New Classic Poems – Contemporary Verse That Rhymes

New Classic Poems
Is Poetry Dead
brilliant poet-songwriters such as Leonard
Cohen and Tom Waits have almost bridged this
chasm; but their performances are an integral,
inseparable component of their special art. Their
song-poems are generally appreciated as auditory
experiences rather than as words read from
printed pages.
Most readers now have little or no
exposure to well-written, contemporary, formal
poetry. In our modern world, poems that rhyme
are merely old-fashioned; something we were
exposed to during school days when the works
of dead poets were exhumed for dissection in
English literature classes.
This book was born of frustration with
this state of affairs. Just as a preponderance of
badly-written free verse in no way diminishes the
genius of accomplished poets who have
mastered that genre, a plethora of commercial,
rhyming doggerel does not reflect the ingenuity,
grandeur, emotional impact and intellectual
integrity of well-constructed, formal poetry.
Unfortunately, even the best of modern,
formal poetry may not reach a potentially
appreciative audience. The most casual survey of
the current books and journals where poetry
appears confirms that, except for a few
publications with a bent towards neoformalism,
there exists an almost universal prejudice against
poetry that scans and rhymes. Neoformalists
believe good poetry does not require its readers
to possess special education or arcane sensitivity
in order to appreciate it properly. Classical poets
always directed their work at a literate,
thoughtful, but general audience. By contrast,
obscurantism seems to have been elevated to the
cardinal virtue of free verse. The more
obstinately such a work refuses to divulge its
meaning to the general reader, the more likely it
is to find a home on the printed page.
At the same time, the free verse style of
poetry considered avant-garde in our
grandparents’ generation has grown rather
inward-looking and stale. Its audience has
shrunk proportionately. The anæmic sales of
poetry books in comparison to other fiction and
non-fiction stands as irrefutable evidence of the
book-buying public’s indifference towards
contemporary poetic expression. If money talks
in our modern world, the silence is deafening.
Having utterly lost touch with the kind
of mass readership that Longfellow enjoyed in
his lifetime, present-day poets direct their output
mainly towards each other, publishing on the
Internet, or – when they can get their works into
print at all – in thin chap books and special
interest journals. Total press runs typically range
from dozens to a few thousand copies for a
“best seller.”
Moribund it may be; but formal poetry is
not quite dead in the 21 st Century.
With fortuitous timing, modern
technology comes to the aid of this
ailing, traditional art form. Although the
democratic medium of the Internet
indiscriminately spreads literary drivel, it also
allows serious and talented poets of all genres to
address a potentially wide audience.
With this in mind, Contemporary Formal
Poetry decided to throw open its Internet site to a
contest for rhyming, metrical poems only.
Detailed guidelines for what would and would
not be acceptable were posted. (Appendix A.)
The very concept of a poetry competition is
inherently problematic. Which poem is the
“best” – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The
Village Blacksmith, or Do Not Go Gentle Into That
Good Night Poet, teacher, editor and noted critic
John Ciardi once warned that “there will never
be a complete system for … ‘judging’ poetry.” 2
Therefore three equal prizes of CDN$ 50 were
initially offered for three works that would stand
out as being particularly praiseworthy in some
manner.
Poems in all formal “western” styles
were invited: sonnets, villanelles, odes, elegies
and epics, narratives, ballades, acrostics and so on.
Particularly welcomed were the longer works
that cannot get published elsewhere – the big
narratives that do not fit within the limited space
available in small periodicals, or inside the
cramped submission boxes on most of the postit-yourself
Internet competitions.
This contest immediately attracted an
untapped mother lode of poetic creativity. The
first entry, Peter Gilchrist’s polished narrative,
The Sparrow and the Hawk, appeared in the E-mail
in-box within hours of the contest’s
announcement. Several hundred entries were
11