There Was An Irish Lass, A Would-Be Poet, But Alas, It's What She Didn't Know About The Art Of Writing, Her Poems Mere Flotsam, Jetsam … Poem by Dennis Ryan

Wednesday morning, April 17, 2024 at 7: 15 a.m.

—This poem is for an Irish poet with an inflated ego and anger problems who I would recommend stay humble, as humility is everything—in life as well as in the arts, the life of the poet. The sarcastic poem which follows below is well-deserved.

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read …"
—William Butler Yeats, "When You Are Old", from Yeats' second book of poems, The Rose (1893)

There was an Irish lass whose sensibility
was way far up her arse, she who couldn't tell
a conceptual error from a spelling one, just so;
so, in the end she doomed 'her verses' so-called
to repeat her past—her utter, unpassing ignorance.
The poor lass was never one to take a man's advice,
her father's let alone her husband's well-meant, nor
that of a well-meaning poet attempting to help extricate
her from a morass of errors, from her errors in logic—
basic errors in logical, poetic thinking. 'Rank amateur.'
'True juvenelia' 'Pure rubbish.' These are the phrases,
descriptors that lay in wait, in ambush for her, stubborn
and unyielding as she is stubborn Irish. Is Irish, you say?
From Ireland? Aye, she is, from there for sure. For sure.
But ‘tis a pity, for she don't know her arse from that hole
in the ground—that's for certain—where her long-dead ancestors ha' parted company though they once lived
their lives together in complete harmony if in obscurity,
like her, stubborn and unyielding as she is herself, will
one day turn into flotsam and jetsam just like her verses.