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Tough on Rhyme

We’re locking up the poets

And throwing them in cells

They’re dissidents and show it

Via odes and villanelles

 

Collected incantations 

Against the status quo 

Acerbic observations 

Couplets in full flow

 

We’re exiling the muses 

To be banished somewhere grim

With Terza Rima that confuses

And volumes that are slim

 

Wokey right-on anarchists

Who kid no one with their balladry

Spending long nights getting pissed

And indulging in word saladry

 

Your rhapsodies are risible

We lambast your false bravura 

Clunky metaphors, made visible

Through enjambment and cesura

 

Your blank verse pentameters

Bring us out in hives

They define the parameters

Of your wasted little lives

 

You think you’re so superior

With your sestinas and your haiku

More verbal diarrhoea 

Than a symbol of your I.Q.

 

Each overwrought quatrain 

Or precocious piece of poesy

Is your custodial refrain

And the Gulag’s far from cosy

 

No alliterative insurrections

In language lyrical and louche

No introspective reflections

For poetic victims of a putsch

 

A Stanza Division storm

Will eliminate the bards

Crushing every sonnet form

Except on greetings cards

 

You put the verse into subversive

You put the rhyme in crime

You’re dangerous, discursive

So now you’re doing time 

 

 

🌷(9)

political satiresatireperformance poetry

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Comments

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John Gilbert Ellis

Sat 17th Feb 2024 17:59

Great stuff RA. Reminder how important poetry is as an indicator of freedom.
Also reminds me of the book I read recently, the stasi poetry circle by Philip Oltermann. He describes how at the start of the GDR they wanted poets, creatives to be central to society, as a contrast to the nazis. That changed over time as the Stasi got more paranoid and wanted to know more about people. Poetry gave them a glimpse into what people really thought, poetry circles were encouraged, and outputs acted on.

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R A Porter

Sat 17th Feb 2024 16:46

Thank you all. I watched the Navalny documentary last night - if you haven’t seen it yet, it is brilliant… and incredibly sad. Authoritarian regimes don’t like storytellers, when the story isn’t theirs. I also recommend Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia for his take on the poets, novelists, playwrights & thinkers of the last century who kept the flame alive, as the lights around them were going out.

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Greg Freeman

Sat 17th Feb 2024 09:11

Marvellous words, RA!

Uilleam Ó Ceallaigh

Sat 17th Feb 2024 08:45

Excellent, RA, your humour only serves to emphasise the serious threat to freedom of artistic and academic expression.

In the UK, we are told that we believe in academic and artistic freedom, however, however, however…coming soon to a university or college or bookshop near you…

Kamila Shamsie, who delivered the 2018 Orwell Lecture at University College London, and who had been announced as winner of the Nelly Sachs Prize, named after a Jewish poet and Nobel laureate, has been stripped of her German literary prize, because of her support for the Palestinian people through the BDS movement, modelled on the anti-apartheid South Africa boycott…………….Poets, writers, artists beware!

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Steve White

Fri 16th Feb 2024 18:07

At a poetry open mic recently, a young poet from Belarus shared a poem with us that she'd written while imprisoned for political dissent. It was quite a moment.

Love the last verse - very JCC.

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Stephen Gospage

Fri 16th Feb 2024 17:18

This is brilliantly written, RA. Wonderful humourous touches, although somewhere in the background lurks a dark reality, I fear.

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