Poetry
Mon., May 6, 06:53 PM
I waited until National Poetry Month was over, because I have never been good at poetry. When a high school English teacher assigned us to write original poetry, my best friend constructed an Elizabethan sonnet, perfect in rhyme and meter. I could do no better than “The Murder of Prepositions.”
A digression: there is far less disapproval nowadays of ending a sentence with a preposition. There never should have been any censure anyhow. The purpose of language is to communicate; you recast the sentence when it doesn’t convey your message, which may mean you’re correcting grammar, but you might also be overruling it. When you study other languages, you learn something about the whys and wherefores of grammar rules. Rita Mae Brown advocates studying Latin, which I have done. But I find better instincts in German, for English is a Germanic language.
German tends to stick concepts together to make new words. French, on the other hand, keeps them separated. (That’s why “my aunt’s pen is on my uncle’s desk” comes through in French as “the pen of my aunt is on the table of my uncle.” A cute, if unwieldy, song.) German has verbs with the preposition tacked on as part of the verb, words like go-in, walk-through, and so forth. The particles of a verb like “keep-out” are often separated by other parts of the sentence, leading to something like, “she kept her husband from the house out.” Look at that, a preposition – or is it an adverb – at the end of the sentence!
When I was in high school, that construction was a big no-no. But I was never going to be able to write formal poetry, so I had to try for something funny. I knew the teacher wouldn’t like it; she usually classed my creative writing as “folksy,” which translated to “you did the assignment, but I won’t give you anything higher than a C.”
So here is my “folksy” poem, “The Murder of Prepositions.”
Just use up energy;also,
The subjects that we labor through
My mind is far below.
Homework I can do without,
The school why must I stay inside?
They’re boring things we learn about,
Just one good thing – who I sit beside.
Two more things I was wrong about: I don’t think that teacher cared much for dashes. And the guy I sat beside is now in jail.
