Nowadays rhyming poems are old fashioned and played
Remnants of a bygone day
Great passion therein may have lie
True beauty, deep sadness, poignant love
Gnawing fear, righteous anger, creeping horror
All encompassing joy, all embracing connection and self obliterating awakening made manifest
But now poems of this nature have inevitably declined into the banal and the trite
The insipid and the syrupy
The tacky and the treacled
What can they say to us now that we haven’t already heard a thousand times before?
Once the free verse so commonplace today would have been denounced
And decried as pedestrian, prosaic, puerile, hedonistic, heretical hack
Poetry was for the privileged few ensconced in their fortress of form and formality
Free expression held in check by an elite tyranny of taste
The tyrants told us only they held the keys to knowledge, wonder and grace
And we believed and we bent our knees and we were silent
Those with anti-formal vision met with familial resistance, social pressure and authoritarian censure
And suffered from self-doubt, self-loathing and other self-inflicted insanities
But a stalwart few stayed the course
Whitman never let go his messianic dream
Pound clearly stated precisely what there was to say
Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness yet journeyed ever on
And now we are free
The chains of yore yoke us no more
The unsophisticate of yesterday has become the new sophistication
In these post modern days of now, of hip, of lost convention
Big Poetry has boldly sounded the battle cry
No more must we emulate the masters of old, but cry out now with our own voice
Calling an end to the tyranny of formal structure
Let’s slash these fading rules away once and for all
Let’s hurl them onto the decaying trash heap of history
Let’s peel back the layers and finally say it already
Let’s deconstruct the couplets and the ballads and the sonnets
Hell, let’s not only finish off rhyme, let’s rid ourselves of tone and meter and beat
Let’s crush the use of consonance, of assonance, of alliteration, of metaphor
Let’s stop with all the words, all the words, all the words, all the words
All the thought, all the feeling, all the sense, all the meaning
Let’s boil it all down and reduce it to one final nothing of an exclamation point!
The ultimate culmination of man
The rise from nothing to the primal urge
To sense of self, self realization
To self expression, to carnal knowledge
To alienation, self awareness
To freedom, to life, to death, to nothing
The word upon the page no word at all
The blank page, origin to terminus
No longer bound by the chains of the past
Of stale decrees we have no more need
Into the future march firm and steadfast
Our heads held high, voices clear at long last
Like prophets of old we dare not to plead
No longer bound by the chains of the past
No more must we wander as the outcast
Fear not dear readers, it’s our time to lead
Into the future march firm and steadfast
Create without law, the whole of our task
Tis our own heart’s truth that now we must heed
No longer bound by the chains of the past
Join us in battle, the die has been cast
Yesterday’s gone, let it go, leave it bleed
Into the future march firm and steadfast
Stride into the void, our spirit is vast
Strike at the heart, stab and thrust, plant the seed
No longer bound by the chains of the past
Into the future march firm and steadfast
Don’t let the ghosts of a dead age dictate their terms
They’ve had their day
This time is ours
Let yourself go
Step into the light
Rhyme? No more!
Big Poetry ain’t buyin’!
And now I present
“Echoes of a Bygone Age”
With no more ado: