Poetry, a Rebuttal

for John Reuter

Poetry is so simple, you say,
that anyone can do it.
The poetry world is full
of people who don't have anything
to talk about, their stories
aren't interesting, their poetry
unfathomably bad, you say.

Since it is so easy to write poetry,
I want to write you this poem.
I didn't take me long to write,
it's not full of similes and assonance.
Though perhaps "assonance"
has an assonant quality to it.
And perhaps "unfathomably bad"
is an analogy of some kind.
And perhaps I can't avoid being a poet
as much as you cannot avoid
being an intellectual.

Poetry is as old as language itself.
It is in the drinking water.
It is the air that a baby breathes
for the first time, coughing.
It is deep within our bones.
It clutches us to remember it
every night before we rollover to sleep.

Poetry (complex mistress and forgotten
utopia), there is a monster at your gates.
He spits fire and quietly decays
the foundation of your home.
He is the holy Intellectual, pious
to the god Aristotle and all
his linear plot structures.

And yet, the glass blowers blow
the kilns still fire
the canvasses dance with paint
the blank page yearns for words.

It is these things that give me solace.
The progression of art is alive
and it breathes in poetry
like gust of wind,
filling the lungs with music.

This work by Scott Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.