On Poetry And Prose Poem by Willem VanVoorthuysen

The way we speak in daily life
bears very little resemblance,
if any at all, to speeches by
our Presidents, Chief Justices,
or ministers and other noble
and highly motivated speakers.

No barroom idiom is ever used,
each carefully chosen word,
receives the stress it needs,
each line meets syntax rules,
to spare the audience any
doubt about the message.

Outstanding prose, quite often,
approaches poetry in sound
and meter, but only a fool
would make his written prose
rhyme like a marching song
for basic infantry training.

Next, take a pleasant-sounding
piece of prose, and cut those
long, flowing lines of text into
much shorter ones, without
surrendering the message's
original content and meaning.
Congratulations, dear friend!
What you just wrote is called,
Free Poetry..

Next, take a simple poem,
connect all lines together,
head-to-tail, arrange them
into paragraphs, redistribute
quotation marks and spaces,
and what you have now is
a presentation, in prose,
on the subject of your poem.

In short, my humble advise
for any aspiring poet is:
Learn how to write good prose,
before you even try to write
free poetry...