_______________________
That Which To The Ear Rings
Weird, Probably Is

There's something awfully 'precious' about rhymed poetry.
It's the language of another age that does it, because yes, people
did speak better English~ more flowery, more representational
than today. They tended to waltz around the lines, spending
time savoring and sniffing: to hint, not to hammer so hard
at what they meant, and for that time, the language of poetry
reflected the parlance of an age that has gone the way of the
daguerreotype and the crank RCA - and even before that -
the buggy and the unpaved roads of yesteryear.


Whenever I read contemporary poetry that rhymes, it seems
to be caught in a time warp, using archaic contractions and lots
and LOTS of imagery. It skirts away from the realism we live
with everyday, and though it may be quaint, it rings false - rather
clankingly. I think that poetry is part of the energy soaked up in
the time lived, and if the world reflects a sense of urgency,
of stripped images and immediate clarity, it does no good
for us to be gazing through gauze, hiding out in thickets of
rhymed couplets - that so often sound forced and stilted -
like the poses in old pictures.


I often find rhymers to be hopeless romantics, and their overview
of the human condtion just a tad on the exalted side. There's a
washtub full of hyperbole, a dearth of simile and metaphor
that may have wooed the socks right off of great grandmother,
but in lines that sound forced to this set of early 21st century ears.
Taken in context, the poetry of bygone days is fine, perhaps not
my personal favorite, but true to a word photography indigenous
to the time in which it was written- with the exception being
Shakespeare, who is never old, always genius- whose words we
enter as we would a theatre expecting a play- accepting the
kiss of his perfect, oddly-accented and tumbling words
to enter us like wind.


In short, the sound of most contemporary rhyming verse rings
false because it's out of its time and so self-consciously, the reader
feels its dissonance, and it's "trying too hard to be pretty". Good,
strong modern poetry is not without imagery. It's not without
power or beauty, and what it has that the structured poems
aping old masters does not - is absolute, irrefrutable fidelity
to the voice of the time in which it lives. It's opening the
mouth and echoing. It's real - and it's far more moving
than attempts to count out syllables and stresses.


We're 'pressed between pages' only in the past -- and our
words emerge out of daily living - from current events, from the
throats of people caught in the twilight of the gods and still strumming
what instruments we have -- strung with the intestines of the
contemporary dog who wags us and often musically - despite
the absence of our most careful affectations.



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