Poetastery Poem by David Bedell

A man was versed in rhymery;
His poetry was punnery
And gimmickry and devilment,
While elements of eloquence
He misemployed and altered so
They faltered on their wordy wings,
All burbling and babbling,
And o'er the page did lope and trot
His trope and tralatitious tricks
Of euphuism intermixed
With metaphor and rheticor
(And anagrams and cacograms)
And similes and synecdocs-
Unorthodox his orthograph,
And poor his craft in spouting rhymes,
With vowels plied in assonance
And dissonance of consonants
Alliterated lawlessly
While flawlessly his footage failed
To innovate or deviate
From iambs in tetrameter;
So uniform, his measure lacked
A stress and slack diversified;
He versified unmanifold,
He wasn't bold, he was in mode
Of pounding meter rather set,
Allowing neither anapest
Nor dactyl, lest, all patternless,
His verse should seem as doggerel
Or chatterel in groggibus-
And macaronic were his words;
They cácophónously concurred
(His accents prone to be transférred) ,
And hackneyed tones three times recurred,
Declining to redundancy,
With tendency for tedium
And mediocre idiom;
Continuing interm'nably,
Eternally a monotone,
Thus on it droned and on it dragged
And never lagged but weary-went,
Till overspent in versiment
It dropped and, choppy, sloppy, stopped.

(1977)