The girl, two tables down
angles her right shoulder forward
every time she makes a point.
Beside us,
the expensive suits and haircuts
play with their phones
like fishermen on the dock in Mykonos
playing with their worry beads.
After four beers,
they relax into loud brodacious banter.
The glass towers flare as the sun goes down.
Happy Hour Friday
on The Tap and Barrel patio
and Monday morning
seems a lifetime away.
Another post from the past.
I’m not sure when rhymes all but disappeared from modern poetry, but pick up any recent collection and you would be hard put to find a single rhyme. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, on the other hand, stop anyone in the street and ask them to recite their favourite poem and invariably, if they reply at all, it will be a rhyming poem. So people like rhyme but if poets have stopped rhyming where do people go for their rhyming fix?
The answer of course is popular song. Pop, folk, country, rock, rap, hip hop could not function without rhyme; obvious rhyme mostly, rhyme that can seen coming a mile away. If you hear ‘dance’ there will be ‘romance’; if you hear ‘night’, it’s going to be ‘alright’, if you hear “love’, there will be a ‘sky above’. This can be boring or comforting depending on your point of view. But there are rhymes in popular song, rhymes that avoid cliché, that manage to surprise. For example:
The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles.
(Bob Dylan from “Love minus Zero, No Limits)
Or more recently, check out the “The Trapeze Swinger” from Sam Beam[i] of Iron and Wine who writes songs of such fragile beauty that it feels like they will fall apart if you touch them.
But please remember me, fondly
I heard from someone you’re still pretty
And then they went on to say that the Pearly Gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Or, from the White Album:
I’m so tired, I’m feeling so upset
Although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette
And curse Sir Walter Raleigh
He was such a stupid get[ii].
‘Trembles, ‘rambles’, ‘poetry’, ‘graffiti’, ‘cigarette’, stupid get’, all rhymes that don’t resort to cliché, that manage to surprise and there are many more. So if there is anyone out there reading this, send me your favorites, let’s get a list going! Only two criteria: 1) the rhyme must surprise 2) no rhymes ending in ‘ution’ as in “make revolutions/ not institutions/ dilution/ is not the solution/ to pollution/ make restitution…enough already.
*******
[i] Why has Sam Beam not been made poet laureate of the United States of America? He could have written “Trapeze Swinger” alone, and he would be streets ahead of anyone else. Graffiti on the pearly gates -‘tell my mother not to worry’, ‘rug-burned babies’, ‘a trapeze swinger as high as any savior’; check it out here:
[ii] Some websites write this as “stupid git”, but the album liner notes show it as “stupid get” which obviously rhymes better but also it would be more likely that Lennon being from Liverpool would use the Irish (and also Scottish) pronunciation ‘get’ rather than ‘git’ which is more common in the south of England. By the way, Wiktionary suggests that ‘get’ is related to the word ‘beget’, whereas I think it is more likely that it comes from the gaelic word ‘geit’ meaning ‘fright’ or ‘terror’. The meaning has since morphed into something close to ‘jerk’.
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 arse
of an elephant.
Photos taken around Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, Cambodia, by Marie Feeney
I have 2 poems (“Living Off the Grid”, “Railspur Alley Park”) and a song lyric (“Willie’s Oasis”) up at the tri-quarterly web magazine “The Basil O’Flaherty”.
Regular visitors to this blog will recognise the second poem as a triple slimverse. Only the second time this verse form has appeared outside this blog….is that momentum I feel?
I’m never totally sure about publishing song lyrics as they sometimes seem a bit thin on the page without melody and music, but I hope this one stands up! You can check out a sample of the recorded version here.
My head is throbbing like a car stereo, there’s stubble on my tongue. Last night, I invited Slim and the rest of his Poet’s Circle over for a few drinks to celebrate the end of April-Month of Slim and it was quite a night, or at least, I think it was. It began relatively smoothly with an intense discussion about accessibility (no surprises there) and I remember making an emotional speech about the end rhymes in “Suzanne”. Then the conversation moved on to verse forms – cinquains, tankas, sestinas, halibuns, what happens if one turns a haiku upside down -fascinating stuff. Then Slim chimed in and asked where his own invention, the slimverse, fitted in to this pantheon. There was an embarrassed silence. Eventually, one of the poets – the one we refer to as 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 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 says quietly “fuck you and your fucking garden” and aims a punch at The Accomplished Poet’s head, who, perhaps because of all that work in the garden, turns out to be quite agile. He ducks Slim’s punch and kicks him adroitly in the nuts. 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.
But before we wrap it all up, just one more po-faced gem from Slim.
The Universe is Unexplainable
like a frog
down a well
we only
know the walls.
Maybe it’s the hangover but I am having an adverse reaction to that last poem.
For Chrissakes
doesn’t that
make you want
to smash a
garden gnome!
Before this deteriorates let’s turn to my good friend, Snoop D Doggerel, currently on tour in Southwest Ontario, who took time out to pen this following opus which I think puts it all in perspective.
COMING UP SHORT
aphorists
are gnomic
the dwarfs of
lit’rature
And that’s it! No finer ending!
I would like to point out that no animals were harmed in the making of this month of blog posts, although a few (a frog, a bull, dogs, mice) were shamelessly used as props or on the business end of a simile.
What Can I Say
to leave no
footprint we
must fly but
never land.
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.
Vancouver Jazz Festival (Re-Mix)
a humid
lion house
hogo hangs
on the air
dogs and trees
dogs and trees
free jazz, jazz
for free, the
bass player
leans like a
drunk around
a lamp post.
Well, 3 posts into April – Month of Slim and I’m wondering will this 12 syllable madness ever end? I asked Slim if he found this verse form, this 3 syllable line too confining. Did he not want to escape its shackles and roam free, go for 5, 6 syllables or even stretch a line across the width of the page. “Au contraire”, he said. He actually said that, “au contraire”, and I thought that’s a bit effete, a bit foppish for a bald guy with gravity issues.
“Au contraire, in fact I find it liberating to escape the tyranny of free verse, the endless decisions – upper case, lower case, line length, is it really a poem or is it just chopped up prose, if I am writing a poem about a flower, should the poem be in the shape of a flower, should I rhyme or not rhyme, what is doggerel anyway? – this is like fundamentalism, the boundaries are clearly defined, this far and no further, the Lord gave you 12 syllables, make the best of it!”
Well, that answer was a bit more than I needed or wanted, if I owned a watch I would have been looking at it.
“Got to go, Slim” I said.
“Hang on” he said, “talking of religion, I saw that movie ‘Spotlight’, here’s my review.
Spotlight (slim review)
Catholic
priests find the
immoral
higher ground.
Where have all the Good Rhymes Gone?
I’m not sure when rhymes all but disappeared from modern poetry, but pick up any recent collection and you would be hard put to find a single rhyme. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, on the other hand, stop anyone in the street and ask them to recite their favourite poem and invariably, if they reply at all, it will be a rhyming poem. So people like rhyme but if poets have stopped rhyming where do people go for their rhyming fix?
The answer of course is popular song. Pop, folk, country, rock, rap, hip hop could not function without rhyme; obvious rhyme mostly, rhyme that can seen coming a mile away. If you hear ‘dance’ there will be ‘romance’; if you hear ‘night’, it’s going to be ‘alright’, if you hear “love’, there will be a ‘sky above’. This can be boring or comforting depending on your point of view. But there are rhymes in popular song, rhymes that avoid cliché, that manage to surprise. For example:
The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles.
(Bob Dylan from “Love minus Zero, No Limits)
Or more recently, check out the “The Trapeze Swinger” from Sam Beam[i] of Iron and Wine who writes songs of such fragile beauty that it feels like they will fall apart if you touch them.
But please remember me, fondly
I heard from someone you’re still pretty
And then they went on to say that the Pearly Gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Or, from the White Album:
I’m so tired, I’m feeling so upset
Although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette
And curse Sir Walter Raleigh
He was such a stupid get[ii].
‘Trembles, ‘rambles’, ‘poetry’, ‘graffiti’, ‘cigarette’, stupid get’, all rhymes that don’t resort to cliché, that manage to surprise and there are many more. So if there is anyone out there reading this, send me your favorites, let’s get a list going! Only two criteria: 1) the rhyme must surprise 2) no rhymes ending in ‘ution’ as in “make revolutions/ not institutions/ dilution/ is not the solution/ to pollution/ make restitution…enough already.
*******
[i] Why has Sam Beam not been made poet laureate of the United States of America? He could have written “Trapeze Swinger” alone, and he would be streets ahead of anyone else. Graffiti on the pearly gates -‘tell my mother not to worry’, ‘rug-burned babies’, ‘a trapeze swinger as high as any savior’; check it out here:
[ii] Some websites write this as “stupid git”, but the album liner notes show it as “stupid get” which obviously rhymes better but also it would be more likely that Lennon being from Liverpool would use the Irish (and also Scottish) pronunciation ‘get’ rather than ‘git’ which is more common in the south of England. By the way, Wiktionary suggests that ‘get’ is related to the word ‘beget’, whereas I think it is more likely that it comes from the gaelic word ‘geit’ meaning ‘fright’ or ‘terror’. The meaning has since morphed into something close to ‘jerk’.
It is late afternoon in The Post Coital Beetle and Slim and I are starting into our first pitcher of Blue Buck Ale, nachos have been ordered. On the television screen on the wall in front of us, a baseball player is attacking a dugout water cooler with his bat. The television is on mute. Adele emotes in the background.
It’s been a while since Slim and I have got together and although nothing has been said, I sense that he has a beef of some kind. Not that this is unusual, having a beef is Slim’s default mode, but at the moment he seems relaxed. He has just finished a three hour practice with his band “Bad Complexion”. Slim plays bass and does background vocals. The armpits of his faded Clash T shirt are wet with sweat and the T shirt has been washed so many times that it no longer fits, leaving a gap of bristly pink flesh above the belt of his jeans. The image of a pig’s cheek pops into my head.
He’s smiling.
“She’s really just an old-fashioned British pop singer, isn’t she?” He says.
“Who?”
“Adele, you know…somewhere between Lulu and Shirley Bassey.”
“I guess…she also has that girl next door thing”
“Exactly,” Slim says, “like Cilla Black.”
“That name brings to mind a small black and white television set”
“You could have a pint with Adele,” Slim says, wistfully, and we both fall silent thinking about sharing a pint with Adele.
The pub door opens and closes. Cold blast of January air. Skunky whiff of over-hopped ale. Or is that Slim’s armpit? The silence lingers a little too long.
“I’ve taken up cooking, I’ve become a devotee of Wolfgang Puck.”
Slim does an owl blink, I can almost hear his brain working.
“Who the fuck
is Wolfgang
Puck? And why
should I care?”
He intones smugly.
“You’re doing that 12 syllable slimverse thing again, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he says, “and that reminds me, I have a bone to pick with you.”
Ahh, not a beef but a bone.
“Shoot”
“This lame-ass blog of yours, I thought it was supposed to be devoted to my poems, but lately it’s all your stuff and you’ve taken stories I’ve told you and used them for your poems and created this character called Slim”
“I’m being post-modern”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You know, there are many ways of knowing and many truths to a fact.
“Crystal clear then, how can anything be post-modern? ‘Modern’ means ‘of the present’ – ‘now’, the only possible way a work could be post-modern would be if it was written in the future, for that we will have to wait for the invention of time travel.”
He folds his arms, discussion over.
“You have a point. Anyway, you haven’t been giving me much to publish lately.”
“Ok, how about this one, it’s called ‘Rasta’:
It’s a fact
all Rastas
are born out
of dreadlock.”
“Amusing, but a bit thin, we need flesh on the bones, Slim, flesh on the bones. Besides, I’m not so sure about this slim verse thing.”
Slim drains his half full pint glass and refills it.
“Go on.” He says.
“Well, you know, the haiku has got a headlock on internet poetry and it has seventeen syllables to work with, that’s five more than a slimverse. Now I hear that someone in the north of England has come up with a new form – the ‘anchored terset’ which is essentially a three word/four line poem, the fourth line being a punctuation mark, for example:
Sky
Field
Cow
.
It’s a race towards nothingness.”
Slim drains his pint glass and leans forward, his finger poking in my direction.
“Here’s an anchored terset for you….
You
Fuck
Off
!”
He tries to storm out but because we are in a booth he has to slide along the bench seat, his stomach rubbing against the table’s edge. His T shirt rides up. At the same time the waitress arrives with a plate of nachos shaped like a volcano, a volcano spewing molten cheese lava. The waitress stares in horror at the sinkhole that is Slim’s navel. Slim shouts at the waitress:
“I thought I said ‘hold the jalapenos’!
We watch him leave, on his back Paul Simonon slams his Fender Precision Bass into the stage at The Palladium in New York city.
“He seems upset”, the waitress says, and I’m thinking:
I can’t see
the pulled pork,
she forgot
the pulled pork.
After all
that bother
she forgot
the pulled pork.
Reference:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/feb/04/a-brief-guide-anchored-terset-poetry
Well, April-Month of Slim is slowly drawing to a close and this blog is starting to feel like a seaside resort at the end of the season…
a rain-swept pier
all the tourists gone
a few locals
bending into the wind
et moi, I am feeling a vague ennui, a certain je ne sais quoi and I have this urge to use every hackneyed French phrase I know in a pathetic attempt to sound world-weary, like I’m sitting in an outdoor café, a scarf knotted at my neck, smoking a Gitane and nursing an existential crisis.
Right so, more 12 syllable madness, here we go, something new, something old, something revised:
Golf
the one sport
that demands
blandness from
its heroes.
And No Tom
Danger Mouse
Modest Mouse
DeadMau5. It’s
all Jerry…….
Party Animal
he walks in
the room like
a bull to
a paddock
the air shifts
nervously
eyes lower
bells jangle.
Closing Time
barman’s stare
stacked chairs legs
in the air
like dead flies.
“Lock the door, Schoolmaster,
Keep the children in,
The river in spate at the schoolyard gate
Roars like original sin”
From “The Life of the Poet” by Charles Causley
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.
she was just
a little
too slow on
the uptick.
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………
Thesaurus Rex
Rex Murphy, Thesaurus Rex
scold of left and right,
contrarian curmudgeon,
Christopher Hitchens lite.
Rex, you dazzle and perplex
lamenting this, that, the state of the nation
in your orotund hands, an after dinner stroll
becomes a post-prandial perambulation.
Rex Murphy is a pundit on the CBC’s nightly news program, the National, which is one of the last old school news programs, complete with paternal anchor man, Peter Mansbridge, and nightly panels of intelligent people who don’t shout at each other.
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.
Rialto Beach Re-Mix
a glabrous
sea, a plinth
of severed
head land sulks
limp waves like
marathon
men, collapse,
on the shore.
It’s safe to say that when it comes to nature poetry Slim is no William Wordsworth or Seamus Heaney, but he has on occasion opened a gate or jumped a fence to commune with Mother Nature, as can be seen above. Here is another example:
Nature Poem (Reprise)
you call your
self a tree
my bank has
more branches.
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
Bison
Like an old
Christian
Brother, an
unkempt monk.
Rialto Beach
A plinth of severed headland
Sulks on the glabrous sea.
