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”.
she was just
a little
too slow on
the uptick.
Holy Scripture
when asked to
pick a font
he replied:
baptismal.
Photo Of Baptistry, Pisa, Italy.
Firenze
that complaint
stretching the
second last
sylaaable.
Old Cowboy ( a double slimverse)
bowed legs
straddling a
ghost horse, beef
jerky thin
Holiday
Inn, buffet
breakfast, far
from the range.
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?
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………
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.)
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!!
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.).
cherry blossoms bloom
the wrecking ball’s lazy swing
petals, debris, spring.
cherry blossoms bloom
the air is sticky with greed
houses, for sale, sold.
cherry blossoms bloom
well-dressed ladies from Beijing
pose with hand on hip
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?
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!
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
The Camposanto has been called one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world….hang on a second, what’s happening on the front lawn..
What are they up to and why is no one paying attention? Maybe because they are doing this ..
and this….
Meanwhile , inside the Camposanto, all is quiet..
Hang on….
Let’s take a closer look…
What in Hell’s name is that devil doing, is he actually excreting lost souls?? Some one should tell that couple out on the lawn to stop what they are doing or else this could be their fate!
Notes: Most of the frescoes inside the Camposanto were all but destroyed by allied bombing in 1944. They are now undergoing restoration.
From Wikipedia:
“Despite these common depictions of Hell as a place of fire, some other traditions portray Hell as cold. Buddhist – and particularly Tibetan Buddhist – descriptions of hell feature an equal number of hot and cold hells. Among Christian descriptions Dante‘s Inferno portrays the innermost (9th) circle of Hell as a frozen lake of blood and guilt.”
A Hell that has frozen over.
potus
poultice
poultry
poetry
podcast
pomegranate
pornography
porridge
pork
only
one
of
the
above
is
a
lethal
weapon
when
given
to
a
fool
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.
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:
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.
Stopdraggingthepanda 