[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…