Category Archives: Poetry

So Long, Halong

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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 oneness

with the song’s embattled lovers.

 

This poem was first published in Oddball Magazine, about 4 months ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Unconventional Republican (remix)

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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)

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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)

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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!

 

 

 

The Trump Collection (5 poems)

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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

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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)

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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

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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.).

 

April – Month of Slim 1 (2 poems)

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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

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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

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Oddball Magazine have been kind enough to publish one of my poems. Check them out!

Oddball Magazine's avataroddball magazine

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…

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