Half Rigid Half Verse

A few years ago, I found myself strolling down a narrow, car-free street in Bury Saint Edmunds, a gorgeous little town in Suffolk, England. Admiring its houses’ irregular roof line, I realized that although the human mind needs patterns to orient itself, it’s also thrilled by the sabotage of these patterns, that the coexistence of order and chaos lies at the heart of the aesthetic experience.

That’s why a poem that adheres to a rhyme scheme and/or syllable count becomes too much like a too-straight street, announcing its intentions miles in advance. Your place or mine? Although the sights along the way may intrigue, we know there’ll be a stoplight at exactly three hundred yards, and that we should keep our speed constant until we’re sucked into another equally soul-destroying-yet-A-OK-for-commerce gridded artery.
Borges joked somewhere that literary surprises are unseemly for civilized people, but his works are nothing but surprises, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word, practically, as in the much celebrated passage from “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language," translated here by Eliot Weinberger:

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that from a distance resemble flies.

With his “animals are divided into," Borges tricked us into expecting some sort of scientific classification, some recognizable pattern of thoughts, only to yank all of our mental anchors. If this isn’t poetry, I don’t know what is. Again, I think poetry lies in the violation of mental patterns. Check out this Vietnamese figure of speech:

Mother chicken, son duck.

Since we had expected another chicken, duck became a poetic moment, albeit a tiny one. Here’s the nickname of Anthony Heyward, a Brooklyn street baller:

Half Man Half Amazing

That’s already better, since the surprise’s greater, the discovery of an adjective where we expected a noun. With neither rhymes nor line breaks, we get something like a poem in six syllables. It’s not much, I agree, but there's still more poetry here than in many volumes of verse. In short, give me the poetry and quickly!