A Peep Into Poetry Poem by John Sensele

Poems span a myriad forms
Which defy facile formulations and notions.
Each poem by nature informs
The reader about categories, repetitions

Rhythm, internal and end rhyme
A poem may not rhyme. A poem may choose to snore or bore.
Traditional poetry lays claim
To meter, sound, rhyme and rigid structure to meet poetic folklore

Aspects. Modern poems promote free verse
Which divorces meter, strict versification
To reform poetic craft, to embrace
Freedoms that unleash creativity and nourish a poet's imagination

To roam free within and beyond stanzas and create poetry
Though dependent on the poetic line
As the building block of its story
Marries assonance, consonance, alliteration, personification to define, to refine

Vivid vistas into panoramic artistry in the new millennium
Where a poet elaborates, explores, expounds on any topic
The poet ponders away from the podium and odium
That behave as though an examination rubric

Pinpointed a fuzzy focus. Poems by nature convey a myriad meanings
To avid cosmopolitan readers. Poems differ from strings of prose
Exemplifying school magazine articles dressed up as seminal underpinnings
Gyrating too close to the nose and hose

Of a writer whose bull's eye targets transparency
For readers to lick simple understanding.
A poem while observing leniency and clemency
Is a well-rounded protagonist with a sacred sling

That engages a reader
Enjoining readers to work
Not like pupils shivering in front of a taunting teacher or a fault-finder
But to grant them freedom to harvest bona fide fruit as they break


Through images and messages beyond the surface
Beneath a poem's floor
To glean aspects that displace and outpace
Presumptions, misconceptions and distortions across a phonetic glow

Beyond spurious scansion
But scuba-dive nearer profound prosody
To an erudite expansion
Yonder the tragedy

That argues that analyzing a poem
Means a predetermined effort, retort or resort
To lump all poems into a naïve totem
As the preferred port

Where armchair critics paint puny portraits as the epitome
Of literary analysis
Whose comb
Panders to parametric paralysis

Hallucinogenic hypnosis
That bites more than it can chew
While cruising or sneezing in a comatose crisis
With a little less than a horny horseshoe.

Poems encapsulate complexity
In form and substance
Poems exhibit deft dexterity
Poems strike a balance between a fluke feat and nifty nuance.

In short, a poem can breathe total nonsense
Full of feelings
Full of common sense as a point of reference
Or summersault onto sublime swings devoid of wilted wings.