(Poem) "15people"

12 December 2009

Revised on 2025-10-07.

This poem is both nonsense and no-nonsense. It is a game I have played before. Effectively about the topic of the rules of poetry and the response to the rules of poetry as a poem. I believe there is beauty in trying to understand what makes something beautiful. I simply take issue with prescriptivist thinking which concludes, for instance, that a person's writing is no good because their handwriting is sloppy or their use of idioms does not follow a classical style.

2025-10-07 edit: Despite being a "response" poem, I am pretty sure the whole thing was me making up an argument and then fighting against it. However, the "never start a poem with a number" is so specific, I feel like someone must have said that to me. Who? No clue. In general, I consider a weaker effort by myself but one that I also kind of like because of its gradual breakdown. If I wrote something like it today it would likely melt into fairly unreadable dreck by the end, in some ways proving the initial folks right. Which I would think was quite funny.

Fifteen people explained to me, in simple words, To never start a poem with a number. "It's absurd," One whispers, deep in theories of structure's holy presence; "And never end," he says, "in mid-sentence." Fifteen, give or take. We all have our opinions. Another dozen sat further back, turning the evening Air into a most brilliant dull, the great weaving Epic of a dry river bed. The noble leafless tree, Reaching up to the bronze sky in marble relief: Dancing in the wind as though it seriously believed. The rest of the rest (of the day), some odd, we speak In sleight undertones, the corpse of faiths laid to teak— Smiling, riding the shadows of webs and songs— Dotting the room's northernmost corner in broken formation: Stretching into an unnamed and meandering constellation. All these rules and serious folk, with their arbitrations. All these grandiose things: flings and spiritous libations. 20:38, Tuesday, and some year's November, not quite cold But not quite worth a memory. It would seem Not quite nothing. A breath fogs to illuminate the soul before being lost on the edge of the window pane, A single drop traveling down, a single stream Keeping its secrets from this room of serious things. Some of us say goodbye, done with talking philosophy, And you could say, wondering