Imperfect

April is National Poetry Month. Typically, I celebrate by sharing poetry with my blog followers. If ambitious enough, I will be posting a new poem each day for the remainder of April. Below you will find one of my poems. This one was quite fun to write.

I was inspired several years ago to write a poem that addresses the “academic” approach to poetry. I drew from some related experiences as a high school student where my work was challenged as being faulty, outside of the box, incorrect. Yet it was prose. It was fiction. It was poetry. I’ve heard it said relative to screenwriting that it’s okay to break the rules. But it is critical that we first understand and know those rules. I’m okay with that. But I got caught up in the moment of a memory from 9th grade English.

The following poem is the result.

I sat, submissively. You stood, towering.
You, the PhD. Me the struggling artist.
My thumbnail kept picking at the edge
of the nail on my index finger.
My writing hand index finger. Odd.
You told me my poem was “okay,”
but it was not perfect.
So what, then, it was imperfect?
Faulty? Flawed? Defective? Unsound?
Wait, this was a “free verse” assignment.
It was meant to not have a regular meter.
It was supposed to simply “be.”
Perhaps my poem had “imperfect vision.”
Imperfectus: incomplete.
So you’re saying it was “missing something.”
Perhaps you don’t like unrestrained boundaries.
Your failure to appreciate poetry that is
absent fixed metrical pattern does not mean
my work has failed as poetry.
Non-metrical, non-rhyming lines often
closely follow the natural rhythms of speech.
Perhaps this is the very purpose of
an imperfect poem.

©2016 by Steven Barto