I am not spam...

(no, I can't think what will make that a good first line for a poem).

I half agree with the anti-poetical sentiments in this poem. However, not everyone who is writing a poem is simply writing prose with gaps. The best test is to press 'back space' at the end of each line and see if you get sensbile prose. If it is a poem, then it should 'work' as a poem and not be either prose that thinks it is a poem or lazy poetry.

Amen.
 

Fair enough,

I don't really hate all modern pomes, maybe not even most of them. In fact in this very instance I'm praising some poems I do like.

Since posting that I've remembered there are a couple of other people who write poetry I really like too, and even if they're not reading, I hate to think I'm dissing them on some cosmic level.

I'm just excercising my right to be bitter and venomous and to overstate certain things for my own, er, reasons.

If someone's got something to say and it comes out best as a pome, so be it.

I do find prose and songs to be much more straight-up means of verbal expression though, and, much like contemporary art, the context sourrounding poetry allows an awful lot of assholes to peddle a lot of shit.

And, as hinted in my own pome, I'm constantly amazed by the strange process by which if John Lennon had approached his local poetry journal and submitted..

"Oh I, I'll tell you something
I hope you'll understand
Oh I, I'll tell you something
I want to hold your hand!"

..people would have thought he was sub-normal, but combine it with some clumsy guitar chords and it's an eternal expression of joyous hope and desire that can blast from radios and affect anyone uncertainly tumbling toward a new love.

It's this that I want to get to the bottom of.
 

Well, it seems perfectly simple: J. Lennon is writing lyrics for a song. Hence, just as some poetry should be prose, lyrics are not necessarily poetry. Poetry doesn't have the benefit of music and must create some sort of music in the underlying rythmn of the language. (Hence when people turn drama into opera and musical... the horror!).