The sun with rare generosity
beats down on the solar panels
on the roof of Vincent’s log cabin.
The first sentence of his organic novel
–The abattoir, for once, was silent –
sits alone on his laptop screen.
This is the seed from which will spring
plot, character, content.
He gets up, walks out through the kitchen door
through the tortured arch of his driftwood arbor
and into the vegetable garden
where he urinates in a jagged arc
sprinkling life-giving nutrients
on the unsuspecting butter lettuce.
Returning to his desk
he taps out another sentence: With his mother’s mop, he wipes the blood from the kitchen floor.
Why so morbid?
It’s warm, he’s feeling drowsy,
he detects a faint signal from a long-dormant source
like the distant ping from a submarine
at the bottom of the ocean.
He should invite someone for dinner,
the lady who sells jam at the Saturday market, perhaps,
or the angry sculptress – she of the tangled hair,
the scrap metal raptors, the acetylene scent.
The jam lady it is.
Bottle of wine from the retired lawyer’s vineyard,
salmon from the gnarled fishermen down at the dock,
try a little humor,
ask her if raspberry jam is a male preserve,
make a nice salad. What’s the worst that could happen?
too much of a good thing
gorge, and your gorge may rise
not a canyon – a narrow valley,
nearly an anagram of George.
Gorgeous George inspired Muhammad Ali
who went on to beat George Chuvalo,
George Foreman
a blow to the face may cause swelling
engorgement
not such a good thing.
I thought I would revive this post as part of the dVerse challenge today which is to find beauty in ugliness. This poem, I think, reverses that process by moving from beauty to ugliness. Thanks to Mish at dVerse for the challenge.
This Daily Prompt thing is becoming addictive. What happened to that long post I was going to write about U2’s new album which I haven’t yet listened to: how http://www.allmusic.com gave it 2 1/2 stars out of 5; how Rolling Stone gave it 4 1/2 stars; how the Guardian gave it 2 stars and 4 stars (2 different reviews); how Variety called it their best album in years; how some people just don’t like Bono and decide what they are going to write before they listen to the album; how U2 have always been polarising; how I can’t listen to “The Unforgettable Fire”; how I don’t think Bono became a mature lyricist until “Achtung Baby”; how the last album “Songs of Innocence” has 7 tracks on it that are as good as anything U2 has ever done; how the Edge treats every note like it’s a precious object; how I am biased because ever since I relocated from Ireland to Canada, I have become far more patriotic than I ever was when I lived there.
Anderson and his panel of pundits are discussing the Robert Mueller investigation into collusion with Russia when…..
out of the blue, Anderson
in that earnest, honest broker way
that he has, says:
“What if there is no there, there?”
and Carl Bernstein concedes
that it is possible there is no there, there;
and the Trump surrogate
with the smug certainty
that only conservatives can muster
says categorically there is no there, there;
the rest of the panel joins in
and they all charge like lemmings
to the edge of an existential cliff.
I am profoundly disturbed by this
because if there is no there, there
then I can’t go there
and what if I call a friend
to meet for coffee
and I say: ”see you there”
but when I arrive there is no there, there
just a vacuum that suggests that
where we are over here
is nothing more than a fever dream
and if there is no here, here
and no there, there
then where the hell are we?
This poem is all about sound, association and perhaps, memory. The first three lines are an homage to the sound of ‘un’. The phrase -“fecund moribundity, moribund fecundity” – was uttered by my friend, John Damery (John D.) during a discussion about the music of Neil Diamond – his oeuvre, his place in the pantheon. This was some time ago but it has always stuck in my head, it has a brevity and clarity that could only have been brought on by the consumption of 5 or 6 pints and the ingestion of greasy chicken. After a long legal battle (not really) he has recently granted me permission to use it in a poem.
The fourth line is the workhorse of the poem, the engine, the poem’s midfield general. It inverts the ‘mo’ from the first 3 lines to create the ‘om’ that dominates the last two lines. it also introduces ‘iss’ which makes an appearance in the last line. As for “piss-hole in the snow”, I defy anyone to find a finer example of bathos . The fifth line is all about ‘om” but note the clever inversion back to ‘mo’ in ‘pheromone’.
The sixth and last line has a slick softness to it like blancmange. As promised the ‘iss’ from ‘rissole’ and ‘piss-hole’ makes an appearance before morphing into ‘oss’ and in a final stroke of nothing that remotely approaches genius, the transformation of ‘om’ into ‘um’.
Notes:
quincunx (a word that flirts with obscenity):
an arrangement of five objects with four at the corners of a square or rectangle and the fifth at its centre, used for the five on dice or playing cards, and in planting trees.
rhizome:
a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.
Both words were used in an article in the Irish Times on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, sent to me by John D; ‘Cartesian dualism’ and ‘Binarism’ were also mentioned (and Jesus wept).
rissole:
a compressed mixture of meat and spices, coated in breadcrumbs and fried.
My mom used to make them, although I remember them as being more like a hamburger patty without the bun…thanks, mom!
Photo: English Bay, Vancouver, A-MAZE-ING LAUGHTER, by Yue Minjun.
wheel well icicles
rear screen wiper on thin ice
seat warmer up high
arse-scorching
high, so that
is what that
switch is for.
A haiku and a slimverse together for the first time – 29 syllable madness. A terrible beauty is born.
Now, a poem that died and came back to life.
Elliot
some said he got what he deserved
he was just another ocean liner
looking for an iceberg
but I had to observe, you know,
not all disasters
are waiting to happen.
1
Goodbye Reince Priebus
no longer will I contemplate
the strange music of your name –
those slender vowels reversing,
no longer will I look for meanings, explanations –
Reince?
A salve to be applied sparingly to a wound?
Put some Reince on that cut, son!
a rinse? a douche? a poultice?
and Priebus?
Latinate portliness – a Shakespearean character,
a writ to slap someone with- Habeas Priebus,
or a complicated skateboard manouevre:
He executed a perfect reverse Priebus!
Reince, it’s been a slice.
2
Scaramucci, Scaramucci,
will you do the fandango?
Anthony, we hardly knew you,
but thanks for letting us know
about Steve Bannon
and his auto-fellatio.
3
Alas, poor Stephen,
abandoned
like a rumpled sofa.
On Reflection…. Donald Trump
America has given birth
to a giant orange child
a zaftig infant Gulliver
striding the ravaged earth
of his own imagination
trampling whole villages swallowing…
I have posted this a few times before, but since today’s the anniversary of Leonard Cohen’s death I thought I would give it another outing.
A note on the genius of Leonard Cohen:
Below is the first verse of “Suzanne”. Notice how he doesn’t hit a conventional rhyme until the chorus where he rhymes ‘blind’ and ‘mind’. He repeats that pattern in the next 2 verses.
“Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover
And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind”
These poems are part of Oddball Magazine’s lead in to the anniversary of Election Day 2016. Versions of the poems have appeared previously on this blog, although the first poem is radically different than the blog poem.
Now I lie here so out of breath And over –opiated Maybe I couldn’t catch up no but Maybe he could have waited
Opiated….The Tragically Hip
This is the song I went looking for, the day Gord Downie died. I couldn’t remember the title, all I had was the phrase “over-opiated” which had been stuck in my head for years. Why? I don’t really know but maybe it was the triple iamb and the repeated ‘o’? Unlike a lot of The Tragically Hip’s music, this song was never in heavy rotation on Canadian radio, but I knew the song that contained the phrase was on the album ‘Up to Here’ and I knew I had a cassette tape of that album which I had bought back in 1990.
That was the era of the cassette tape and over the years, as tapes became extinct and compact discs, then streaming, took over, I stop listening to the album. So on the day Gord Downie died I found myself looking everywhere for it, eventually finding it in the storage space between the front seats of my red 98 Ford Taurus station wagon. There was some serendipity to this, because the only tape deck I have left is in the Taurus station wagon. A cassette and a Taurus sound system – not exactly high fidelity, but then the Hip were never really about high fidelity; put the vocal and drums on top of the mix and let the rest take care of itself. Besides, the sound system isn’t bad. There are 4 speakers , 2 front, 2 back, and if you switch everything to the 2 rear speakers and the bed of the station wagon is empty, the sound is actually pretty good, good enough for a bar band with 2 guitar players that sound like Keith Richards and Ron Wood but not as sloppy. I don’t normally drive the Taurus except occasionally to take stuff to the dump, but on the day Gord Downie died, I drove it around Vancouver all day listening to “Up to Here”. Yes, I was one of those guys you see in a parked car with the windows closed, beating time on the steering wheel.
And it struck me what a good rock lyricist Gord Downie is. Much has been made of his talent as a poet, and he is a talented poet, but writing lyrics for rock music is a different skill. For me, both rock and blues are all about the set up and the punchline. Take this for example:
“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine”
….Leiber and Stoller
Simple maybe, but deceptively hard to do well. Here’s Gord Downie from Boots or Hearts:
“Fingers and toes, fingers and toes Forty things we share Forty one if you include The fact that we don’t care”
Or this from the same song:
“I feel I’ve stepped out of the wilderness All squint-eyed and confused But even babies raised by wolves They know exactly when they’ve been used”
In fact, I could quote the whole song, because for me it’s as close as anyone has come to a perfect lyric. Or how about this from “New Orleans Is Sinking””
“Ain’t got no picture postcards, ain’t got no souvenirs my baby, she don’t know me when I’m thinking ’bout those years”
But Downie is also at heart a folk singer, a teller of tales. “38 years old” is about a guy serving time for avenging the rape of his sister; the story is told from the view point of his younger brother. I don’t think there’s a more devastating chorus than this one, anywhere in popular music:
“Same pattern on the table, same clock on the wall Been one seat empty, eighteen years in all Freezing slow time, away from the world He’s thirty-eight years old, never kissed a girl He’s thirty-eight years old, never kissed a girl”
Not all song lyrics look good on paper and Downie is an idiosyncratic singer who stretches and bends words to fit the song, but here’s a few more random samples from the album:
“In my dreams, a candy coated train comes to my door”
“Pumping hands and kissing all the babies Ain’t no time for shadowed doubts or maybes”
“Pulled down his birthday suitcase Brown with dust from no place Said, “I think it’s time we made a start” They danced the waltz of charity No car garage, two kids for free They were pissing bliss and playing parts”
“Up to Here” was the Hip’s first album, they want on to make many more, to become Canadian icons. Downie even wrote songs about hockey. When he died he was eulogised by a tearful Justin Trudeau and Canadian radio played Hip songs all day long. All deserved of course. Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Gord Downie – not a bad list to be part of. But Downie, was different. The rest of those artists came out of the folk music tradition, but Downie’s genre, modus operandi was bar band rock and his genius was that he succeeded in blending poetry with bar band rock. Just scroll back up and read that last verse, a short story in six lines. Rave on Gord. Now take a listen.
Slim came to me with this one, apparently he has taken up bird watching.
The Low November Sun
The low November sun
hits the silver birches
and the cherry tree
sending the bush tits
and the black-capped
chickadees
into a flitting frenzy
Who pulled the alarm?
Which one is my nest?
Where did I leave that worm?
Followers of this blog will, of course, remember Slim’s only other attempt at a poem about nature:
I have played around with this poem a few times in previous posts, some poems are never finished, I guess, they are just resting. Perhaps, in the case of this poem, it’s because the subject was pretty much nailed by John Keats in 1819 at the age of 24.
My friend, the poet Slim Volume, once gave me this advice:
Avoid autumn and death, They’ve been done before; There’s little more to say On either score.
Also, waves like marathon runners Collapsing on the shore, The inexorable march of time, Don’t go through that door.
Autumn in Vancouver means it’s time for the Vancouver Writer’s Festival. Last Saturday I went to see the Scottish novelist and journalist, Andrew O’Hagan, talk about his adventures as ghost writer for Julian Assange and his ultimate disenchantment with Assange, whom he now regards as an unprincipled narcissist. He also read from some of his own novels. He talked for close to one and half hours and is an engaging, intelligent, witty speaker who in the course of his readings imitated a range of voices from Marilyn Monroe to a group of Scottish people in an old folk’s home on New Year’s Eve. But it was a question he took at the end that more than anything else stuck with me long after the talk ended.
He was asked by an audience member whether he thought that the internet and the platform it provides for self publishing through blogs, websites etc was a good thing in general for English literature in that more and more people are now writing fiction, poetry etc. He replied that initially he thought that it was a good thing but now he wishes it would stop, primarily because of the poor quality of what is being produced. Writers are not taking the time to edit and re-edit their work, they are in rush to get something out when maybe they should be waiting. Writing, like all art, requires hard work, diligence and talent.
The next day, the sun came out after a week of constant rain, so we headed out for a walk on the beach. As we left the house, this line popped into my head: ” we walked out today to celebrate the absence of rain”. I’ve been writing haiku’s recently as a kind of mind game, a poetic Sudoku, so by the end of the walk, I had this:
we walked out today
to celebrate October,
the absence of rain.
When I got home, I went straight to my laptop and posted the poem. An hour later, I had a look at the poem again and I trashed it immediately. It was flat, wooden and had that self-consciously poetic tone that haiku’s sometimes have. In addition, I had destroyed the rhythm of the original line by trying to adhere to a syllable count. This might have been better:
we walked out today
to celebrate
the absence of rain.
It keeps the assonance of the ‘a’s’ running through each line, plus the half rhyme between ‘today’, ‘celebrate’, and ‘rain’ and it keeps the ‘b’s’ in ‘celebrate’ and ‘absence’ close together. In addition, it’s an internet friendly length, three lines long, just the right length for clicking on and moving on.
On the other hand, I could just tuck the line away until I find a better context for it.
Is it just me, or is Andrew O’Hagan looking over my shoulder
Reuben Wooley over at I Am Not A Silent Poet has posted 2 of my poems. The first poem I reblogged in the post previous to this one. It’s a haiku about Northern Ireland Politics, which is quite a large subject to squeeze into seventeen syllables, but I gave it a try. The second poem is looser, maybe too loose now that I read it again, but with topical poems there isn’t time to chip away at the poem.
Bothpoems appeared previously on this blog, but check them out and the rest of Reuben Wooley’s excellent magazine.
“Danish Oil and Natural Gas…….has transformed itself into the world’s largest offshore wind farm company spurred on my Denmark’s aggressive efforts to decarbonize its economy.”
“BMW prepares to mass produce electric cars by 2020”
“China plans to spend $360 billion on renewable energy capacity by 2020”
“in May, India cancelled 14 gigawatts of proposed coal-fired plants, while seeing a steep dropoff in coal imports…”
Quotes from Corporate Knights Magazine , Fall 2017
thoughts and prayers
hearts go out
difficult times
pledge to do
everything in our power
to end this blight
that threatens to destroy
the very fabric
of this great nation
well….
no one actually said
that last one.
Stopdraggingthepanda 