Goines On: In the company of poets

By Moristotle

Goines observed that a lot of poetry was appearing on a certain weblog lately, and as he drove along the freeway he became aware that he was composing something himself. His fingers were even tapping out the words on the steering wheel.
    Turning his attention to the words coalescing under his fingers, his excitement mounted and the freeway receded in his awareness. “The weblog was having a run of good luck....”
    A car in the left lane came within five feet of Goines as it cut into his lane, breaking into his reverie and prompting him to swerve a little to the right. The interruption reminded Goines that not everyone who ventures onto a freeway gets off it alive, so he gripped the wheel more tightly and tried to concentrate on driving.
    He really needed to be a better driver. He wanted to keep on living, keep on enjoying verbal rhythm and rhyme...and other pleasures.

Goines managed to get home alive and log onto his computer. He keyed in what he could remember of the verse his fingers had been tapping and went on from there, through several iterations of word selection, substitution, deletion, addition, rearrangement, and one major line reshuffling, ending up with what he hoped qualified as a limerick, but he wasn’t sure about the anapestic feet. ˘ ˘ ¯, Goines duh-duh-dummed to himself.

The poets here have been running amok,
day after day showing plentiful pluck,
    so maybe it would be no crime
    for me to try my hand with rhyme;
it might work out, if I had any luck.

Goines wasn’t all that confident they’d run his poem with the other poets’ stuff. His was much lighter fare, certainly, than Mr. Brownstein’s poems, which couldn’t be said to be light at all, and not nearly so clever as Mr. Dean’s light verses.
    Nor was he commenting on nature or society, the way Ms. Sperry and Ms. Zapata Finnegan were doing.
    And Mr. Meub’s sonnets, which had appeared on the weblog for years— Well, forget it, Meub was in a league of his own. His verses were even accompanied by an accomplished artist’s drawings, which supposedly inspired the poems.
    And wasn’t “running amok” a bit off the mark, possibly even offensive? The phrase meant “to behave in a wild or unruly manner,” which wasn’t the case literally, and it didn’t work metaphorically either. Metaphorically of what? He had to admit that he had chosen “amok” because it rhymed with “pluck” and “luck.” And he suspected that Mr. Brownstein and Ms. Sperry wrote in free verse partly to avoid being tied to rhyme’s constraints on word choice.

The poets here have lately wonder struck,
writing fluently with prolific pluck;
    so maybe there would crop no crime
    for me to try my hand with rhyme –
to try, then hope to be allotted luck.

    There, they might like that better, Goines hoped. He had even added some alliteration. He really wanted to join their company, he realized. He wasn’t sure why. It needed further consideration.

Copyright © 2019 by Moristotle