A TOWERING FIGURE IN POETRY

April is NATIONAL POETRY MONTH (as decreed by the Academy of American Poets in 1996). Can there be any doubt that a poet of my stature* would be expected to contribute a poem to the celebration?

*about 5′ 7″

As it happens, I had a poem in my April 20 post, but that doesn’t count….unless I say it does, which I don’t, because I’ve composed a new poem for the occasion (or any occasion, for that matter). The point is that this occasion happens to be at hand and is sufficiently worthy of a work of such distingué distinktion:

ONCE A POET

Once I wrote poems;
Writing poems was fun.
Once I wrote poems;
Now I write none.

Once I wrote poems;
Poems were my life.
Once I wrote poems;
Then I met my wife.

I’m just joking, of course;
I still write, as you see —
For my wife loves my poems,
And I still loves she*.

*That end word was going to be me, but that might be the end of me, so I reconsidered.

Thank you very much, ladies and sentimentalmen. I’m glad you appreciate the heartfelt passion and savoir fairy that went into said poem. Your defecating applause on this historic day warms my cockles to the core. This calls for a curtain call. But I don’t have another new poem handy, so how about two oldies that survived previous publication:

RHYME GONE TO HELL

I don’t comprehend
why poems that rhyme
must, most of the time,
just rhyme at line’s end.
Who so decreed it to, as though it needed
to? And would it spell

nonsense if most rhymes
commence where lines start?
Dare we call it art?
Where I’m at, at times,
is: does it matter where rhyme is, if indeed
it’s where mine is? Hell!!!

TRYING TIMES

Forgive me, please, my verse you’ve read —
Much better works are in my head….
–  But they’ll remain there
–  Until the brain there
Learns how to extract gold from lead.

But enough about me. Let us close on a serious quote from ex-Chancellor of the aforementioned Academy of American Poets, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet/novelist, Robert Penn Warren, who was fittingly born (April, 1905) in what would become National Poetry Month:
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.