December 2016

December 2016

Gliding down the moving stairs

you seemed so eminently ignorable

Now that you’re the President, it’s...

what word am I looking for?...deplorable.

 

Author, tycoon, educator

so very, very rich

a political Lothario moving on us like a b***h.

 

Left for dead you yet have risen

to face our unconcealed derision

You grasped the poles of the city gates

and pulled them down around you

You even got twenty-nine percent

of voters of a brown hue.

 

Stand you now with sword upraised

in media’s unflinching gaze

Teach us, Leader, that we may learn

from a frequent guest of Howard Stern

Send them to us, your oaf-ish tweets

so that educated, smug elites

may feel themselves superior

to you and your flown-over friends

in the heart of our interior.

 

O Trump we hate you

O Trump we await you

Reviews

[JayG]

You're forcing the line to the needs of the rhyme. And because it's obvious to the reader that you are, it detracts. As in all poetry, it's the thought that matters. In structured poems, the rhyme should seem almost accidental, because it fits the thought so well. But when you force "swollen glands," because you needed a rhyme for "hands," it's calling attention to the choice of rhyme, not the thought you're trying to convey.

Next is consistency. If you're going to present structured poetry the structure matters. Like it or not, the reader has expectations based on the poetry they've read and enjoyed. Things like prosody, stanza structure, and more, count. So when you abandon rhyming on the first couplet of S2 (and meaning, too) it's as much of a jarring note as the random length of the stanzas and lack of cohesion between stanzas so far as iambic or Trochaic line openings.

There's a lot more to structured poetry than is obvious. You might want to take a look at the excerpt, on Amazon," to Stephen Fry's, The Ode Less Traveled. It's a great intro to structured poetry.