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A Formalist Walks into a Bar…
“Dear barkeep, give me something most unsweet,
I like my drinks with an astringent bite.
And please forego the rocks and make it neat,
My sorrows this nepenthe soundly smites.”
This gentleman was followed by a Greek,
Who really loved his rhyming and technique.
“Nepenthe? That elixir for great woe!
‘Keep, tranquillise me with some Lesbos wine.
So sweet and racy, I hear Sappho’s lyre—
We sing with muses, what great company!”
The poets get on like a house on fire,
They sing in pure iambic harmony.
Yet, just when they think everything is fine,
Their ears are struck by a cacophony:
“yo, barkeep, what’s good
____________________________what are you
_____________________saying?!
your outfit is really
_________________slaying!
____________________________I don’t
try to rhyme but I’ll sure take it, d’ya get me
anyways, I’d like a pint of your finest and hoppiest IPA
____________________________but wait, don’t
make me snort
who invited these bozos with their rules and restrictions?!”
The Formalist and Classicist retort:
“To stay awake and bear your horrid diction,
We’d need two methamphetamine prescriptions.”
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The Octogenarian President
A hard day’s work is finished now.
I’ll take a break until who knows;
Screw my dry, presidential vow,
I’ll lie in bed and have a doze.
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Poet’s Note: As of September 2023, Joe Biden has spent 40% of his tenure as POTUS on vacation, which is the most of any POTUS in recorded history. For reference, Trump spent 26%, Obama spent 11%, W. Bush spent 35% and Clinton spent 12% of their respective tenures on vacation.
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Drilon Bajrami is a nascent poet who lives in the United Kingdom and is currently finishing up a dystopian novel he has been working on for a few years.
This is a cute scenario, with formalist and free-verse types bumping into each other at a bar. The contrast of the very classy “nepenthe and Lesbos wine” with the the cheap IPA makes the poet’s point quite clear.
One suggestion: the poet could dramatize the difference between these two approaches to poetry by italicizing all the chopped-up lines between “yo, barkeep…” and “…rules and restrictions.” The change in typeface would heighten the separation and division.
Thank you for the comment, Joe, and you would be correct to assume my choice of drinks weren’t random at all. I allude with the astringent bite that the nepenthe the formalist orders is a spirit, as the popularity of spirits came about when formal verse poetry in English was its most popular.
And that’s an interesting suggestion about italicising most of the free verse poet’s speech and I’ll keep that in mind for future poems. I’ve been known to over-italicise at times so I’m wary of over-doing it but I think in this case it may have worked.
The first is rollicking fun.
I hope the second becomes irrelevant next January.
But FWIW I don’t trust the familiar statisical ploy whereby the lefties are hard at work compared to the (more or less) righties.
Thank you for your kind words, Stephen. And being candid, while I don’t like Joe Biden, I can’t say I’m a fan of Trump either. I think both parties could field better and younger candidates — and that’s my main point and why I titled it so. The most important job in the world shouldn’t be done by old men deep in retirement age.
When it comes to the statistics, they are what they are (the math doesn’t take sides) but one thing to notice is that the older a president is, the more time off they take. Clinton and Obama started their tenures in their 40s and that’s what probably allowed them to work a lot more than older presidents — which I think strengthens my previous point.
This is wonderful humor; I really enjoyed it!
I’m glad you enjoyed the poem, Cynthia. Your comment is music to a poet’s ears.
As in the old joke about the panda who walks into a bar to eat his natural food of shoots and leaves, the formalist poet and his Greek companion happily exercise their true nature. The free versifier misinterprets (he is the type who thinks the panda walks in, shoots someone, and leaves). His verse does not partake of poetry’s true nature. An excellent beginning to a more descriptive way of saying the same thing, Drilon.
Thank you for sharing that old joke, Margaret, I looked it up to make sure I got it and it gave me a good chuckle. And in this case, the free verser is more of the new age types that actively take pride in being philistines of formal poetry (or even rhymed free verse), so in this case, he’s trying to offend them but the true poets show their class with a great punchline.
The first poem was quite fun, elevating the “walks into a bar” joke into a work that, for all its humor, illustrates a serious and important point. I very much like your switch to parodied free verse (although it uses rhyme and meter — and is therefore much more technically adept than the free verse it mocks). The formalist and the classicist, meanwhile, are essentially of the same school, as you observe.
Honestly, Adam, now that I’m doing a scansion of the free verse for the first time, I do notice a kind of iambic metre there. Especially the last free verse line as it’s almost perfectly anapestic, it’s only off by an extra unstressed beat. I guess I must be coming one with poetic metre and even in my free verse, it’s accidentally leaking through.
And you’re observations are spot on, though personally, I’m not a huge fan of blank verse, I can appreciate how it set the foundation for poetry and for formal verse, which takes that foundation and builds a palace on it. Only recently, have I started to hear metre distinctly and how magical is it when you can form a beat in poetry with merely word choice? Makes the toilsome efforts all the better.
That is an interesting observation. It supports the long-standing observation that English is iambic in nature; verse imitates language and vice versa. It also reminds me of a recent study I read that “atonal” music is really all in A minor.