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Saturday, July 31, 2010

Autobiographical Rant of my Perplexity at Prosody

I am absolutely dumbfounded by my contemporaries’ nostalgic
View of the world and the way it’s unfurled by their lack of rhyme and reason.
Endlessly astounded by my wordsculptors’ sans logic
Way of the word and the way it’s uncurled by their smack of time and season.

My Grandfather was a sculptor and I was raised by him to believe
that “good art shouldn’t require an explanation.” Something about those bright blue
wizened eyes staring from a septagenarian’s crinkled face made me think
he was right, as he towered over me at an impressive six foot four
with broken fingernails oozing ignored blood at the end of a trunk of muscle
emblazoned with memorabilia from a war that he didn’t talk about.

An eagle on a flag, now muddled into a bluish blur, The word “Mom”
though she used to flog him until he was bloodied and broken.
The name “Mert” a girl that though he was once enamoured with
his children know nothing about. All this on that monstrous frame with a custom-made shirt
amidst the sprawling compound of house, workshops, stable, and sheds
that were built by those hands, scarred into callouses that felt like broken concrete.
Hands that could make glorious crafts that could scatter the light of Central Park
in a way that supernal Haphaestus might covet.

Or break a man’s eyesocket. I guess it depended on the job.

But I digress.

The wisdom he imparted to the world should have been my focus. The books he wrote, the art school he founded, the community theatre he played an integral role in, the family he took care of, and knowledge his interns departed with. But as he also taught me about art, there will always be something you will wish you had done differently; eventually anyways.

The question.
That plagues me.
is…
What is poetry?

When I spoke of my Grandfather, was that poetry? Is it if I call it such? If I call it prose can you call it poetry, and can we both be right?
Call it poetry and I’ll agree to disagree and perhaps then we’ll be in agreement.
‘Cause I think it’s informal prose.

If I were to add some esoteric mysticisms to the nomenclature
Perhaps I’d be fortuitous enough, despite it’s loquaciousness,
To have it appropriated by the New Yorker,
Or to inflate the quandary of quixotic ruminations at an august slam poetry meet.

But that’s not how I was raised.

Thus you will find that I tend to stick to the musical and beautiful, logical and mathematical, eloquent and traditional,
Sides of my craft.
I can only hope that should it list I shall then ride high.

-B.