Proetry

When I was working on the evolution poem I was thinking about how many of my poems I've written recently have been about poems. I find it to be a very fun topic to write about because I can poke fun at myself while I am writing. But then I was thinking that I could write a poem that was not a poem. I don't know what I was thinking, but that hit me at the same time as the idea that if I ever published a poetry book I'd like it to be called "This is not poetry" or even the title of this poem "Not Poetry". So in the process of writing this poem the word proety came about, which was the combination of prose and poetry. I pronounce it "Pro-et-tree" (I know that is not a proper pronunciation key, but I'm too lazy to look up how to actually do it). I like the word because the "pro" part makes me think of professional athletes and I liked the idea of a pro-poet. Yes, we have professional poets who do poetry for a living, and yes we have poets who compete with their poems (i.e. publishing). But I wanted to go with the sports idea and have teams of poets who were literary fighting with each other, not literally fighting of course and I love the "literary" and "literally". So here isn't a poem.


Not Poetry

We all know what a poem is and is not.
And we all know what prose are, so
it isn't that hard to tell the two apart.
But this isn't poetry.
We've already said that we know what poetry is,
so why isn't this a poem. I don't know. I don't want it is to be one.
Or maybe I do.
Maybe I want a poem, but do I want a prose poem. I mean what is
a prose poem. Isn't that simply a short story with awkward
line breaks?
This certainly isn't a short story, there is no story. So what is it?
You tell me. You tell me is crap. Not a poem. Not prose. Not even a memo.
What do we do with this now?
Perhaps we give it another name, proety.
It kind of sounds like a professional poetry league,
where we will gather all the great poets,
we'll gather them into teams and then make them
duke it out literally, not literally but literary.

Copyright 2007 William Curb