Reuben Wooley over at I am not a Silent Poet has been kind enough to publish one of my poems – “Trumped” – about our good friend, Donald. Check it out at https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/trumped-by-jim-feeney/
In-flight Literary magazine has been kind enough to publish two of my poems (Punk, Small Talk) in Issue 6. Check them out at http://inflightlitmag.com/issues/issue6/
JIM FEENEY
The great Paul Simon once said: “I’d rather be a llama than a whale”. Ok, maybe he didn’t but perhaps he should have. Anyway, this is not about rhymin’ Simon, this is about rhymin’ Diamond who once said”
I am, I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
Implying that, in a room containing inanimate objects, the object most likely to reply would be a chair. But all smart ass carping aside, that chair is important, not just because it rhymes with “there”. The chair suggests that Neil is in a room, and there is only one chair (“the chair”), so Neil is most likely lying on a bed and of course he is alone, so alone that he has resorted to talking to the furniture. Without the chair, he could be anywhere, it becomes the focus of his existential crisis. This is a “pop song”, one has to grab the attention of the audience or they are gone and it has to look easy and that’s hard and he does it through that one detail, the chair.
It has to be said that Neil is perhaps not at the same level as Paul Simon when it comes to poetic, sophisticated lyrics, but he has his moments. Take the first verse of “ Cracklin’ Rosie”:
“Aw, Cracklin’ Rosie, get on board
We’re gonna ride
Till there ain’t no more to go
Taking it slow
And Lord, don’t you know
We’ll have me a time with a poor man’s lady”
There’s that internal rhyme happening – board, more, Lord, poor -and all those ‘O’s’, fifteen in total! And the assonance in the chorus of
“Cracklin’ Rose,
You’re a store-bought woman”
It goes a bit downhill after that – “you make me sing like a guitar hummin’” – hummin’ and woman – ouch!
But, for my money, Neil’s finest moment when it comes to writing lyrics is in “Sweet Caroline”. The song, admittedly, is not without some absolute groaners:
“Where it began,
I can’t begin to knowin’”
And that’s the first two lines.
Even the chorus, which contains that finest moment is a syntactical nightmare:
Sweet Caroline
Good times never seemed so good
I’ve been inclined,
To believe they never would
Oh, no, no
I have wrestled with this for some time and the best I can come up with is this: ”I’ve been inclined to believe that good times never would never seem so good”. Think about that too long and I guarantee that steam will come out of your ears. But it doesn’t matter, because all that matters is that rhyme between “Sweet Caroline” and “I’ve been inclined”. He could have gone for “fine”, “wine”, “mine” etc but there is something about “inclined” that is so unexpected, so colloquial, so conversational. It surprises every time you hear it. And of course, the acid test of any chorus is how well it does in a pub or bar late in the evening and everyone is a little hammered and some skinny guy on acoustic guitar hauls out “Sweet Caroline” and everyone is just waiting to belt out that chorus and I guarantee you that the volume will perceptibly increase when they reach that line and everyone takes just a little credit for recognizing just how clever it is.
There’s nothing like being
in a crowded bar
in a foreign city
on a Friday evening
just after five
and you don’t know anyone
but it doesn’t matter
and you can’t speak the language
but it doesn’t matter
it’s enough to be there
to breathe in the relief
to share the belief
that Monday morning
is a life time away.
Autumn
The leaves have abandoned
that chlorophyll thing
and are leaking yellows and reds
like a paint store catalogue.
Death (a slimverse)
A God’s voice
roaring: You!
You are not
in control.
Conversation with Slim
Me: Slim, in a previous post “Slim’s Advice Part 2” you said and I quote:
“Avoid Autumn and Death
they’ve been done before
there’s little more to say
on either score.”
Are you being ironic here in a self referential way?
Slim: No.
Me: “Slim, the first poem here is an outtake or revision of a previous poem (Slim’s Advice Part 3), are poems ever really finished?”
Slim:
“Words can be ‘
rearranged
if you just
talk to them.”
Lately, Slim has taken to talking in these 12 syllable bites he calls “slimverse” and I find it irritating and more than a little disturbing. So, as gently as I can, I say to him:
“Slim, that makes absolutely no sense to me, do you not think you are being a tad cryptic, a tad gnomic, if you keep on like this, you are danger of turning into a fucking garden ornament”
We haven’t talked since.
Slim’s Dream
The poet struggles
to achieve opacity
his poems are
clear like perspex
familiar like sin
in his dream
he explains this
to the grey backside
of an elephant.
Insomniacs
We are all
still lying
in a cold cave
under mammoth
skin blankets
keeping
one eye open
for that sabre
toothed tiger.
This is a continuation of a previous blog, titled: “Bob Dylan’s Worst Line Ever”.
After Slim’s brief outburst, he lapsed into silence again and did his impression of a lizard sitting on a rock. The not unpleasant smell from the Indian take-out mercifully masked the usual faint odour of sour sweat emanating from Slim’s bedroom. His bedroom door was closed, a yellow light leaked through the gap between bottom of the door and the threadbare carpet. The room pulsed in a vaguely sinister way.
I began to panic; he could pull out his blueprints of the Star Ship Enterprise at any minute. I was about to ask him why so much depends on a red wheelbarrow, but thought better of it. I reached for my phone.
“Slim”, I said, “I was looking at Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 albums of all time, the other day, do you want to see it?”
“Not really”, he replied.
“Ok”, I tried, “what do you think is the most over-rated album of all time?”
“All right”, he sighed, ”show me the top 10 albums.”
I passed him my phone and he studied the list for a few minutes, then pounced.
“Number 7, ‘Exile on Main Street’, by the Stones”
“Really, why?”
“Because, it’s awful. It’s recycled 12 bar, refried boogie, Jagger sounds like a cat being neutered. It’s not even the seventh best Stones’ album. Creedence and The Band did this kind of thing a few years before and a lot better. This is the sound of the Stones throwing in their creative hand and saying, ‘enough, we’re tired’. It’s the artistic equivalent of taking a package holiday to Majorca. Look, it’s listed higher than ‘The White Album’ and ‘Kinda Blue’. Absolute bollocks!”
“Kind of…”
“What?”
“It’s ‘Kind of Blue’ not ‘Kinda Blue’
Slim looked at me like he was wondering why he bothered to speak to the rest of the human race at all.
“Well”, I said,”why do you think Rolling Stone rates it so high?”
“Because, it’s a Keef album and, to rock critics, Keef embodies the rock and roll spirit, the dead romantic hero, except he’s not dead. He’s the guy who would never have hung out with them at school. Plus, there’s this legend of the Stones hunkered down in a house in France recording the album, escaping from the tax man where in fact, Mick, Charlie and Bill never stayed at the house probably because they didn’t want to be around Keef’s junkie friends. Anyway, Mick didn’t think much of the album at all”.
“Really?”
“Look it up”.
So I did.
This is Mick Jagger talking about ‘Exile’ in “According to The Rolling Stones” (Chronicle Books, San Francisco):
“Exile on Main Street is not one of my favourite albums”.
“…when I listen to Exile it has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.”
“Exile is really a mixture of bits and pieces left over from the previous album recorded at Olympic Studios…..These were mixed up with a few slightly more grungy things done in the South of France. It’s seen as one album all recorded there and it really wasn’t.”
“So there’s a good four songs off it, but when you play the other nineteen, you can’t, or they don’t work, or nobody likes them, and you think, ’Ok, we’ll play another one instead’. We have rehearsed a lot of the tunes off Exile, but there’s not much that’s playable.”
Template” is a sculpture by the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. It is made from old wooden doors from demolished Chinese houses. At an exhibition, in Kassel, Germany in 2007, the sculpture collapsed after exposure to wind and rain. Ai Weiwei decided to leave it in its collapsed state. In an interview, he explained that nature had taken his work and re-shaped it, perhaps made it better, had done something he could never have done. Slim has this to say:
Template
Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei
Give your head a shake
Cease these po-faced utterances.
Yes, the forces of nature
Can create great wonders:
The Grand Canyon, for example.
But what we have here
Is a tornado in a trailer park.
Havoc has been wreaked.
You left your sculpture out in the wind and rain
And the wind and rain have done their thing.
Let us not pretend
That this is anything more
Than a failure to read the weather report.
Bathos
The moon hung
like a searchlight
in the spangled sky
and we hung
out on
the deck.
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 machisimo
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?
Taking the Piss*
A man on crutches
carrying a catheter bag
full of urine
leaves St. Paul’s Hospital
wearing a tee-shirt
that says:
Dreams start here.
*According to Wikipedia “Take the piss” may refer to the expression piss-proud, which, and this is a stretch, in turn refers to the morning erections caused by a full bladder pressing upon nerves that help affect erection. This is considered a “false’ erection, and hence someone who is “piss-proud” would be taking credit where none is due, and taking the piss out of them would be an attempt to discredit them using mockery.
Another theory is that back when urine was used in the process of fixing dye to wool, urine was brought by canal to the wool mills in the North of England. Naturally transporting urine was less rewarding financially than transporting, for example, wine, so when asked what they had on board the boatmen would reply “I’m taking wine”. The inevitable reply to this would be “No, you’re taking the piss”.
This could all be true or perhaps Wikipedia is taking the piss.
Stephen Harper (a slimverse)
your glass stare
your helmet
hair, you don’t
care, do you?
Slim at the Vancouver Folk Festival
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 chilled out, Tilley clad audience
who, unlike Slim, have a default mode
other than anger.
Ahh, Joe, I
thought you were
just Biden
your time. Ouch!
The Twenty Second Read
A couple of days ago, I was looking at my WordPress reader and I came across a poem by Robert Okaji called “The Nightingale”. Robert is a fine poet, check out his blog at robertokaji.com. Anyway, the reader as per usual just showed the first few verses, and a word count, then as I looked down I noticed a message at the bottom saying”20 sec read”.
I got up and went into the next room where I have a ceiling high Ikea bookshelf packed with poetry books and novels that I can’t throw out because I intend to read most of them again at some point. I pulled out the first poetry book that I bought (sometime in the seventies), The Collected Poems of TS Eliot, Faber and Faber. I opened the book at “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.”
“Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table….”
That’s one of those images that snagged on my brain, the first time I read it, like windblown paper snagging on a bush. The poem was published in 1917, but to me it is a quintessentially modern poem with its antihero narrator, the outsider, the wry observer – “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”. My point is that I have read that poem many times since the seventies and will continue to read it because every time I do, I get something new out of it. So if today TS Eliot had a blog, although somehow I think he would prefer the relative permanence of paper, I hope WordPress reader would label his poem a “lifetime read”.
By the way, I tried reading Robert Okaji’s poem in twenty seconds, but all I could glean was that it was about a nightingale. So, I went back, a second, third, fourth time and each time I extracted more meaning from the poem. So, I would currently probably label this poem “20 seconds and counting”.
Slim gets all industrial.
The Stack
And what a beautiful plume this is, Nigel,
a plume with time on its hands.
Look at it loping across the sky
like the tail of a giant Chinese Dragon.
Let’s hail a cab to find the plume’s end
where the last wisps of water vapour drift upwards
and a blue mist hangs,
and there it is
above the emptying parking lot
of the big box mall
in the western sky
before a bawling sun.
Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
your voice is like a bruise
there’s no one out there
there’s 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.
No man is an island
no man is a golf course
no man is a tower
no man knows
what will happen
if no man has power.
Jeb Bush
Jeb B, no
offence, it’s
not you, it’s
your brother.
Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz, it’s
just that your
views are so
…..confusing
Rand Paul
Rand Paul, is
that really
all that you
have to say.
OK that’s enough.
The Future
Grandma, can
I see your
tattoo, the
dragon one.
And No Tom
Danger Mouse
Modest Mouse
DeadMau5. It’s
all Jerry…….
*************
Image courtesy of [Mister GC] at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
First Impressions
When they meet
he insults
her. It’s love
at first slight.
Oklahoma
Cowboy, outside
The Holiday Inn
Beef jerky thin
Weathered as leather
The ghost of a horse
Bowing his legs.
Sign Outside a Funeral Home
Martin Bros.
Coffee’s on.
Come in and
say hello.
Stopdraggingthepanda 