Poetry 2024

 

PoBoy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Words

Or

Feelings

        “Anytime is sometimes sometimes. Sometimes is sometimes anytime. Sometimes is always sometimes. But only anytime is always sometimes And Eddie time is all the time”:  Eddie Tebbe (Sir Bone Funk)

 

        That is poetry. Poetry inspires feelings, patience and verbal skills; poetry asks/teaches us to make sense of words; poetry invites us to listen and learn. Poetry will speak to us if we listen; it will resonate and amaze. “We’ve all walked into the bar of a joke we’ll never get” begins a poem by Dobby Gibson.

         “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold; the Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.” Is the beginning of a poetic tale by Robert W. Service, who began another with “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon” that’s the stuff that resonates and amazes a reader.

        You could say that the reading of poetry is coming back with somewhere between 20-25% of the population reading it…(Quora) or you can say it has never gone away; that poetry has always been with us or that poetry is stuff that other people read and why they appreciate it is a mystery. After all, poets kill themselves don’t they? Nobody knows why, just that a large bunch do.

        Poetrysoup.com will list  of the top 100 most popular and best famous poets who committed suicide if you care to read some less than relative to your life information; they’re (poets) a weird bunch and who knows what the heck goes on in their mind/lives to want to express their thoughts/feelings only to have no other recourse but to end their lives for their own reasons which nobody knew because we were busy trying to find some obscure meanings, justifications and possibly lessons that in some fever had them put thoughts on paper for the world to ponder. I wonder if Elizabeth Bishop’s brain aneurism wasn’t some kind of force of nature euthanasia.

        Some of your favorite songs are merely poetry put to music; some pieces of music are merely pure poetry. Poetry has rhythmic qualities of a myriad of forms from limericks to sonnets; Hallmark cards to Haikus; little ditties to profound empirical discourses; odes to enjambment. Oddly enough, you don’t spy many folks carrying a book of poetry with them as they make their daily rounds; in fact, oddly enough, you rarely see anyone carrying books of any kind as they make their daily rounds (kindle excluded). You will occasionally spy a newspaper reader, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here (bless them anyway). I personally think that carrying a book of poetry around with you would be a pretty cool thing to do (although I haven’t done that …yet).

        Rarely do I hear anyone start a conversation with “as Garcia Lorca (or Pablo Neruda, Silvia Plath, Emily Dickenson and/or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) would say….”; however, start someone off with “there once was a man from Nantucket…” and off you’ll go on a whimsical train of thought. Not exactly Proustian existentialism, but, what the hey.

        Begin a conversation with something by John Prine, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan and people’ll match you old school lyrics word for word; more recently try a little Jay Z, Alicia Keys or John Legend. Barry White, Teddy Pendergrass, Mary J. Blige, all poets. Locally, and, true dat, who can deny, Doctor John, Allen Toussaint and Little Queenie Harris were all poets extraordinaire?

        New Orleans has forever been a poet’s dream cave to mine, a Gold Mine, so to speak. Justin Lamb, Sunni Patterson, FreeQuency, Skye Jackson, Gina Ferrara and Brad Richard are here. There is a New Orleans Poetry Festival every year; ten years running. There are poetry jams going on in New Orleans, ten different (at least) locations around the city. If you’re interested, you will find them. Why go watch poets expound their thoughts? I don’t know, but somehow it’s a pretty cool thing to do; who knows who you’ll meet and maybe hook up with on an intellectual mammalian level?

        What are poems about? In The Daily Feast, Bart Schneider writes poems about sunny side up eggs, dirty martinis and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Raych Jackson wrote: A Sestina For A Black Girl Who Does Not Know How To Braid Hair (a sestina is an intricate thirty-nine line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end words in six stanzas). A verse pattern split into two 7/4 measures and a single bar of 8/4 followed by a one bar of 7/4 is quite evident in John Lennon’s song All You Need Is Love.

        In short, in conclusion and in the end as we know it, we are all poets and writers; we all have the ability to write something down that will be considered poetic if only we are able to use words to express ourselves. Simple. You look, you feel, you imagine and you articulate.

        Face it, you might not be able to write poetry starting: “I think that I shall never hear a poem as lovely as a beer” or “By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water…” but you could write something; like I just did:                  EARLY MORNING VILLERE STREET

“The woman crosses the busy street

to the dead grass school yard

hair the color of new blossomed gardenias.

 cawing for crows that swoop catching peanuts

 flung like wishes from dandelion

school busses and garbage trucks

rumbling like rabid prehistoric behemoths.

The air still on humid southern mornings hanging

as blanket on the city that they call The Big Easy.

 Clouds like cotton candy indifferent to it all

the woman finds peace in the caring.”

Try it