Editors note: For some obscure reason
we had Alfred (Fred) as Alfreda at first, and our pronouns were just WRONG! We
are both so sorry!
Alfred J.
Bruey has
been writing poetry for about 30 years. His poems have appeared in publications
such as Snow Monkey, Slow Trains Online,
Pudding and Erato. His chapbook,
Between You and Me,
won second prize in
the most recent chapbook competition at Pudding House in Columbus, Ohio.
The Poem Convention
Poets are always running off to some convention or the
other. Some of the poems get to go with them but some of them never get to go.
So the poems decided they would hold their own convention. They met on a
Saturday at a big-city hotel. The haiku and senryu were so short
that they all got tall stools to sit on. The sonnets missed many of the meetings
because they were busy counting syllables and checking accents
and examining rhyme schemes. The sestina was there but proved to be
disappointing. It was expected to contribute much to the conference,
but it simply sat around calling attention to itself by announcing “I am a
sestina, I am a sestina” when a less-complicated poem came near. The
unrhymed poems were constantly harassed by the rhymed verse. The rhymed verses
accused the unrhymed verses of playing tennis without a net
although none of the poems had ever played tennis and very few of them knew what
a net was. The language poems were there and they never
stopped talking, but no one understood what they were saying so they went back
to their rooms, confused about what they had said and wondering
if it was what they wanted to say. The villanelles were classy looking but the
other poems soon grew tired of their repetitions. They kept repeating their
lines.
They kept repeating their lines. The limericks were a lot of fun, but many of
the other poems considered them obscene and their constant humor made
them hard to take seriously at the business meetings. The prose poems arrived
late and the other poems looked down their lines at them because of
their lack of rules. When anyone questioned the prose poem about whether it was
really a poem, it would flex it brawny phrases and say “I’m a poem
because I say I’m a poem.” The prose poems were the bullies of the group so they
pushed through a new by-law in their constitution that required all
minutes to be written as prose poems. The haiku and sonnets and other structured
forms went along with this proposal but secretly agreed never to
appear in any publication that contained a prose poem.
