Might Sell Any

My latest venture is marketing a collection of poetry, which was going be easy, and profitable, because poetry is everywhere, right? You simply can’t get away from it. It’s as if poetry is the fastest thing in the universe, always able to catch up, like it’s permanently in motion.

It turns out that poetry is complex and confusing, something hard to pin down, even though it is clearly measured in meters.

So, I got some poetry together, all centred around a theme, and got a friend to give it all a read through. I thought it was good, but it turned out to be not proper poetry at all. According to my friend, it stanza reason that it’s all supposed to rhyme, so mine was no good. It’s as if I was going hunting for bear, and someone took my ammo for a prank, replacing everything with blank.

Undaunted by this early reverse, I set about finding some proper rhyming verse, and asked another friend to give me a verdict. It’s totally perverse, and apparently a curse, that what I had gathered was doggerel or worse. On top of all that, the initial advice turns out to be wrong, and there’s no need for poetry to rhyme, or not all of the time.

With my editorial plans in tatters I decided to stick in a recipe for porridge. I know it’s not poetry but I thought it would help even the pace, sort of spice up the gaps between the poems.

So boil up your odes, with the finest sparkling grains of crispy salt garnered from the swelling sea, garnish it with the slickest, smoothest cream lovingly skimmed from atop the finest milk. And that’s it. Simple, right? I mean, no-one’s averse to a bit of porridge between verses, are they?

Then someone suggested putting a few songs in, because they’re just poetry with music. I’ve been given some really bad advice recently, so I called them a lyre. So, just to prove me wrong, they did me a song, specially for me, which to be fair is serious dedication. Anyway…

Morning has broken

No hint of sunrise

Can not return it

Or get it replaced

Been on the phone now

To get a repair man

Can’t come on Monday

Call us next week.

I’m not convinced, but I’ve put it in anyway, just because it doesn’t rhyme. And I need the padding because if I’m going to sell this anthology, it needs stuff in it. Although I’ve now been told I can’t call it an anthology because I got unhitched from my linking theme, which is a bit unfair because it’s all poetry. So there’s a linking theme. Apart from the recipe, but that doesn’t matter, does it?

And the essay, which I put in to explain why my anthology is such a mess, and that doesn’t matter because so long as it sells I don’t care. I know it’s starting to sound more like a magazine, but it’s mine, so I can call it what I like.

So there it is, my anthology of unrelated poetry, and it’s even got its own book number, with a bar-code, so my poetry anthology scans as well. Just to finish off, someone did a final poem, so now all it needs is a title, which I’m currently stuck on. I only mention that because I’m looking for inspiration, and I thought it would amuse.

So, finally,

There once was a muddled anthology

A collection of poem and recipe

All packed in as one

To be cooked and then sung

And sold as a varied miscellany

# # #

I had to actually look up the March #BlogBattle prompt of Miscellanarian , because although I have many things labelled “misc”, it’s just one of those words you accept without necessarily knowing what it really means. Then I read the Wikipedia article and decided to summarise it in a relentless pun-fest.

Images from Pixabay