Tag Archives: Books

Party Animal (Slimverse* – The Journey, Episode 2, nostalgia for simpler times)

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Party Animal

in he walks
like a bull
checking out
a paddock

the air shifts
nervously
eyes lower
bells jangle

Back when times were simpler…..

(Episode 1 is here)
The following is a memory and like all memories it’s under constant revision. What’s significant I think is that it was the first time I realized that Slim was taking this whole slimverse thing a bit more seriously than I was. As I remember it……..


I invited Slim and the rest of The Poet’s Circle over for a few drinks to celebrate something, I can’t quite remember what it was and to be honest, it doesn’t matter.
The evening began relatively smoothly with an intense discussion about accessibility (no surprises there) and I made an emotional speech about the end rhymes in Leonard Cohen’s song, “Suzanne”. The conversation moved on to verse forms – cinquains, tankas, sestinas, haibuns, what happens if one turns a haiku upside down -fascinating stuff. Then Slim chimed in and asked where our own invention, the slimverse, fitted in to this pantheon. There was an awkward silence. Eventually, The Accomplished Poet spoke up. I should add that he is indeed accomplished and his compact vivid poems, mostly about his garden, have been widely published. He politely suggested that perhaps a 3 syllable line was too limiting, that making poetic music with such a restriction is quite difficult.
Now there was another kind of silence, the kind that ensues when a lion tamer drops his whip. Slim said quietly “fuck you and your fucking garden” and aimed a punch at The Accomplished Poet’s head, who, perhaps because of all that work in the garden, is quite agile. He ducked Slim’s punch and kicked him adroitly in the crotch. When the applause died down and Slim could speak again, he uncharacteristically apologized and gave The Accomplished Poet a hug, a doubtful pleasure given Slim’s personal hygiene issues. The evening ended on a happy note with a raucous rendition of “Suzanne”, everyone hitting the end rhymes hard.
Later that night Slim and I wrote the above poem which stretched the slimverse form to two verses. History in the making.

(*Slimverse – four 3 syllable lines)

Advice to myself on the subject of writing poetry after a number of years trying to write poetry

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150 (3)

Advice to myself on the subject of writing poetry after a number of years trying to write poetry

Avoid the polemic, the rant,
the bromide
be all you can be
avoid the hackneyed phrase
the weak-kneed phrase
the self-consciously poetic line
the moon, a pale orb in the evening sky
never call the moon “an orb”
never call the sun “a fiery ball”
your waves should not
crash on the shore
they should collapse
like marathon runners
avoid foliage
excessive leafiness
too many trees
the reader needs to see the poem
and remember it’s unlikely
that your poem
will be an agent of change
no one is going to march through the streets
chanting your poem
unless your poem is a three word slogan
but your poem can chronicle change
and  the lines should resonate
should generate heat
meanwhile concentrate on
impressing yourself
avoid lines and rhymes ending in “ution”
the rest will take care of itself.

The prompt from Brendan over at Desperate Poets is as follows:

“For this challenge, write a poem about your creative process.”

” Is it a different animal now than when you first decided to make writing poetry a vocation?”

This poem is an edit of another poem which was a response to another prompt from Brendan, back in the earthweal days . That man is The Prompt Master!

The Road to New Year

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Just Before Christmas……

an Arctic cold front
Amazon trucks stuck
down snow-packed side roads.

Christmas

Between Christmas and New Year

You review your blog stats, as one does, and you wonder why you you are using phrases like “as one does”, have you been watching too much Britbox?

Back to the blog stats, number of views is down from last year which was down from the year before. Your viewing numbers appear to have peaked in 2019. Why? In 2019 you had the pandemic of course and a perfect storm of subject matter – the pandemic, the Trump presidency, and climate change. Now you have said pretty much all you have to say about these subjects for the moment. But isn’t that the way of some blogs, they fade because they need a fresh angle. Also, you have gone back to letting poems marinate for a while to see where they are going, giving them some quiet time.

In the meantime you have been reading, and your top read for 2022 was “Our Country Friends” by Gary Shteyngart. You read the novel one chapter at a time, each chapter accompanied by a can of Yellow Dog Play Dead IPA. Why, because Gary’s prose is too good to rush. You also enjoyed “The Nineties” by Chuck Closterman and “April in Spain” by John Banville.

You listened to “Stolen Car” by Beth Orton, because of the lyric and the guitar figure that slithers through the song like a poisonous snake. You listened to El Camino by Elizabeth Cook because who else would rhyme “annull it” with “mullet”. You listened to “Under The Milky Way” by Church because of the expanse it conjures. You listened to “Jesus etc” by Puss N’Boots because it’s Norah Jones doing a Jeff Tweedy song.

You thought “Licorice Pizza” was the best movie of the year because of Bradley Cooper and everyone else in the movie.

And now as 2022 draws to a close, you are wondering why the hell you are writing in the second person singular.

Happy New Year everyone!

JIM