I know I write too much

of this crappy poetry

“Nature” “sadness” “you”

then “me” “me” “me” “me””me”

I write it for many reasons

most too hard to explain

but once I start my writing

it becomes almost a game;

I’m player one, Literacy two,

I feel it then he rhymes

and so we work together,

it doesn’t take much time,

which is why too many syllables

sometimes mean I am offbeat –

that is Literacy taking lead

but I won’t accept defeat!

This poem is what I call a “quickie”, that I knocked out one evening. It seems, on the surface, to be simply a silly rhyme - this is intentional! As an English Literature student, hoping to lecture poetry as one of my primary teaching jobs, I have studied a variety of poems with a variety of teachers in a variety of methods.

What I dislike about the modern English course is the way poems are broken down to the point of permanent disintegration. Mistake me not; I understand how to study poetry, and I appreciate the extreme breakdown to an extent, but what annoys me is the way certain blindingly obvious elements which would have contributed to the poem are totally ignored.

The most obvious example in literature of an overlooked factor contributing to the finished project is to do with Dickens; how frequently do so many people forget that Dickens was paid by the page? “Why do you think he decided to spend such long time repeating his description of the walls in ’A Tale Of Two Cities’?”Well whether or not he possessed some extreme desire to repeat his intricate description of the walls, I am quite sure that the prospect of more money might have had the slightest amount to do with it.

Back to poetry; when discussing why the poet used this exact word at this exact point with this exact number of syllables, I feel I must restrain myself from leaping onto the table and screaming “Because it fits into their chosen rhyming scheme! Why does everyone seem to think that poets think their thoughts and feel their feelings naturally in rhyme?!”

’Tis a small point I am making here, and of course I understand the thought and time and effort that goes into writing poetry (I have written better pieces than this, surprisingly!), I just thought for a moment, that we should imagine a poet who quite literally sees writing poetry as an entertaining, money-making game; who thinks a rhyme is a rhyme, belittles the content therefore bewildering the frantic GCSE student.