If our bodies weren’t so beautiful.
Even rabbits are made of firecrackers
so tiny they tickle your hand.
If only the infirmities,
blocked neural pathways, leg braces
and bandages didn’t make all these bodies
look like they’re dancing.
Breathing will destroy us, hearts
like ninja stars stuck into the sternums
of granite caesars. Should I worry
people have stopped saying how skinny
and pale I am? Paul may destroy the kitchen
but he’s the best cook I know.
Seared tuna, pesto risotto – where
did he get those tomatoes? –what a war
must be fought for simplicity!
Even the alligator, flipped over,
is soft as an eyelid. Hans, the trapezist,
got everyone high on New Year’s Eve
with a single joint, the girl he was with
a sequin it was impossible not to want
to try to catch without a net.
Across the bay, fireworks punched
luminous bruises in the fog.
If only my body wasn’t borrowed from dust!
.
.
by Dean Young
from Bender: New and Selected Poems
Posted by Jim Culleny at 06:15 AM | Permalink
Comments
Not to pick on this particular writing, but... Has society totally moved off the idea that a poem is written in verse rather than in prose, and/or that it should have meter, metaphor, and rhyme, to paraphrase some definitions I found of "poem?" What makes this writing a "poem," other than the author and publisher calling it one?
Posted by: sandgolds | Jan 22, 2013 5:40:15 PM
Sandgolds—To resolve your concern, start here and proceed forever:
1. Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define.
2. The art of apprehending and interpreting ideas by the faculty of imagination; the art of idealizing in thought and in expression.
3. Imaginative language or composition, whether expressed rhythmically or in prose
4. A verbal composition designed to convey experiences, ideas, or emotions in a vivid and imaginative way, characterized by the use of language chosen for its sound and suggestive power and by the use of literary techniques such as meter, metaphor, and rhyme.
5. composition in metre : a composition of high beauty of thought or language and artistic form, in verse or prose : a creation, achievement, etc, marked by beauty or artistry.
6. Poetry is emotion put into measure. Thomas Hardy
7. Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. William Hazlitt
8. Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. Christopher Fry
9. Poetry is a rhythmical form of words which express an imaginative-emotional-intellectual experience of the writer’s…in such a way that it creates a similar experience in the mind of his reader or listener. Clive Sansom
10. Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1802
11. (Poetry is) literature in metrical form : any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
12. Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry
13. Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is. James Branch Cabell
14. (Poetry is) a kind of ingenious nonsense. Isaac Newton
15. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him. Dylan Thomas
16. (Poetry is) texts in rhythmic form, often employing rhyme and usually shorter and more concentrated in language and ideas than either prose or drama www.longman.co.uk/tt_seceng/resources/glosauth.htm
17. Etc.
Posted by: Jim | Jan 22, 2013 7:25:24 PM
This is great!
Posted by: picklefarmer | Jan 24, 2013 6:59:29 AM
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