[Philip Quinlan]

The Devil, they say, makes work for idle hands. I found this in my "spoof" box while looking for something to answer Holly's thread. Anyone else have anything on the "gentle" art of criticism?

Ad-verse Criticism

Higgledy-piggledy
Circumlocutory
Telling its tale in a roundabout way

S1L6, out of 10, gets a nix
I am missing the meaning
You tried to convey

The poem’s debatable
Unpunctuatable
Prosody’s parlous by any parameter

Went for a sonnet
But fell over on it
With what I would christen “spasmodic pentameter”

Please be a formalist
Make your pomes normalest
Get on the “A” list, the playlist at Raintown

Work at the craft
Write vers-libre? Don’t be daft!
Do translation and crit, get a reading gig downtown

Show me, don’t tell
No “confessional”, hell
That’s so passé, and Sylvia did it to death

You may yet be a poet
But this doesn’t show it
The schema, you dreamer
Is in terza rima
And villanelles tell well of last dying breath

Triolets? Yes way!
Or write like Neruda did
Lemons have nipples, or so it would seem

I await your revision
With anticipation

There’s much here to like, though
That last line’s a dream…

[Ann Drysdale]

I've got a couple but they've been published - do they count?

[Philip Quinlan]

Why not?

No prizes...

P

[Ann Drysdale]

OK - here goes then

Against Rhyming

For U.A. Fanthorpe, who found me weeping on
the road to Jericho, having fallen among critics.

“Rhyme gets you noticed”. But it’s just a flier
To get the punters near the proper stuff.
It’s to free verse a poet should aspire;
Rhyming and chiming isn’t strong enough
To carry messages of any weight
And real involvement in the here and now
Demands the rawness of the naked state
Of language. One can just imagine how
Imaginative thought would feel the pinch
Of being squeezed into a villanelle
Whose rigid metre wouldn’t give an inch
When freedom’s feet demanded space to swell.
Who in their right mind would contrive a sonnet
If anything worthwhile depended on it?

[John Whitworth]

Here's one, though not by me. It was a winner in a long ago New Statesman competition and effectively prevented me from reading the good lady's works. I don't know who wrote it. Probably Bill Greenwell will know. It could have been him.

Higgledy-piggledy,
Dorothy Richardson
Wrote a long novel in
Search of her Muse,
Where, though I wouldn’t sound
Uncomplimentary,
Nothing much happens and
Nobody screws.

[Michael Cantor]

Concocting excuses
to post sad old crap
engenders abuses
all over the map.

When rhymes are all forced
the kingdom is lost.

[Petra Norr]

A ditty I once posted at the Gazebo, with advice on how to show, not tell:

Don’t Tell Me the Man in Your Poem Is Happy, Show Me


Show me bluebirds flying from his eyes
and a smile as wide as Wyoming’s sky.
Show that he shakes so hard with laughter
his head flies off and hits the rafters.
Show when he leaps so high with glee
he’ll crash through my computer screen.
Don’t tell me your man will bust a gut,
just show me a man who self-combusts!
.