Two Step (Song)

The art, as with other lexically repetitive and patterned schemes, is to choose вЂopen-ended’ repeating lines allowing ambiguity and room for manoeuvre. It is one thing, of course, to write them as a fun exercise, quite another to make a poem of readable qualities for others. Technically the ideal is to push the normative requirements of the mode hard, sometimes to breaking point. There in lies the knack–stretching the bubble until just before it bursts. Without hard pressure on the inner walls of its membrane the pantoum–and this holds true of the other complex forms–can seem a flaccid, futile exercise in wordsmanship. THE BALLADEBALLADE is not an easy form to crackNo other rhymes, but only A or B;The paeon, dactyl and the amphibrach,The antispast, molossus and spondeeWill not assist us in the least degreeAs through the wilderness we grimly hackAnd sow our hopeful seeds of poetry.It’s always one step forward, two steps back.But let me be Marvell, not KerouacThe open road holds no allure for me.A garden path shall be my desert track,The song of birds my jukebox melody,The neighbour’s cat my Neil Cassidy.With just a mower for a CadillacI won’t get far, but nor will they ...»