POETRHYME

From a Daughter’s 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 dad’s 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. I’ve 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.

He perceived that poetry has volume and pitch that is controlled by use of stanza, line-length, and other structural devices that need to be worked with just as music. Rhyme gives a sense of rhythm to poetry as beat does to music. This is the “body and soul connection,” he would say. “I don’t like the trend in avoiding rhyme.”  With this insistence comes POETRHYME, a work totally dedicated to rhyme in whatever he experienced.

In his way of writing poetry, he was always kindred to nature, a partaker of love, a friend of wisdom, a caretaker of gardens and vineyards that always captured his smiles and personification in a most practical and simple style.

Courtney Dockery

Leon Dockery has been writing poetry really all of his life, and has contributed to many periodicals, which showcase poetry in the sense of a flavor of inspiration and rhyme. His family life and rural background comes out in his poems, which inspire our thoughts and emotions to consider familiar things, which are not so familiar as we might have thought. His credentials as a mathematician may be evident in his orderly use of abstractions to jar our minds to consider those things of life beyond what we can see. His poetry presents an affect of communicating as a general conversation, leaving the reader with room to think and respond in a silent mode.

After reading some of his work, I felt as though I knew him as a friend, father or brother. I can appreciate his dedication to rhyme. It is indeed becoming a lost art that needs to be revitalized.