Contemporary poetry
does not have allure for me.
It is full of adjectives,
but at the end I ask, “what gives?”
No meaning, point, or moral clear,
no joy or anger, love or fear.
Words are crafted carefully,
but in the lines I do not see
any interesting story.
It is boring, I am sorry!
What happened to imagination?
Ecstasy and indignation?
If Donne or Longfellow wrote now,
editors would not say “wow!”
Verses passionate by Blake
publishers would not take.
“That Poe guy’s maudlin, Yeats pretentious;
Allen Ginsberg is tendentious.
Tennyson’s an epic bore;
his lengthy rhymes of days of yore
are not to our liking,” they’d say.
I would like to see the day
when poetry regains emotion.
I even have the novel notion
that we’d welcome the returning
of passionate and lustful yearning.
Of rhyme and meter, song and lyric.
Or of verses bitterly satiric.
If I read more sterile free verse
I’ll toss the magazine and curse.
Wrote this shortly after I began writing poetry and reading more of it. I found out The New Yorker receives 600 poetry submissions a week and publishes 2 of them. When I learned this I thought "how bad were the other 598?!" It's mostly pretentious wordplay.
