Modern Verse: A Critique

You want me to scan my lines and get

me tight with rhymes and off rhymes

within patterns imposed by tradition,

by past practice. You wish me to imprison

myself in a late attempt to write like

some ancestors celebrated in the Canon,

but not again and again like those other

fellows and fellas who unleashed the virus

of free verse into prosody–their democratic

impulse inevitably opening the stadium

gates to bovver boys and skinheads

of poetry, who make love and war

to the page in a great hurry without

any birth control, filling the earth

with billions of new, unschooled lines

of children obsessed only with their identity.

Indran Amirthanayagam, c) June 24, 2023