Today I had a strange experience,
Not in this group but in another group.
‘Poetry and Lit′rature' it is not,
In ‘Written or Revealed Poetry' thread.
Asked, have I written poems in my life?
I found it fit to answer it this way:
I'm writing this in reply to a miss,
I have never written poems in my life.
Have wondered where these poems all come from,
From human intellect or nature's store,
To be picked up at moments of revelation;
Or synthesized in rotten human brain!
I was inspired to write these wicked lines,
By those whose verses written were in sand.
Let us debate poetry in poems,
I hope she'll someday answer me in kind.
I ′am not doing anything again,
But asking questions all have answers for.
I have my answers, you can have yours,
This not an illiterate arena,
Where someone asks questions and another from,
Some academic circle answers them.
Some anxious are, to questions throw around,
Some eagerly waits there to answer them;
This not such school or college where one can,
En′tertain answers not from others too.
I know I'm Alexander Pope's close kin,
I stop here, to read Temple of Fame again.
NOTE:
I regularly take part in discussions in a famous social site of experts and writes in two special groups Poetry and Literature and Language, Literature & Criticism. A discussion on ‘Whether Poetry Has To Keep Form' became heated and I had to remain at the receiving end of severe but polished criticism for some of my views insisting on form in poetry.
One criticism went: ‘No offense, but it is easy to make generalizations about things you have little or no hands-on experience with. Reading poetry is very different from writing it. How much poetry have you actually written (or tried to write)?’
Another criticism even went to asking me at last: ‘You do not seem to have understood the mechanics of poetry like many of us; have you ever read a poem or at least try to write one’?
I decided to write my reply to these criticisms in the poetical form and invited others to reply in kind by writing their criticisms in poetry and continue the discussion. This poem was my first and original reply to them.
In my native land Kerala, in Malayalam literature, there has been a long history of poets writing letters to each other in poetical form, not prose, which created a rich branch of literature. Almost all Indian languages have this kind of a branch of literature which has become very interesting and rich through the years and is a prominent feature of Indian literature.