I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;
So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.
As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.
Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.
Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)
But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.
Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.
Catch a Falling Star 
Being Prosaic
I admit it. I am prosaic. I think in sentences. I speak in paragraphs. I write in 5-paragraph essays. I should stop with the repetition of forms and the parallel structures, because that could easily be seen as poetic and defeat my argument in this post. I write prose. Simple. Direct. Declarative. But those last three are sentence fragments. Does that fit the model of prose? How about asking a question in the middle of a paragraph full of statements? Is that all simple enough to be truly prosaic?
Prose is focused on the everyday tasks of writing. It seems like the world thinks that the mechanical delivery of information in words and sentences should be boring, should be functional, should be simple and easy to understand.
I don’t mean to be pulling your reader’s mind in two directions at once, however. I need to stop confusing you with my onslaught of sentences full of contradictory and complex ideas. I should be more clear, more direct, and more to the point.
So here is my thesis, finally clearly stated; The magic of writing prose, it turns out, makes you the opposite of prosaic.
Simply stated; I am a writer of prose. I am too dumb about what makes something poetry to really write anything but prose. But I do know how to make a word-pile like this one that might just accidentally make you think a little more deeply about your writing… that is, if you didn’t give up on reading this three paragraphs ago. I find it useful to examine in writing how I go about writing and what I can do with it. I try to push the boundaries in directions they haven’t been pushed before. And hopefully, I learn something from every new essay I write. What I learned here is that I am prosaic. And that is not always a bad thing.
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Tagged as prose writing