Pundits of Prosody

Castle & Sun by Paul Klee

Pundits of Prosody

“All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms

of prosody, is prayer.”-- Merriam-Webster.

Prosody has its

origins in Latin and

Greek; revered by some.

As if to

imply that “serious” poets must

study form like

Rabbinical scholars, like

medical students dissecting corpses to

understand Nature’s secrets.

Listening to linguists discuss poetics

saying that sans classical form-aesthetics

all verse pales, becomes almost pathetic,

to me is delusional, leagues from prophetic--

because poetry that finds its own way,

foraging through language, keeping form at bay,

can emerge as muscular, inspired, simply majestic,

                                                                 magnetic,

                                                               athletic,

                                                            frenetic,

                                                         kinesthetic,

miraculously just much more       energetic.

It is said/written that without adequate knowledge of the art of

versification, a poem can become barren, static, & soulless, like

a computer simulating music versus an accomplished musician

interpreting it emotionally, but speaking only for myself, to rely 

too heavily on pedantic parameters is stifling. In High School,

when it became apparent I had a talent for writing, my English

teachers complained:

“Glenn, you have already developed a writing style that violates

many of the rules of grammar even before you fully understand

them. You attack language like a berserk bear in a bakery. You

should not attempt to write like Faulkner or Ginsberg when you

are only 15 years old.”

Each time that I approach classic poetic forms

    & have to be concerned with tempus & morea,

               become obsessed with the prosodic principles

                     of feet, meter, & pernicious syllable count, using

                            the pyrrihic, trochee, spondee, dispondee, &

                     sapphic--merging into dactyls & anapestes, possibly

                morphing into the troglodyte state of being a hoary

           spiny-scaled pungent Dactylic Hexameter, 

my head swims with the artificiality

of the limp & lame language,

the hollowness of the murky mandates

& damned diatribes--                                 and my POEtic spirit

                         becomes enraged at the

                         claustrophobic characteristics

                         & the malicious manacles;

                   

because my poetry rises 

like dew on mountain meadows,

not from some fenced-off,

plowed, tilled, & sown parcel of platitudes;

it is written to be spoken, to be sung, & like jazz, it creates its own

measures during the act of creation--& I tell you enthusiastically that

when prose copulates with phonetics rather than merely being bound

by prosaic prosody, it embraces pitch, volume, tempo, & rhythm more

naturally, viscerally, & organically.

It is born.

It breathes.

It is alive. 

Although I respect

poets who study their art, still I

roam free, & off leash.

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over on dVerse Poets MTB/FFA

Our guest host at dVerse is asking for us to write with Prosody in mind. This 

poem is my maverick version of a Haibun, opening with a haiku, followed by 

two stanzas of Collom Lunes, followed by a stanza of rhyming verse, 

AAAABB, that becomes a sliding list of AAAAAA, followed by a pure prose 

stanza, followed by a dialogue stanza, followed by a Wave stanza, ebb & flow, 

descending & ascending, capped with creative spacing of line breaks and stops, 

followed by a straight-up free verse stanza, followed by another prose stanza, 

capped with an epilogue Haiku.

          

Would you like to hear me read this poem to you?