What's In A (Poet's) Name? Poem by Frank Avon

It was once important
for poets to have three names:
either trochees
or, preferably,
dactylic.

It must have started with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and his 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

or maybe Percy Bysshe Shelley,
but Americans caught the wave:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
William Cullen Bryant
John Greenleaf Whittier
Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell

(ye olde Fireside Poets)

James Whitcomb Riley
Paul Laurence Dunbar

(Walt broke the cadence
as he did with everything else)

Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edgar Lee Masters
James Weldon Johnson
Thomas Stearns Eliot
(old T. S.)
William Carlos Williams

but the modernists
clipped their wings:

Ezra Pound
H. D.
e e cummings
W. H. Auden
Ogden Nash
Bob Dylan
Pete Seeger

Robert Bly
Gary Snyder
Ted Hughes
Thom Gunn
(he's the one
who wore
black leather jackets
and tore
into the sun)

Mark Strand
Louise Gluck
Frank O'Hara
Robert Haas
Robert Pinsky
Rita Dove
Billy Collins
Ted Kooser
Kay Ryan
John Blair

So there.

And then there's
Virginia Hamilton Adair.
Thank your stars for her.

Amphibrach
Dactyl
Iamb