Monday, March 23, 2015

You Were A Wizard, Harry

"Vimes had found old Stoneface's journal in the Unseen University library.

The man had been hard, no doubt about that. But they were hard times.

He'd written: 'In the Fyres of Struggle let us bake New Men, who Will Notte heed the old Lies.' But the old lies had won in the end.

He said to people: you're free. And they said hooray, and then he showed them what freedom costs and they called him a tyrant and, as soon as he'd been betrayed, they milled around a bit like barn-bred chickens who've seen the big world outside for the first time, and then they went back into the warm and shut the door-"

--Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

Monday, March 09, 2015

Poems That Don’t Rhyme

Poems That Don’t Rhyme


There are things that annoy me; they render me unhinged:
Like bells that were off-colour, they incorrectly tinged.
They’re written by lovers and those who are spurned;
And also by scholars, those men who are learned;
They’re penned down by artists who make such a fuss;
And those nature-lovers who fawn over does.
I know those that say it’s not much of a crime,
But I really can’t stand poems that don’t echo.

There are those who can pun on a run-on sentence,
Weaving witty words that enchant and entrance;
Spoken word’s tolerable if it’s give and take,
And haikus are swell when you’ve swallowed some sake –
But a printed down piece, I have to concede
I’ve a terrible need voicing what I just read.
It’s jarring when those sounds don’t match up on time,
And that’s why I don’t like poems that don’t sound right.

If there were a contest, Dr Seuss would win it!
Every clause has a pause, and his flaws are minute.
Ogden Nash too, is on solid rhyme ground:
His stanzas are sharp, but sometimes they wound.
As are the lyrics that at concerts they blare;
Their rhythmic pattern makes me shed a tear.
These are the verses that are in their prime!
Not like those hateful poems that don’t end in homonyms.

Let’s veto all free verse, this era’s cliché,
And let all our diphthongs jostle and buffet;
It’d be so much better! Much better instead,
If we all raise our pencils and follow my lead.
It might not be brilliant as I may have hoped,
But you won’t get run over by a bike or a moped.
It will be outstanding and simply sublime,
If we all could stop writing poems that don’t use similar-sounding syllables.