doctor’s wives
in low rent
dives, looking
for a cure.
Out on the Town (a slimverse)
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Category Archives: Poetry
Rejection (a slimverse)
Rejection
pick yourself
a story
one that fits
and move on.
The Unconventional Republican (remix)
The center folds
and all ’round topple
into the opening void,
what rough beast
rabble in tow
slouches towards Washington
bursting with tawdry pomp
and irrational schemes.
A few notes, this poem of course echoes and directly quotes “The Second Coming” by WB Yeats, a poem which was written after the first World War and still resonates today. For a brilliant analysis of the poem, read “Break, Blow, Burn” by Camille Paglia. The Irish jazz singer, Christine Tobin has put the poem to music on a CD called “Sailing to Byzantium” which is well worth checking out.
Slim at the Vancouver Folk Festival (reprise)
One hour into the folkfest
and a mellow, minor key, melancholy
is seeping into Slim’s bones,
he feels it like an arthritic ache
and he wishes that someone
would duck walk across the stage
shooting staccato bursts of distorted guitar
at the chill, Tilley clad audience
who, unlike Slim, have a default mode
other than anger.
I thought I would reprise this one. I spent yesterday at the Vancouver Folk Festival. The photograph shows the on-site solar-powered ATM. The ATM is housed in a Volkswagen van which is indicative of the post Woodstock festival vibe, in fact some of the people looked like they may have been at Woodstock. At times they must have felt, looking at the current generation of festival-goers, that they were looking at their former selves – long straight air, flowing dresses, tie-dyed shirts, garlands, beards, that swirling hippy dance. The solar-powered ATM is indicative of the environmental consciousness or conscience of the event ( there are attendants at each garbage bin station to ensure that people make the right recycling choice).
In recent years, local authorities have allowed a beer garden, which means that beer can be purchased and consumed behind a chain-linked fence but not carried around the festival grounds. This is good in that beer is available but having to drink in a compound dampens the free spirit vibe a little bit. It is ironic that at the Republican Convention this week, guns can be open-carried and here in Vancouver, it is forbidden to open-carry a beer. Sometimes erring on the side of safety is a good thing.
Some great acts that I hadn’t heard before = the Moulettes, San Firmin, Hayes Carll.
Slim’s Sudbury Vacation ( a poem and a post-poem interview)
The Stack (remix)
And what a
beautiful
plume we have
here, Nigel,
a plume with
time on its
hands, look at
it loping
across the
sky like a
giant Chinese
dragon, let’s
hail a cab
to find the
plume’s end, where
the last wisps
of vapor
drift upwards
and a blue
mist hangs, yes,
there it is
in the sky
to the west
stalking the
cars in the
parking lot
outside the
big box mall
while the sun
bawls and the
sky gets all
indignant.
Post Poem Interview
You played well out there tonight, Slim.
Slim: Well, you know it’s not about me, it’s about the poem, I’m just part of the process.
Are you suggesting that you are perhaps some kind of conduit linked to some higher power, some higher resource.
Slim: No, I am just mouthing platitudes, isn’t that the idea?
Quite, so I am sure everyone is wondering, who is Nigel?
Slim: He’s my cousin.
That’s a very English name.
Slim: That’s hardly surprising, he is English.
Do you call him ’Nige’ for short?
Slim: No!
It sounds like he could be a member of one of those floppy-haired synth bands from the eighties, you know, like Soft Cell or Human League or The Pet Shop Boys. Didn’t XTC have a song about a guy called Nigel. Is he in a band?
Slim: He’s a welder.
Does his hair not get in the way?
Slim: He’s bald, where is this going?
(mumbles) somewhere slow or nowhere fast. So tell me about the structure of this poem.
Slim: I took the 3 syllable line, 4 line verse , I have been using, and applied it to a poem that I was never happy with and it worked, at least it made me trim a lot of the fat and I came up with a better poem, I think?
……….what? Sorry I nodded off there for a bit. Well, I’m sure you are itching to get back to the dressing room and join the rest of the lads in a lukewarm bath of diluted sweat.
Slim: Can’t wait!
Boris and David (3 Brexit haikus)
Boris and David
Two public school boys
who both want to be prefect
divide a country.
Two public school boys
who both want to be prefect
destroy a country.
Two public school boys
both wanted to be prefect
but not any more.
Lucinda Williams (revision)
Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
your voice is like a bruise
there’s no one out there
no one out there
fit to tie your shoes.
Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
your voice is gargled dust
you wrote the book
you wrote the book
on loneliness, love and lust.
Bloom’s Day, Dublin 2016
Sign in window of Sweny’s Pharmacy, Lincoln Place, Dublin.
Sweny’s Pharmacy
Readings from Ulysses, Sandymount Green, Dublin.
Steam train, taken from path between Bray and Greystones.
The Pigeon House Power Station, Sandymount Strand and the “scrotum-tightening sea”.
I Guess They All Can’t Be California Girls (a slimverse)
she was just
a little
too slow on
the uptick.
Holy Scripture (a Slimverse)
Holy Scripture
when asked to
pick a font
he replied:
baptismal.
Photo Of Baptistry, Pisa, Italy.
Firenze (a slim verse)
Firenze
that complaint
stretching the
second last
sylaaable.
Old Cowboy
Old Cowboy ( a double slimverse)
bowed legs
straddling a
ghost horse, beef
jerky thin
Holiday
Inn, buffet
breakfast, far
from the range.
The Trump Collection (5 poems)
Well, despite the best efforts of a clown car of cartoon contestants and the ridicule heaped on him by John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Bill Maher, Samantha Bee and all those late night satirists, Donald Trump is about to win the Republican Party nomination; he is about to become the winner he has always claimed to be. Time to review this blog’s vain efforts to stop this behemoth. Here they are in order of appearance, as they move from ridicule to outrage to reflection to fear and finally an appeal to a higher power.
Donald Trump (a slimverse)
Donald T
court jester
hair today
tomorrow?
The Level of Discourse
I want to say a few words
About the level of discourse
How low can it go?
How low can it go
When a candidate for the presidency
Of the United States
Gets up on television
And mocks, mimics, ridicules
A disabled man
And the media endlessly debate
Whether he intended to or not
When he plainly did
And the members of his party
Refuse to criticize him
Refuse to say that
This is beneath our dignity,
Perhaps dignity
Has left the room
Has left the United States of America,
And these same party members
Pride themselves
On their rugged individualism
Their boots on the ground machismo
And oh how they love their Hitler analogies
But when a trumped up
Pumped up tin pot bully
Emerges from their own ranks
They are too chickenshit to say anything
How low can it go?
The level of discourse
How low can it go?
Trumped
I get it now
Donald T
Is a performance artist
Like that guy in Beijing
Sucking dust out of the air
With a vacuum cleaner
Or maybe he’s one of those mirrors
In a fairy tale
Reflecting only
The worst in ourselves.
The above poem also appeared on https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/trumped-by-jim-feeney/
Watching the Republican Debates
potus
poultice
poultry
poetry
podcast
pomegranate
pornography
porridge
pork
only
one
of
the
above
is
a
lethal
weapon
when
given
to
a
fool
Super Saturday
There’s a dog wearing a tartan skirt
outside the window of Starbuck’s;
a tartan skirt, a belt, and a knitted white sweater.
Its little dog legs are moving furiously
on the wet pavement,
across the slick road
and the sodden green park
the ocean sits
like a slab of lead
having clearly decided
to take some time off,
no crashing on the shore today.
South of the border
A bigoted bully with a head
like a bloated turnip
is moving towards
the presidency of the United States,
and God, once again,
is moving in mysterious ways
but I, for one, wish he would knock it off,
enough already with the mystery
for once in your eternal life,
clarify something,
I mean, for Chrissakes,
there’s a dog wearing a tartan skirt
outside the window of Starbuck’s.
There you go, the poetry’s a bit rough and ready but that goes with the territory. That’s probably enough about Donald for a while. It’s hard to argue logically against statements that have no logic to begin, against policy that doesn’t exist except as cynical manipulation but most of all I can’t get interested. He’s had his twenty minutes. I’m bored. I’m bored with Donald. I’m bored with the people who believe what he says. Little Marco is gone, lyin’ Ted is gone and we are left with boring Donald (#boringdonald). Until I get irritated again………
Me and Julio – a Quick Thought on Writing Poetry
When I first started writing poetry, I had really no idea how to do it (I’m still not totally sure). We had covered poetry in high school (or secondary school as it’s called in Ireland), mostly the works of English poets like Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley and a bit of Yeats, but after high school most of my exposure was through reading anthologies or Irish poets like Heaney, Muldoon, Durcan.
So when I started writing, my only technique was to try out lines and see how they sounded and this is pretty much how I write today, although occasionally I will switch to a form as a way of compressing the language. Lately. I have been looking more closely, but always in retrospect, at why a particular line works and another doesn’t.
Recently, I saw in the newspaper, an obituary for Daniel Berrigan, the activist priest, who was a controversial figure in the late sixties and early seventies and at one time spent time in prison for burning draft records in a protest. I immediately thought of a line from a Paul Simon song “Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard”. Initially, I remembered the line as “when the activist priest came to get us released/ we were all on the cover of Newsweek”, but that didn’t sound right. Then, I realized that it was “radical priest” not “activist priest”. Why does that sound better? Music, the ‘r’ in ‘radical’ is repeated in both ‘priest’ and ‘released’; the ‘d’ and ‘l’ in ‘radical are repeated in ‘released’. Without music, it’s prose!
(By the way, Berrigan is the priest that Paul Simon is referring to in the song.)
Slimverse Down Under (Quantum Foam and the Subjunctive)
Well, this is exciting, slimverse goes antipodal! My good friend Snoop Doggerel in Adelaide, Australia has just joined the international movement towards slimverse. Can anything, other than widespread apathy, stop this juggernaut now? Here it is, Snoop D’s paean to the power of nothing:
NOTHING MUCH
By Snoop D. Doggerel
Nothing’s great
It can sate
Quantum foam
I can roam
By way of explanation, from Wikipedia:
“Quantum mechanics predicts that space-time is not smooth; instead, space-time would have a foamy, jittery nature and would consist of many small, ever-changing, regions in which space and time are not definite, but fluctuate.
The predicted scale of space-time foam is about ten times a billionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom’s nucleus, which cannot be measured directly. A foamy space-time would have limits on the accuracy with which distances can be measured because the size of the many quantum bubbles through which light travels will fluctuate. Depending on the space-time model used, the space-time uncertainties accumulate at different rates as light travels through the vast distances.”
Speaking of a foamy, jittery nature, I asked Slim to comment on ‘quantum foam’ and how it could enhance Snoop D’s ability to roam. He had this to say:
CHILL
the answer
lies in the
wondering.
gnomic? moi?
What can I say? We are experiencing an embarrassment of riches. But wait, this just in, another gem from Snoop Doggerel:
TENSE TIME
By Snoop D. Doggerel
As it were
Subjunctive
No-one saw
It coming
Strut that subjunctive, Snoop.
I present this to Slim and he goes silent like he’s experiencing a food chain moment, like he feels he’s been out-versed. But wait, something is coming in….
SHOCK AND AWE
It’s enough
to make me
floss outside
corn season.
Yep, if you want gnomic, if you want cryptic, if you want non-sequiturs, this is the blog for you!!
12 Syllables that Shook the World
Well, after a brief diversion into haikuland, April – Month of Slim returns with the first sighting of slimverse outside of North America (well, actually, outside of this blog) and it comes from Stiofan O’Broin (over in Ireland/ Italy ?) who shows a complete mastery of the form in his first attempt! Here it is:
Slimverse
a slimverse
is an odd
metrical
exercise.
On closer examination, this is actually a poem in which the poem is the subject of the poem itself, a kind of poetic selfie. It’s like writing a sonnet about a sonnet, or a haiku about a haiku. For example:
Haiku
haiku: seventeen
ineffable syllables
five, seven and five.
I think we’ll call it a“ Narcissus”.
Here’s a vaguely related blast from the past from Slim:
The Pre-Selfie Years (a slimverse)
fifteen years
ago, no
one could spell
narcissist.
(Be sure to check out Stiofan’s blog, it’s an eclectic mix of poetry, Irish politics and music and always interesting.).
Scene on West 16th (haiku 3)
cherry blossoms bloom
the wrecking ball’s lazy swing
petals, debris, spring.
Scene on West 16th (haiku 2)
cherry blossoms bloom
the air is sticky with greed
houses, for sale, sold.
Scene on West 16th (haiku 1)
cherry blossoms bloom
well-dressed ladies from Beijing
pose with hand on hip
April – Month of Slim 1 (2 poems)
Yes, as promised, April just got a bit crueler. In response to Slim’s recent complaints about being ignored, we kick off with 2 poems – a slimverse and a slimverse lite (12 syllables, 4 lines, 3 syllables per line, utilizing only 6 letters).
Names (a slimverse)
those that can
stand alone
those that can’t
hyphenate.
(Inspired by Cameron Borthwick-Jackson and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlaine )
Too Many Questions (a slimverse lite)
U is at?
Is u at?
At issue?
Is it u?
Coming Soon! April – Month Of Slim
The great TS Eliot once wrote :”April is the cruelest month”, well it’s about to get crueler. In response to almost no demand at all, for the month of April this blog, as was it’s original intent, will be devoted to the writings of resident poet, Slim Volume. There will of course be slimverse, slimverse lite. a reboot of the Lad Poetry project and one or two guest appearances.
Also, I encourage all you poets out there to create your own slimverse. It’s the simplest of forms – 12 syllables, 4 lines, 3 syllables each line. Knock yourself out! And let me know about it!
Poem by Jim Feeney
Oddball Magazine have been kind enough to publish one of my poems. Check them out!
So long, Halong
As we ride out of Cat Ba
through a valley circled
by limestone crags,
a compilation of pop ballads
from the seventies and eighties
oozes from the speakers
and the affable English backpackers
at the back of the bus
groan in faux horror
as Aerosmith follows Bryan Adams
follows George Michaels
follows Michael Jackson
but when the Bee Gees launch
“How Deep Is Your Love”
the backpackers quieten down
and the driver stops honking his horn
at the dogs, children, women
in cone hats and cyclists
with finely balanced cargos
who drift carelessly
in front of the bus
as if it was an invisible
visitor from the future,
and we all strain against
the tug of the song’s chorus
far too cool to sing along
except for one backpacker
let’s call him Nigel
or Christian, or Jason, or Justin
who, in a high piping voice
declares his…
View original post 122 more words
Watching the Republican Debate
potus
poultice
poultry
poetry
podcast
pomegranate
pornography
porridge
pork
only
one
of
the
above
is
a
lethal
weapon
when
given
to
a
fool
Flip, Flip and Fly – the Crazy world of Vancouver Real estate
The great Paul Simon once said “I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”. Yep, I had to go that far back to find a real estate reference in a poem or song. I’ll get back to poetry and real estate later in this post but in the meantime check out this excellent piece of investigative journalism which appeared in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/the-real-estate-technique-fuelling-vancouvers-housing-market/article28634868/.
It paints a depressing picture of opportunism and greed, it reminded me in a lot of ways of the movie “The Big Short”. In particular, this quote from one realtor, a Mr. Wang:
“I have multiple properties and an annual income 10 times higher than the average Canadian. I am making more money than multiple doctors” .
To quote “The Big Short”: “he’s not confessing, he’s bragging”.
I live in the area at the epicentre of the bidding wars described in the article and every weekend I see real estate agents in white BMW SUV’s cruising up and down the road with prospective clients. As a result, a siege mentality has developed among people like me who want to stay in the neighbourhood and have no intention of selling (my next door neighbour has put a sign on her door saying “I am not selling my house”). There is also a lot of anger (justified or not) in the community at the destruction of perfectly good houses, some of which have been around since the 1920’s, and their replacement with larger, lot filling “monster houses” which are then rented or left to stand empty waiting for the price to rise.
So I thought, is there a poem in all of this? I looked at parody – “I’ve got some real estate flyers here in my bag”, “pave paradise, put up a monster house”- but I couldn’t get beyond one or two lines. Then I looked at the pile of flyers from real estate agents that drop through by letter box on a daily basis and I thought “found poetry”! Maybe I could string the names of all the real estate agents together and form a poem. I immediately hit a problem. Way back in time, I read an interview with Eric Burdon of the Animals about a song called “Gonna send you back to Walker”. It was the B-side of “House of the Rising Sun” and was originally called, I believe, “Gonna send you back to Georgia”, but Eric thought it would be amusing to substitute an English place name. In the interview, he explained that it was difficult to write rock or R&B songs using English place names because most of the names were just not musical. I can see his point, “Sweet Home Derbyshire”, “Derbyshire on my Mind” wouldn’t work – those parsimonious slender vowels “e” and “i” compressing the middle of the word into that unmusical ”ysh”. “Alabama” on the other hand, now that’s a big loud word – all those “a’s” and that big “bam” in the middle.
Well, looking at my list of real estate agents, about half of the names were Anglo Saxon or Scottish and what can be done with “MacDonald”? He had a farm, end of story, or maybe he sold the farm, either way I was going nowhere. The names of the Chinese real estate agents offered more possibilities – one syllable, a lot ending in the same two consonants “ng”, easier to rhyme. There were two “Zhangs” on the list, so I thought – “more Zhang for your buck”- but that raised the spectre of racism that has been hanging over the whole issue like a giant red herring (mix that metaphor!). So it was all getting a bit fraught and mean-spirited and perhaps most of these real estate agents were just decent people following the first rule of capitalism – make hay while the sun shines.
So, no poem,
but maybe down the road
when the wrecking ball hits the house next door,
or the house across the back lane,
or the house across the road
and another load of old timber, gyproc and memories
is scooped into a giant tote
and trucked off to the land fill
maybe then there will be a poem
and a sad poem it will be.
Glenn Frey, the New York Daily News and the Lionel Messi Problem
Following the death of Glenn Frey, an article by Gersh Kuntzman appeared in the “New York Daily News” titled “Glenn Frey’s death is sad but the Eagles were a horrific band”. The definition of “horrific “in the Oxford English Dictionary is “causing horror” and the definition of “horror” is “An intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust”. I wondered how could a country rock band that created some great songs and were accomplished instrumentalists and singers cause an intense feeling of fear, shock or disgust. He then goes on to say in the body of the article that Eagles were “quite simply, the worst rock and roll band”. Again, like them or not, how could that be? There are a million other far worthier candidates; the three guys who practiced in the garage of my neighbor’s house when I was growing up, for a start. The Eagles aren’t even a rock band, they are a country rock band that occasionally plays rock n’roll and when they do, they play it well – “Life in the Fast lane”, for example.
Further down, Gersh lists other artists who were active in 1972 to 1976 – Lou Reed, David Bowie, The Sex Pistols – implying that the Eagles were creative dwarves in comparison. Whatever about Lou and David – The Sex Pistols? Never mind the bollocks, and there is an awful lot of bollocks written when it comes to The Sex Pistols, has anyone, even Gersh, listened to The Sex Pistols in the last 35 years. At the end of the article, he describes a scene in “The Big Lebowski” where “The Dude” asks his cab driver to turn off “Peaceful Easy Feeling”, because The Dude (“an icon of cool”) hates the “f**king Eagles”. Gersh exempts Joe Walsh from this un-coolness, in a sad attempt to pander, awarding him the distinction of being the only cool Eagle. Has North America become a giant high school where politicians resort to bullying, name-calling and macho posturing and rock journalists try to appear cool and hardcore by referencing The Big Lebowski and The Sex Pistols?
And then there’s Gersh’s Lionel Messi Problem. What is a Lionel Messi problem? Well, say you’re a sports fan and you are a dedicated follower of one team, you automatically can’t stand the team’s arch rival; if it’s the Vancouver Canucks, the Leafs suck; if you are an Everton fan, Liverpool suck; if you are a Real Madrid fan, Barcelona suck. But there’s a problem, Lionel Messi plays for Barcelona and is obviously the top player in the world. So if you are a Madrid fan the most you can do is to resort to lame criticism – he’s only good because of the system Barcelona play, he’s not the same when he plays for Argentina – then Messi, all by himself slaloms past four defenders and chips the ball over the keeper. Hotel California is Gersh’s Lionel Messi Problem. The lyrics are “mysterious”, only of interest to “nerds” (high school again), it’s a “novelty” song. Mysterious? It’s poetry, Gersh, Don Henley is using imagery, metaphor, the whole song is a metaphor for chrissake! There isn’t a song writer out there who wouldn’t give his eyeteeth to have written that lyric. Apart from the lyric, the song has everything else – good chord structure, melody and great guitar. It is in fact a great rock song and how can the worst rock band produce a great rock song, that’s Gersh’s Lionel Messi Problem.
He has since written an article titled “I’m the Most Hated Man In America”.
Gersh, you are so bad!
Check it out here:
Stopdraggingthepanda 