I hate curse words, no matter what their prompt I find them unimaginative
why would I use the mundane rants repeated as dull rhetoric by coarse scribes?
there’s eloquent vocabulary
ample to express
every mood without resort
to that banal language;for language warrants beauty.

Some fellow poets label me close-minded for my aversion to cussing
I believe the gamut of passions inspires a high-minded dictionary’s use.

While I concede each poet answers their muse
with the text most true
to individual style and voice
I exercise my prerogative of conviction.

11/24/2003

Author's Note: my syllabic verse homework. We were to choose something we felt strongly for or against, and write a syllabic poem in the sequence of number of syllables Marianne Moore used in "Poetry". Ironically, the same night I finished this, I got censored on here (I know, it's technology, not personal, and it is funny, except for the fact that this means we're limited from making classical references sometimes, on a literary site) for the use of an actual character's name in a classical novel, and play, (The Secret Garden) in my comment to someone's poem. (it was a compliment, to them, by the way). When I expounded in my journal on the very real problems this could pose, ie if a figure in history or politics has a name that includes something close to a bad word, or even one innocuously couched in the actual name, where this could occur too, the same way, it appears that my concern was deleted. I might be wrong but it sure disappeared fast. I made the point in good faith, and out of serious respect for literature, as I did the comment.

Posted on 11/25/2003
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