Wow! Poetry is easy!

Ernie Kovacs as Percy Dovetonsils

from the Ernie Kovacs Show of the late 1950s

It used to be a difficult profession, poet. In order to succeed you had to please an audience that admired your skill at rhyming. Then one day it was decided by someone with way too much influence that poetry could be simplified by dumping rhyming. Whoever did that convinced the avant garde sophisticated consumers of poetry that this new form was superior. Geniuses like Ogden Nash were still respected, but his work was presented mostly as an amusing old-style exercise in wordsmithing. For example:

Candy is dandy
but liquor is quicker.

Now that’s poetry!

The New Yorker magazine publishes “poetry” in each weekly issue. Here is a snippet from the March 29, 2010 issue:

out of canyon, running out of cartoon
runs out of the cartoon, never to return.
That’s why this landscape looks forlorn.

Whoa. Deep. At least each line ends with the letter “n” with two of them ending with “rn.” Maybe that’s progress, but I don’t think I’ll spend too much time following modern poetry’s progress. Compare that to a piece by the late Shel Silverstein—

The Little Boy and the Old Man

Said the little boy, “Sometimes I drop my spoon.”

Said the old man, “I do that too.”

The little boy whispered, “I wet my pants.”

“I do that too,“ laughed the little old man.

Said the little boy, “I often cry.”

The old man nodded, “So do I.”

“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems

Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.”

And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.

“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.

Here is an article from the Reason Web site on this subject. Make sure you read the comments, which are revealing.