He Might Get Published Today, But He'd Never Get A Grant (from MySpace)

Current mood: resigned

Category: Writing and Poetry


The Sorrow of Love

William Butler Yeats


The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;
Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.


Isn't this some tired, corny-ass, irrelevant shit? Thank Goodness today's poets reject rhythm and rhyme. And meaning.

As Archibald MacLeish famously said, "A poem should not mean, but be." (Ars Poetica)

He gave high school students permission to not understand poetry, and poets permission to not write it.



As I see it, most poetry today falls into one of the following categories:


1) Crotch-grabbing rants, la Def Jam (performance poetry)
2) Greeting card verse (amateur poetry)
3) Spam with line breaks (academic poetry)
4) Bad Prose (prose poems)



(Deeplip, who always strives to be understood, rhymes because she can, and who, consequently, will never get a grant from The New Jersey Council on the Arts.)