Tag Archives: poetry

12 Syllables that Shook the World

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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.).

 

April – Month of Slim 1 (2 poems)

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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?

Coming Soon! April – Month Of Slim

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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!

 

 

Poem by Jim Feeney

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Oddball Magazine have been kind enough to publish one of my poems. Check them out!

Oddball Magazine's avataroddball magazine

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…

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Flip, Flip and Fly – the Crazy world of Vancouver Real estate

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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.

The Twenty Second Read

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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”.