The Song

Every now and then I write a poem and I just don’t care what anyone thinks of it. I don’t care if I don’t follow the rules that make a good poem. But then in poetry there really aren’t any rules, are there? It seems like the moment someone tries to contain it or capture it, as it nears a definition; a poet comes along who bashes their too small container all to hell. And rightly so! Can you build a coffin for God? The Poetry is just too big and too full of life to ever be contained. Poets never do well with rules. They are too crazy, wild and irrepressible, and always have been, to ever follow rules. They are always on the fringe of society and often cross the line. Ovid was exiled for “the Art of Love” and for his womanizing of the wrong women, Percy Shelly left his wife and ran off with a teenage Mary Shelly, the extreme antics of Lord Byron are famous. (Pardon my gross over-generalizations here; I’m trying to make a point here, damn it!) Poets just never accept rules or limits and always have a passion and an awake-ness to living, a kind of intense, intentional desire to live, fully alert, to all the details and sensations of life. And sometimes because that flame burns so brightly and so passionately it burns all that they are, and all that they have in them, in a very short time. They will have it no other way though. They have made Achilles’ choice: it is better to have died young and gloriously.

I agree with Ezra Pound and the imagists that it is images that make good poetry. I also love rhyme, rhythm and lyricism and sounds and sensations. (One of my favorite poets is Keats for his youthful sensuality.) But sometimes I have something to say and an essay isn’t right, a story is too long, and I don’t have a pulpit to preach from anymore, so a sermon is out of the question. So I crank out a short rhetorical poem full of the much maligned use of anaphora, end stops and a deplorable lack of images. And other than the anaphora, I have no meter; neither do I use rhyme, metaphor, simile, or a host of other poetic devices. It’s didactic; it’s just preaching, but at least it is short and to the point. Heck, it isn’t even new or original. That’s the point of the anaphora. It is an echoing of all the voices from beyond time itself that urge us, merge us into life out of our slumber; or liberate us from the slumped shoulders of a life lived according to a notion of how someone else thinks we should live and according to their estimation of who we are.

The Song:

Everyone’s gotta’ song in them to sing.
If only they will listen to it.
If only they won’t compromise it.
Just sing it.
Sing it out.
Out beyond the local laughter
Of the people who know them.
‘cause only strangers can hear the greatness of
That song that is in them
That song that is in you
That song that is in me.
Thus spoke Emerson
Thus spoke Thoreau
Thus spoke Whitman
Thus spoke Ghandi,
Thus spoke Jesus
The Kingdom is in you
Let it out—sing it into the world
Give it birth.
Incarnate it.