Free Verse
When I was ten or eleven I learned of a beguiling opportunity. A local university press was putting together a poetry collection to be called For Kids By Kids. As the title suggests, kids (like me) would be the authors. Those days, even though I didn’t enjoy the company of kids, I was a vocal proponent of what you might call Kid Power. In short, I wanted grown-ups to respect, if not be influenced by, the talents and wisdom a kid (me) could have.
Within an hour of learning of this rarest of opportunities, I composed a four-line ditty, which I titled “Mondays.” It reads thusly: The dog is chewing the paper/The baby is hungry, crying/As I get in the shower the phone rings/Oh the Mondays are so tiring.
If you want to know why a kid would communicate such an adult scenario to an audience of other kids, then get in line behind me. Even I cannot say how or why I landed so quickly on such discordant subject matter. We had no dog. We had no baby. And we had no showering facility; in our house, we took baths and nothing but.
No doubt you’re also assuming the esteemed editors and contributing editors and associate editors rejected that poem outright.
But they did not.
Apparently they gave the piece of work an uncommon amount of scrutiny because roughly three years passed before the rejection slip arrived. It included the most heartfelt, impassioned apology this side of Jimmy Swaggart. By all accounts, the editors had really, really wanted to include “Mondays,” but in the final analysis they went in another direction and gracefully wished me the best of luck in placing it in my scrapbook.
Still more years passed before this poetry compilation was published. The kids who wrote the verses that comprised this collection were by now wearing their hair to their shoulders and drinking tall boys and grooving to ZZ Topp and driving second-hand Camaros, as was their intended audience.
Well, that may not be entirely true. Many of them, like me, were probably still camped out alone in their bedrooms on weekend nights, scribbling free verse, and if these teens were anything like me, these lines were chaotic, Ginsbergian, semi-Beatnik, semi-angry lines about phonies and bullies and capitalists and Ed Meese.
Anyway, I never looked at For Kids By Kids, but I hope its poems at least rhymed.
Today, even while I’m still hostile to phonies, bullies, and Ed Meese, I uphold the opinion that poetry should rhyme and scan. This judgement goes counter to everything that was taught in the universities when my forehead last rested on those desktops.
Likewise, the book editor of our local daily sees fit to publish a poem each Sunday in his section, but he has one abiding rule for the submissions: they must not rhyme. For the longest time I wondered what kind of wrongheaded motivation fueled this rule. Not long ago he solved the riddle by asserting that no contemporary mind could dare write a rhyme that rivals the greatest rhyming poetry in the Western canon.
I suppose he’ll be pleased to know that I can meet him half way. He’s right that he’s unlikely to discover the next Alexander Pope. But how dreadful it must be to open those submissions day after day and see nothing but agglomerations of pretentious words that gather with a seeming randomness on the page. How can he possibly determine what to publish and what to ashcan?
In 1984 I finally published a piece of free verse, in our college newspaper. I present it here:
Poetry
Made like
T
H
I
S
Takes
up
SPACE
That, for the record, best sums up my stance on this very important issue.
Within an hour of learning of this rarest of opportunities, I composed a four-line ditty, which I titled “Mondays.” It reads thusly: The dog is chewing the paper/The baby is hungry, crying/As I get in the shower the phone rings/Oh the Mondays are so tiring.
If you want to know why a kid would communicate such an adult scenario to an audience of other kids, then get in line behind me. Even I cannot say how or why I landed so quickly on such discordant subject matter. We had no dog. We had no baby. And we had no showering facility; in our house, we took baths and nothing but.
No doubt you’re also assuming the esteemed editors and contributing editors and associate editors rejected that poem outright.
But they did not.
Apparently they gave the piece of work an uncommon amount of scrutiny because roughly three years passed before the rejection slip arrived. It included the most heartfelt, impassioned apology this side of Jimmy Swaggart. By all accounts, the editors had really, really wanted to include “Mondays,” but in the final analysis they went in another direction and gracefully wished me the best of luck in placing it in my scrapbook.
Still more years passed before this poetry compilation was published. The kids who wrote the verses that comprised this collection were by now wearing their hair to their shoulders and drinking tall boys and grooving to ZZ Topp and driving second-hand Camaros, as was their intended audience.
Well, that may not be entirely true. Many of them, like me, were probably still camped out alone in their bedrooms on weekend nights, scribbling free verse, and if these teens were anything like me, these lines were chaotic, Ginsbergian, semi-Beatnik, semi-angry lines about phonies and bullies and capitalists and Ed Meese.
Anyway, I never looked at For Kids By Kids, but I hope its poems at least rhymed.
Today, even while I’m still hostile to phonies, bullies, and Ed Meese, I uphold the opinion that poetry should rhyme and scan. This judgement goes counter to everything that was taught in the universities when my forehead last rested on those desktops.
Likewise, the book editor of our local daily sees fit to publish a poem each Sunday in his section, but he has one abiding rule for the submissions: they must not rhyme. For the longest time I wondered what kind of wrongheaded motivation fueled this rule. Not long ago he solved the riddle by asserting that no contemporary mind could dare write a rhyme that rivals the greatest rhyming poetry in the Western canon.
I suppose he’ll be pleased to know that I can meet him half way. He’s right that he’s unlikely to discover the next Alexander Pope. But how dreadful it must be to open those submissions day after day and see nothing but agglomerations of pretentious words that gather with a seeming randomness on the page. How can he possibly determine what to publish and what to ashcan?
In 1984 I finally published a piece of free verse, in our college newspaper. I present it here:
Poetry
Made like
T
H
I
S
Takes
up
SPACE
That, for the record, best sums up my stance on this very important issue.
posted by JW at jwopks@gmail.com at 9:07 PM
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