“What subject, genre, sacred cow, or literary convention do you ache to spin until it’s dizzy? What mask do you long to pull off and drag a confession out of its wearer? What accepted wisdom do you long to expose as horsefeathers? Or perhaps you just want to set your keyboard on “stun” and knock us over with your unexpected use of language? Come on, flout convention! Irony and all major credit cards accepted. Unreliable narrators welcome.”
This is a post from a while back but with a new verse!
Thanks to The Galway Review for publishing two of my poems. They are more song lyrics than poems, so I’m not sure how well they work on paper (or the screen to be more exact). Other versions of the poems have appeared on this blog, but I think they may have finally settled down, although….
Just after graduating from university with a degree and no job I had time on my hands so I would take the 46A bus into the centre of Dublin and read poetry in Easons Books Store. Why poetry? Well, it’s hard to browse a whole novel. It was there I learnt ironic distance from TS Eliot and Roger Mc Gough, It was there that I learnt from Sylvia Plath that rhyming doesn’t have to be doggerel It was there I learnt from Robert Lowell writing about the woe that is in marriage that a poem could be a novel that a poem could cover the same subject matter as Updike, Bellow, Roth, Heller that poems don’t have to be about peat bogs and Celtic mist and that all good poems contain lines that snag on the brain like wool on a barbed wire fence and all for the price of the bus fare there and back.
This poem was inspired by a prompt over at Desperate Poets, where the incomparable Brendan asks us to “consider what influenced you as a poet and what you have done with those influences as you have grown and developed in your work. What bid you fly, where have you flown and what are you still looking for?”
If you haven’t done so already, check out Brendan’s blog, he puts out one prompt a week and they are always intriguing and inspirational.
The picture above shows that I did eventually buy some books!
Sitting in Mr. Courtney’s English class moving my feet to that iambic beat while greasy Joan doth keel the pot and snot runneth down the back of my nose.
He tells us he is not a happy man which makes us feel embarrassed, awkward, sad (behold the dawn in russet mantle clad) we pretend interest in (yes) Charles Lamb.
He struck me on the face once, hit me hard. Have at you varlet! A palpable hit! A snide remark I made, yes that was it, about poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Still, would this poem be, if not for him, Keats, beaded bubbles winking at the brim?
“There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, “I don’t have anything.” A lot of things that had meaning are gone, and you have to start anew. But if you read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal. You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets: You’re reading this, so I’m still alive. In fact, they’re not alive, they’re gone, but while they were alive, they did have that extra dimension of their lives. That is not nothing.”
When I read this I thought of the above poem “Mr.Courtney” about my high school teacher. The poem has had a number of forms but ended as a sonnet. As Joyce Carol Oates also points out (see Brendan’s intriguing post) that memories fade but if you capture that memory in a poem, a novel, a painting it gets a life ot its own.
Mr. Courtney taught us Latin and English Literature. The curriculum was tilted towards the great English authors, like Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats. he was a big Keats fan. We had to learn whole poems and passages off by heart. Some lines are permanently stuck in my head and I have inserted them in to the poem here and there. And yes, he did clatter me across the face once, he could never quite look me in the eyes after that.
The sonnet idea came from Bjorn’s verse form challenge over at dVerse to write a sonnet. I’ve chosen an ABBA, CDDC, EFFE, GG rhyme scheme. I’ve used half rhymes here and there to add interest and tried to keep to a ten syllable line even though I haven’t always stuck to that iambic beat.
I have this memory.
I am walking across a field
a squelching field
a field that would suck your wellingtons off
the wind is a wet dish cloth
slapping my face
cow pats are dotted like landmines.
I love the countryside
but I don’t love this countryside
with its barbed wire fences
its ragged ditches
its baleful cows.
In the far corner of the field
I come across the rusty shell
of an old Mercedes
abandoned by the farmer
after one last muddy trip to the market,
and I’ve been thinking lately
I should take some ideas I have
some long held, unexamined beliefs
and park them in the far corner of a field,
top of the list being
the irrational notion
that somehow
against all odds,
we would all continue
to live, forever.
The ever eloquent Brendan over at Desperate Poets aks us to write an elegy. This is one from the past , I think it has perhaps an elegaic tone
It previously appeared on dverse (the prompt was “metaphors”)
tender is the night long is the day’s journey into night it’s easier to name a street car than it is to name one’s desire never attempt a ménage in a glass menagerie there is nothing less erotic than a red wheelbarrow a thing of beauty is a joy for a fortnight.
asks us to write about desperate desire. This is a poem from a while back about desire, thought it might fit, and here’s one about a different kind of desire.
The Reverend George Weeble
The Reverend George Weeble liked to visit churches in foreign lands, his parishioners called him: the steeplechaser. When I’m old and feeble, George Weeble said, when I retire, my one desire is to be where the spires conspire to show me the way.
out on the bay kite surfers, tankers no smoke haze yet heat dome early days
two Canada geese pose for an Instagram shot necks extended rod taut
at their feet a gosling
proud parents they bob their heads like ageing rock stars
Brendan and Sherry , the creators of the now defunct earthweal have a new website. It’s called Desparate Poets
Check them out!
This Sherry’s challenge:
What makes you feel desperate where you live? What is changing? What is being lost? How is “Progress” making inroads on your landscape, and how do you feel about it? Give us a snapshot. It can be as broad as a seascape, a desert, a teeming city. Or it can be the opposite: finding comfort in the beauty around us, whether it is as vast as the sky or as small as a dew-covered spider-web, on a cornstalk by the back fence in the early morning.
A low metronomic plash waves flat-lining on the shore sailboats tacking kayakers kayaking, someone talking loudly about the cost of child care, two blankets down. It’s Father’s day and all the dads and kids are out throwing ball, kicking ball building elaborate castles in the sand and they are not alone, the ghosts of fathers passed are here too, including my own; pale-bodied, they roam the beach wearing old-fashioned swim trunks, grinning widely at the continuum of dads, kids, sun, sand and sea.
Landline (for Dad)
Sometimes, I think I should text my dad give him an update tell him where I’m at. Not that he would answer he’s been gone a few years now and even if he were alive texting would hardly be his thing; at the turn of the century he was still approaching what we now call a ‘landline’ with some trepidation.
Landline: a rope uncoiling towards the shore.
He once told me that when we have children we begin to understand our own parents better so I think my text would be an attempt to let him know that, yes, dad, I am finding this to be true.
In the town of High Dudgeon
at the corner of Grump Street and Curmudgeon
people talk about the old ways
about young people these days with their smart phones, their social media their Facebook, their Wikipedia hell, in our day we had to know stuff. Harrumph! They shout in unison. Harrumph! They shout harrumphantly.
Outside the town limits
the future raises a middle finger
and data accumulates
about this moment
and the moment before
in cabinets that hum
a one note tune.
Are you feeling indignant?
Do you feel the urge to rant?
Are you sick of the city, the government
sycophants, dilettantes, the cant;
are you bitter about the glitterati
the literati, the witeratti, the getfiteratti
that tosser on your street
with the Maserati or is it a Bugatti
always wittering on about his colonoscopy
his digestive tract?
Relax, help is on the way,
take one Indignatron B tablet daily
and you won’t give a shit about all that.
Warning: Some users of Indignatron B have become so unbearably pleasant, that their friends can’t stand them anymore. Do not mix Indignatron B with alcohol, some users, who have, experienced such a feeling of intense happiness that all they could think about was doing it again.
The Neander Valley outside of Dusseldorf is named after Joachim Neander a German poet who liked to wander lonely as a German poet through this now eponymous valley unaware that beneath his feet lay the numb skull and bones of a species whose name would become synonymous with brute stupidity: Neanderthal, named after the valley which was named after Joachim Neander. That’s what we get to do, name things and judge their worth we even got to name ourselves: Homo Sapiens Wise Man and if that’s not hubris….
Check it out here https://www.rattle.com/ , it will be top of the scroll for two days and then make its way down. It’s accompanied by a recording, so you get to hear my nasal Dublin accent.
Thanks again to Timothy Green for publishing the poem. The print version of Issue 79 of Rattle literary Magazine is also available from the same website.
5 a.m. the toddler king checks his twitter feed access denied
it’s quiet now but all last night all he could hear was the squeak and rustle of rats leaving the ship
he stares out into the murky depths Mitch McConnell swims by an oxygen tank strapped to his back, his lugubrious visage fills the porthole he removes his oxygen mask a bubble escapes from his mouth and floats upwards his wattles sway like kelp in the shifting currents he has the detached look of a man examining a museum exhibit another bubble escapes upwards he turns and kicks for the surface his sagging buttocks pale but somehow luminous
Am I dead? The toddler king wonders I can’t be dead I’m absolutely not dead If I say I’m not dead I’m not dead. Hey, what’s Ted Cruz doing out there I thought this was a Cruz ship! See, I made a joke I can’t be dead!
Stopdraggingthepanda 