Poetry's power and appeal are much like that of music. Like music, poetry can combine the rational sense and metaphoric images of prose with rhythm's rolling pulse and a singing counterpoint of rhyme. Like ringing bells, like soggy ground in an earthquake, like the Tacoma Narrows bridge in a high wind, we resonate to poetry's multi-sense message.
I am a stick-in-the-mud tradionalist about classical music and poetry; I much prefer poems that rhyme and scan. Some poets may speak of liberating poetry from chains of conventional structure, but without structure much meaning is lost. We all work within structures not of our making: external, restrictive and somewhat arbitrary frames. The art of poetry -- or chess, or tennis, or programming, or data analysis, or baseball -- lies in how we work within those frames.
A good song's lyrics speak not prose but poetry: images dancing with their own music.
With no other justification than that I like them, here are a few moldy oldies:
![[counter]](/cgi-bin/counter.gif?cochrans_poetry)