To Professor Lee M. Johnson: ON POEMS

I always knew I did not like the poems
of our day, but never knew just why
those golden poems, read from olden tomes,
inspired, while “free verse” seemed but a lie.
I knew I loved those poems Grandad read
out loud to me before I went to bed,
but hated E.E. Cummings and his ilk,
whose modern poems trash taste, metre, and rhyme.
My loves and hates remain the same today,
but now, from Johnson, I have learned the why:
decorum, suiting forms to what they say,
true poems suits to echo forms on high.
A poem is not a poem which doth cease
pursuing its creator's ordered peace.

Note: This is the second in my series of anti-free-verse poems, and, I think, the best. It is also particularly significant to me since it references two of the key influences on my writing and my appreciation of poetry: my grandfather, and Professor Lee M. Johnson. I have to admit that I'm probably a little hard on e.e. cummings here, but for me he functions as a symbol of where modern poetry went wrong, and I am here treating him as a symbol rather than a person. He was, in fact, quite capable of writing sonnets and other complex traditional forms of poetry himself (see, for example, his “the Cambridge ladies...” sonnet), and it is this symbolic unfairness to him that I address in my third anti-free-verse poem.

Note also that the proper reading of this particular poem depends upon both the proper and the modern improper pronunciation of the word “poem”.