Poetrhyme

From a Daughters Perspective

Once I learned that this book was being dedicated to me, I insisted that I have something to say about the author, my dad. I would like to introduce his work simply by way of experience and by what I feel has contributed to its making. I am an avid dance person and he has always referred to me as his poetry in motion, a well-known phrase for dance, but I had never really read much of his poetry until lately. He was not very open with his writings because he thought his children would not be interested.

He would often use phrases that seemed to have a poetic flare. That, to me, was just dads way. He would sometimes say a line and then stop and take note of your reaction. This was what he termed as a hang line. I later saw these lines in his poems with the dot, dot, dot at the ends. I later learned that dad had his own theory about poetry writing and was not easily taken to trends or reading the works of others who would be looked upon as setting the standard.

In his own way, he was insistent with some degree or order or structure citing that it makes poetry more readable and understandable. He totally rejected the idea that structure hinders the creative process but saw it as a tool to preserve it. I remember how displeased he was when I used a stanza of verse that he had helped me with to do an on stage response during a pageant. The response was marked down because it was too structured.

With dad, poetry was not only dance but it was also music as well. He once related to me how the mechanics of music and poetry paralleled. Ive concluded that his theory of poetry writing relates to his current teaching background as a math professor and his former physics teaching background, especially as I remember the way he tutored me when I was pursing my engineering degree.