Offer homage to J. V. Cunningham,
whose poetry revived the epigram;
who wrote his verses with the expectation
that those who read them had made preparation
to give his lines sincere appreciation.
And as for those who did not give a damn,
they never understood what they were missing:
too caught up in their serpentine souls' hissing.
Starward
Author's Notes/Comments:
J. V. Cunningham was a poet-scholar, whose epigrams are considered to be among the best in Western Literature of any time. When I first began to write poetry in 1994, I was advised to study Cunningham extensively, carefully, and repeatedly. This advise served me very well: from Cunningham, I learned that rhymes must be exact---"town/house" is not a rhyme, but "now/pal" is. After several months of intense study of Cunningham's example, during which his volume of collected poems rarely left my side, I was enabled to write my very first sonnet---which I cite here in Cunningham's honor: https://www.postpoems.org/authors/jer/poem/549223
