The title promises a fight, but the poem reads more like a phrasebook. Five lines, each built on the same frame, set two instruments side by side and let each one name the same part of itself in its own words. The central idea is that the guitar and the banjo do more than look and sound different. They seem to think differently, and the way each one names a thing carries a whole attitude. Dave Bonta never says which instrument is better, and he never uses an "I". The poem stays deadpan and lets the vocabulary do the arguing.
The construction is simple, and that simplicity does the work. Every line is its own stanza, with white space around it, like entries in a glossary or turns in a call-and-response. There is no rhyme and no strict metre, but the repeated opening, "Where guitar says… banjo says…", works as anaphora and sets up a steady beat. Once the reader knows the frame, the only thing left to notice is what changes inside it. The line lengths change too. The first two answers are clipped, the third stretches out ("one for each finger"), and the last two shrink again until the poem ends on "full", a single syllable that closes like a lid.
The first pair of lines shifts the register of the words. "Body" and "soundboard" are anatomy and carpentry: wood, a solid surface, a thing built. "Head" and "membrane" suit a banjo, whose sound comes from a skin stretched tight over a round rim, like a drum. But "membrane" also sounds biological. It is thin and alive, and it can vibrate or tear. Even the pairing of "body" with "head" is funny, as if the banjo were all head, bright and ringing. Without announcing it, the vocabulary suggests that the banjo is part string instrument and part drum.
The third line brings in the human hand. "Six" is a count, the kind of fact printed on a spec sheet. The banjo's answer, "one for each finger", replaces the number with a gesture. The familiar five-string banjo fits that description, though the poem leaves the arithmetic for the reader to work out. The guitar counts, and the banjo measures strings against the hand that plays them. It is also the longest line, and it is the one where the player's body steps into the poem.
The last two lines change the grammar. Until now the banjo has answered noun with noun, or noun with phrase. Now "bridge" becomes "keep going", a command, and "hole" becomes "full", a state. A banjo has a bridge too, so this isn't a correction. It is an attitude. A bridge is something you cross, and the banjo's answer treats it as momentum rather than structure, something you pass over without stopping. The final pair is the most playful. A guitar's sound hole is an opening, an absence that lets the music out. The banjo's face has no such opening, and its answer is "full." The ear may also catch "hole" and "whole" sounding alike, so that "full" answers a word the poem doesn't print. That is a reading and not a certainty, but the pun fits the poem's habit of translating by sound and sense together.
Taken in order, the answers move from naming parts to describing a way of being. The poem begins with swapped terms for objects (body, soundboard), passes through a number turned into a hand, and ends with an instruction and a condition: keep going, full. By the end the banjo is no longer being described. It is speaking in its own voice, one of motion and abundance, against the guitar's more careful, structural one.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It uses the form of a dictionary entry, which is neutral and practical, to suggest that a difference in vocabulary is a difference in outlook. The same trick works well beyond music. Two people, two regions or two families can use different words for the same thing, and the words are never quite interchangeable. The poem's own method, repeating a frame and changing one word, is how that argument is made. It also leaves the reader with something unusual for a poem titled "vs.": two instruments that don't compete, and a pleasure in hearing them answer each other.