Gathered there to display their chosen work were a good cross section of the community: children, teens, adults, all with some interest in some aspect of poetry. The "stars" were the thirty poets whose poems were chosen to be part of the Poem-a-Day program of the libraries. The evening's celebrations worked very well. Poetry, because it is usually enjoyed in private, is not easy to present in a group setting and to gather thirty people with friends and family and other interested people together is an accomplishment. More so is keeping the program moving at a good pace; this was done. No one read more than the chosen poem (including the shortest) and the judges kept any comments short. 
Nearly all the chosen writers came. There were several incentives to make the evening well-attended. Primary, of course, was the chance to present their work in public. It surprised me how most, including the youngsters, were more comfortable with a microphone than I expected. While the applause still rang, they were whisked to a room away from the auditorium to again read and have their voices recorded. This would be posted on the library's web site.
Another plus for those attending was the publication of a chapbook anthology containing all thirty poems prepared for the occasion by Serengeti Press. It provided a record of the poems and the event that will last long past electronic records, and perhaps longer than some of the memories.
As a judge, I was asked to comment on the category's entries before the young adults presented their poems. I noticed the other judges had prepared comments but I had not. It didn't bother me. Sometimes comments made "off the cuff" can be just as meaningful and more immediate.Would I do it again? Just ask me. In fact, the Hamilton Public Library just did, lining up judges for their next Power of the Pen for young adults this fall. I accepted.
Personally, I have problems with personifying a creative urge. For me the muses, all nine undifferentiated ones, touched me when I realized what I was: a poet. I experience the world and explain it to myself as a poet, not as a mathematician, not as a scientist. Whenever my poetry, its fervor and intensity, begin to flag I don't search for a personality within or without. I apply myself to another means of creative expression. But even in drama, in music, in history, I remain a poet and different from an actor, musician, historian. I remain creative as I must until the focus is reformed.
That concept has served me well. I need no separate entity within or without.
Now alliteration in moderation is a good and powerful tool for the poet, more so than for any other writer (except the producer of tabloid headlines!). Old English poetry was founded in alliterative four-stress lines. The sound of a sound repeating itself is often a baby's first attempt at language. Alliteration and assonance, its concomitant construction, (two deliberate examples of alliteration) are a vital part of the language. The question still remains, When is it a game and when is it poetry? 
Nursery rhymes that depend on word play, are they considered lasting poems comparing favourably with Old English riddles? Lewis Carrol's "Jaberwocky" can be found in anthologies of Victorian poetry. Why then isn't Joyce's Ulysses a great poem of the twentieth century? Closer to home is Christian Bok, an experimental and "sound" poet. What makes his Eunoia such a popular and critical success? His gathering of words, divided according to their use of one vowel, is the ultimate in word play - the result of years of making lists. Sound (and assonance, therefore) is everything; sense and meaning are far down those lists!
Abstract art: abstract poetry. You endow the words and sounds with whatever meaning you want to fit. So play word games. Play Scrabble, do anagrams, acrostics, crossword puzzles. I like them too. I just don't call it poetry.
And it's not just me; in some way or other he influenced most of the poets who followed him. He has become an icon in Canadian letters, but remains so human, so much a poet of the people and the voice of this land.
They would always follow, although not every time, a fit of coughing. I would cough hard enough that when I regained my breath my body felt as if it was throbbing. I'd watch my arm for movement but there was never anything visible; my wife never remarked on anything but my red face. That was the outside. The effects inside my head were different, usually a cacaphony of sounds that my mind struggled to translate. After the first frightening time, I decided that such "noises" were probably the result of the blood pressure in a vein or artery pressing against or into that part which deals with hearing and/or the translation of sound waves. I convinced myself of this rational explanation and decided I did not have a mental illness.
However, a goood part of this noise I was "hearing" did come through as voices, normal human voices, not spectral ghostly whispers. It sounded like a cocktail party but the language or languages being spoken were totally unrecognizable to me. I don't know if it was my mind or my imagination, but I felt as if I was at a social gathering after a poetry reading (and this is, at last, the relevance) and if I would open my mouth to speak, the most wonderful and beautiful lines of poetry would resound through the room.
And sometimes I miss it. The unusual and unexpected can be such fun!
The stories they recited or sang were no longer the great epics of heroic deeds or the passions of the noble classes. Instead, the poet/performers turned to everyday concerns that were familiar to the common people, that were a part of their lives. The story poem or ballad, with or without music, became an important part of our language and literature. With it came a form, a simple method of construction, that is still very much in use today.
The attributes that made the ballad so versatile continued into the period of greater use of written language. Probably the most important was its form. The ballad was usually arranged in four-line rhymed stanzas; there is such variety in this form that it seems to become a natural pattern for poetry and one which is not difficult to master and employ.
There is certainly no reason why a poet should not write in the "common measure" of the ballad stanza. In fact it should be an integral part of his knowledge and experience before he attempts to write "free verse." Without a deep understanding of rhythm and rhyme, structure and form, his writing so often becomes "free" without any hint of verse. And that can be a great loss.
I suppose that argument has its merrit but I tend to disagree. Throughout the history of poetry, the use of proper names has made poems stronger by their particularity and their emphasis. One example that keeps pushing to the forefront is that of Browning's "My Last Dutchess." In his poem, we never learn the lady's name; this lessens her importance and emphasizes the importance of the Duke himself. Compare that with the repeated naming of the artist, Fra Pandolf, and the impression left of the Duke as a rich man of fine artistic taste. The same still happens today: someone will claim to have a "Van Gogh" rather that a painting hanging on his wall. 
By naming, by using proper names, the poet establishes a personal connection to the person/place/thing he names. In doing so he displays a connection which is important to the poem, more important than the thing named or the poet himself. It should be this connectedness that resonates with the reader; it then does not matter if the reader has knowledge of the thing/place in itself, as long as he can identify with that sense of connection in himself. Place, poet and reader become secondary to the poem and its expression; they become connotations of the primary idea.
That kinetic, pent-up energy was there, coiled as if barely controlled. The music of a bebop jazz group hummed around my ears. The stacatto bursts of words whipped around the room. And I sat there with my metaphorical mouth wide open in amazement.
