Actually, I don’t know if a poet ever bit a dog, and that was not really the comment that inspired me to the current consideration. The real statement that I read on a website dedicated to poetry was—with names left out to protect the innocent—“Mr. Poet, winner of the Prestigious Poetry award, eschews traditional verse forms.” I have not read but the one work by the good poet that was presented on that page, and I am totally unfamiliar with the particular award, so I spare all judgment of either the author or award.
However, I am a teacher and a writer (And a damned good looker-upper!), and I have a pretty good idea of the meaning of the word “eschew,” and I could not help but marvel about why a poet would habitually avoid traditional verse for moral or practical reasons. Has traditional verse somehow promoted immoral actions for which the good poet might reasonably avoid it? The limerick is probably the most easily avoidable of all the traditional verse forms, and I know there are some bawdy limericks, downright pornographic even, but is it the limerick form that makes the short verses bawdy and pornographic? No, I believe the form itself can present any type of idea or any selections of words and claim innocence on all moral issues just as a wall can remain blameless if some presumptive artist draws a lewd and offensive representation of human interactions involving genitalia upon it. Both the wall and the limerick form remain as virtuous as can be. I will accede this same guiltless purity to non-traditional forms whatever that oxymoron can truly mean, so please do not think that I am singling out any verse forms. I am all-inclusive and by no shape whatsoever exclusive, but I do not believe that our good poet could be habitually avoiding traditional forms for moral reasons though I challenge anyone to write a limerick about a serious subject. That would take a real poet!
Was our eschewer habitually avoiding traditional forms for practical reasons? If so, what might those practical reasons be? He wishes to publish, and publishers do not publish poems written in traditional verse forms. Maybe. He struggles to write poems when he tries to write them in traditional verse forms. Maybe. I can see how these might seem like practical reasons, but, as a fellow poet, I just have to say that if I am being told that I should eschew traditional verse forms by publishers, then I am merely being forced into a new tradition by people who do not inspire nor help create my poetic vision. That does not seem practical to me as an artist. If I am a poet who avoids certain forms, traditional or non-traditional, because I cannot perform within their boundaries, well, then I am a poet who is practically limited by his weaknesses. That seems awfully impractical as an artist. If I cannot adjust to any form I choose artistically, I am fixed within my own customs and habits and seem to be most concern with my current conventions and established practices—and four of the five words in the previous sentence are synonyms of “tradition” or “traditional.”
Another element that sparked confusion within me is that I did read the poem of our good poet on that webpage, and I was amazed and amused by how similar it was in verse form to a poem that I had read a couple of days before by the queer latinx punk poet Christopher Soto (AKA Loma). Over the last few days, I have seen another five to six poems that have the same line shape and length, punctuation use, and arrhythmic sound patterns when read aloud. Again, I do not judge, but it seems like our good poet who eschews traditional verse forms finds himself amongst a group of several others who use the same forms. Around my place, if we do things two or three times in the same form, it becomes a ritual. Rituals are merely acts that represent traditions. Using the same verse form habitually, customarily, as a fashion or an honored practice is a tradition. Tomorrow, it will be outdated, old-fashioned, and out-of-style. If we are going to “eschew,” let’s really do it for moral and practical reasons, and not because some verse form is today’s tradition.
Finally, perhaps our good poet does not “eschew” at all nor does he bite dogs. It is quite possible that the individual writing the blurb about our good poet has a cheap thesaurus or has lazily abused an online thesaurus and did not suspect that some readers might be puzzled with the use of the word “eschew” in the context. If that be the case, I apologize for misunderstanding the good poet and would be content to bite the blurb writer.
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