Monday 15 August 2016

Love Song to a Poetry Tutorial















Today, the monsters have arrived en masse
and you are hiding in a passageway
hypnotising your redundancy pay.

Blank verse?! A total no-no, and lines two
and three have accidentally rhymed themselves;
but it’s a weak rhyme, so we will allow it.

Their deconstructed reconstructed verse
plays tennis with the lights turned off. They can’t
complain, because they didn’t bring their racquets.

I should have said: most readers will be quite
confused by all your muddled images,
and this is great (but drop the metric feet).

Young poets steal their voices from each other. Listen:
cadences from each mouth.. are just.. like this?
They accidentally use iambic feet
which make/ the faux/ets bounce/ upon/ their feet?
Before the bounce disappears into normal speech patterns,
and the audience is hit in the face with a plank of triteness:
Bam! Which masquerades as insight.
What’s wrong these people?
Don’t they want find their own voices?
An entire generation with the same idiolect:
maydaymaydaymayday! Facepalm, banalbanalbanal.
They know how to write poetry the same way
that you or I know how to write a Béla Bartók sonata.

Changing targets mid-shot? Rhyming ‘feet’ with ‘feet’?
Losing the metre? Inconsistent line-count?
You’re getting there: only let down by the fact that
it seems to make sense. One last, completely irrelevant
‘versic paragraph’ and I’d say you’re done.

The poetry collective places its shoes
upon the smouldering hatstand. Elision
on smouldering; ‘loose iambics’ end line one.

You’ve totally lost them now: mission accomplished.

Elision on totally.


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