Michael Lerman | + Follow Poet |
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Not Really Poetry

Dear Reader,

Greetings! I hope you are having a wonderful day, or evening if you are just reading this.
No, really, from the depths of my soul, my spirit waves a double-handed "Hi!" to yours.
Come, bring your philosophical coffee cup or tea cup or cup of whatever your favorite
beverage is and sit beside me, across the e-ther. May I ask why you are reading this? You
want to read poetry, I understand, and this is not really poetry. Or is it? Could this
count as free verse? I would not call it a sonnet or a haiku, except in the loosest
possible definition, in the way that drawing outside of the lines can be a drawing and a
de Kooning painting consisting of a chunky orange paintstroke can be considered to depict
a woman. But what makes poetry poetry, or art art for that matter? The medium? The
observer? The intent? Surely Warhol's footage of people sleeping would never be considered
art except for the presence of the camera and the eventual distribution. A man sleeping
miles from a camera or canvas would not likely be considered art, so does the camera
serially produce art? Most people would not consider home movies to be art. So is art
merely a stamp that we all carry around in our frontal lobes? Is life a form of art
regardless of what we call it? In this day and age, in which all rules seem to be broken,
rewritten, broken again, stretched like an old t-shirt, ripped, worn as a new fashion, and
then broken again, have we evolved to the point where we see rules as artificial labels,
something outside our own world that no more exist than the square root of negative one?
Is this letter a poem in spite of itself? What do you think? We may never know for sure,
and if this entry gets deleted from the site, I suppose the answer is a thunderclap "No."
In fact, after thinking it through, I am fairly confident that this is actually not a
poem. These labels are an earnest attempt to creates links in the world, without which
this entire treatise would make no sense. What would Petrarch have thought? What would
Warhol have thought? Or Andy Kaufman? Either way, I guess this is probably not a poem. But
thank you for having read these thoughts of mine, swirling like pagan revelers around my
head. Thank you for reading my non-poem which may actually be a poem but isn't. I bid you
a wondrous and blessed day. Or night.

Yours,
-Michael

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