Prose is written sentence by sentence; poetry is written line by line.
"We write in lines because we plant a vegetable garden in rows, because we have ribs, because..."
Sandra McPherson **
COUNTING OUT RHYME
Ink, pink, pen and ink, I command you for to wink, Rottom, bottom, dish clout, O.U.T. spells out, So out goes she.
English Folk Rhyme
** DECORATED SOLDIER & MOVIE ACTOR AUDIE MURPHY AS A POET
'... he had a natural talent for writing poetry. One of his better-known poems is "The Crosses Grow on Anzio" which appears in To Hell and Back attributed to a soldier named Kerrigan.'
Wikipedia **
DOUBLE DACTYLS by Neil Hickey
Higgledy piggledy General Washington Dallied with Sally and Mortgaged the farm.
Martha took washing in, Cursing the day that she Incomprehensibly Fell for his charm.
Washington was in love with Sally Fairfax but she was married, so he married Martha Custis, who was rich.
Pocketa pocketa General Washington Generalissimo At Valley Forge.
After that winter they Told him fortissimo "Dammit we could have been Frozen by George!
(A form of light verse invented and promoted by Paul Pascal, Anthony Hecht, and John Hollander. The double dactyl consists of two quatrains, each with three double-dactyl lines followed by a shorter dactyl-spondee pair. The two spondees rhyme.)
Double dactyl definitiom - Poetry Foundation
** OF POETRY AND KITING CHECKS or WHAT IS A RHYME FOR FORGERY?
The following item appeared in Time magazine’s Miscellany For January 6, 1958:
In Jersey City , Samuel Silverman, 22, in jail awaiting trial on a check forgery charge, casually scribbled a verse that police promptly confiscated as evidence:
I bounced a check, A cop bounced me. The Judge said, “Son, You’ll do about three.”
**
A POETRY READING I AM GLAD I MISSED
"The incident of the audience member screaming at the Ilkley festival when Cave Birds was performed (Other Lives, 18 September) is recollected by Philip Larkin in a June 1965 letter to Robert Conquest: “At Ilkley festival, a woman shrieked and vomited during a Ted Hughes reading. I must say that I’ve never felt like shrieking. We had the old crow over at Hull recently, looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island. He’s all right when not reading.” Their memorial stones lie next to each other in Poets’ Corner."
Graham Chesters Chair, The Philip Larkin Society **
"Anglo-Saxon poetry is unrhymed because the noise of the rowlocks does not suggest rhyme."
Robert Graves
**
on WILLIAM LYON PHELPS TEACHING AT YALE
The professor asked his students to discuss the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' "sprung rhythm" technique. One young man handed in his exam reading, "Only God knows the answer to your question. Merry Christmas." Professor Phelps returned the paper after Christmas with the note, "Happy New Year. God gets an A—you get an F."
** ON EARLY POETRY ANTHOLOGIES
Clare Bucknell in The Treasuries: Poetry anthologies and the making of British culture,
"Bucknell begins not with Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), the original anthology of poems in English, though she names it in her introduction, but with the first installment in the Poems on Affairs of State series (1697–1707), by which means Dryden, the Duke of Buckingham et al hoped to give the public glimpses of the courts of James II, William III and Queen Anne. These anthologies served as “a key means by which British men, women and children were introduced to the culture of their nation”. Few have since proved strictly influential on the course of history; but few is better than none. "
"Letting the mob in on the enduring influence of the poetry anthology" By Camille Ralphs in TLS On line (April 28, 2023) ** CATCH & RELEASE RHYMING
For me, I touched a thought, I know, Has tantalized me many times, (Like turns of thread the spiders throw Mocking across our path) for rhymes To catch and let go.
From Two in the Campagne by Robert Browning ** PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Percy Bysshe Shelley Placed his hand on his wife’s belly & whispered “I met a traveler from an antique land.” Just why he did so is not easy to understand. MY DEBT TO A.E. HOUSMAN
3 thoughts on “BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: POETS & POETRY”
The Crosses Grow on Anzio
by Audie Murphy
THE CROSSES GROW ON ANZIO
Oh, gather ’round me, comrades; and
listen while I speak
Of a war, a war, a war where hell is
six feet deep.
Along the shore, the cannons roar. Oh
how can a soldier sleep?
The going’s slow on Anzio. And hell is
six feet deep.
Praise be to God for this captured sod that
rich with blood does seep.
With yours and mine, like butchered
swine’s; and hell is six feet deep.
That death awaits there’s no debate;
no triumph will we reap.
The crosses grow on Anzio, where hell is
six feet deep.
If it is fame you want, then any critic worth his salt
Will tell you what it is that you must do: die.
The best way to reach your ideal audience is to go
Underground.
Yes, it is so sad that poets who are celebrated
While alive are often forgotten once they depart;
Sadder yet that our classics are composed essentially
By dead meat.
The moral, of course, or as Henry James might say,
As it were, is that you probably will not even get
Your Warholian fifteen minutes until your minutes have
Run out.
Be patient, push up daffodils, and enjoy a posthumous
Reputation, enhanced, if possible, by peonage,
Loneliness, poverty and pain. The more you hurt,
The better.
PhillipsMiscellany 
The Crosses Grow on Anzio
by Audie Murphy
THE CROSSES GROW ON ANZIO
Oh, gather ’round me, comrades; and
listen while I speak
Of a war, a war, a war where hell is
six feet deep.
Along the shore, the cannons roar. Oh
how can a soldier sleep?
The going’s slow on Anzio. And hell is
six feet deep.
Praise be to God for this captured sod that
rich with blood does seep.
With yours and mine, like butchered
swine’s; and hell is six feet deep.
That death awaits there’s no debate;
no triumph will we reap.
The crosses grow on Anzio, where hell is
six feet deep.
. . . Audie Murphy, 1948
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If it is fame you want, then any critic worth his salt
Will tell you what it is that you must do: die.
The best way to reach your ideal audience is to go
Underground.
Yes, it is so sad that poets who are celebrated
While alive are often forgotten once they depart;
Sadder yet that our classics are composed essentially
By dead meat.
The moral, of course, or as Henry James might say,
As it were, is that you probably will not even get
Your Warholian fifteen minutes until your minutes have
Run out.
Be patient, push up daffodils, and enjoy a posthumous
Reputation, enhanced, if possible, by peonage,
Loneliness, poverty and pain. The more you hurt,
The better.
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I hope the judge reduced
Sammy’s sentence by half
As you may have deduced
His poem provided a good laugh
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