Tag Archives: poetry

The Poetry Superhero Convention

16 Replies

The Poetry Superhero Convention.

What a weekend that was
truly a Marvel
all the usual suspects were there
and they were all into the sauce from the get go,
Ricky the Rhyme King did his rap routine
Simile Sal sang:
Nothing Compares to U
Assonance the Loud and Consonance the Cool hooked up again
can’t keep those two apart
and the bands
The Meta Four and The Alliteration Alliance
laid down a solid groove,
and let’s not forget the families:
the Sonnets – lovely people, very iambic
the Villanelles – again lovely people
but don’t get stuck in conversation with them
they can be a tad repetitive
the Lai’s , the Sestinas, the Rubai’s
all knocking back the vino
the Ghazals had visa problems
and couldn’t make it
but the Haiku’s and the Tanka’s
came all the way from Japan
(you don’t have to bow all the time, guys)
and the Epics were there too
it took five buses to fit them all in, but they made it.
The highlight of the weekend of course
was the Bad Pun Competition:
For Better or for Verse
and the winner for the tenth year in a row
was, yes, Logan King of the Limericks.
A great weekend indeed, all verse no chapter,
some sore heads of course
and some poetry in motion in the washrooms
but well worth it.

This is a response to Brendan’s challenge over at Desperate Poets:

“So why don’t we dream super big for one unsettling week. What would your poetry superhero or heroine look like, what would h/her powers be?”

Also taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

Botero Awareness (in memory of Fernando Botero)

5 Replies

Botero Awareness

I was not

aware of

Botero

until I

visited

Medellin

where he is

famous for

his art and

his largesse,

one could say

his largesse

is nigh on

bottomless

but his art

it is not.

 Fernando Botero, the Colombian artist, died on Friday. He was 91.

The photos were taken on a trip to Colombia.

A Pedestrian Affair

14 Replies

A Pedestrian Affair

they met on a zebra crossing
it was a pedestrian affair
she had an air of competence
he……just had an air

they went downhill from there

to her house
in the middle of a roundabout
near the station

in the morning they looked out
and the cars had changed rotation

the clouds were tinged
with a tawdry shade of orange

the sky was diffident
the sun judgmental

things would not be the same
would not be the same again.

Over at Desperate Poets, Brendan asks us to take a look at illicit encounters.

Why I have difficulty writing haiku (3)

14 Replies

Why I have difficulty writing haiku

problem with haiku
definite article is
first casualty

next casualty
indefinite article
makes me sound little

like Japanese guard
in prison camp in movie
world war two movie

who for some reason
is speaking English (how? why?)
with staccato voice

or perhaps I am
po-faced guru on mountain
dispensing bromides:

crow flies at midnight
in front of luminous moon
affair ends badly

all because I am
in service to, at mercy
of, syllable count

here it comes again
surplus syllable flop sweat
haiku-tortured night.

Over at Desperate Poets, Shay asks :

“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!

Two Poems published in The Galway Review

21 Replies

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….

Check them out here.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at Desperate Poets

Easons Book Store

30 Replies

Easons Book Store

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.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

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!

Mr. Courtney – a sonnet (revisted)

16 Replies
IMG_0443

Mr. Courtney

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?

Over at Desperate Poets, Brendan quotes Joyce Carol Oates:

“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.

Agent Orange Returns

6 Replies

Agent Orange Returns

Who would have thought it?
Trumpty is back on the wall
Ron de Santis is lost like Atlantis
and the others have no chance at all.

There will be no succession.
No, he’s not Logan Roy.
He’s Agent Orange, he’s Teflon Don
he’s the one and only Slogan Boy.

And there’ll be no tremblin’ in the Kremlin
when Donald takes control
and the Grand Old Party re-discovers
its Magaleptic soul.

The theme over at Desperate Poets is satire.

Parking (poem)

31 Replies

IMG_0443

Parking

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”)

This poem originally appeared in Cyphers Magazine.

Desire – Desperate or Otherwise

12 Replies
IMG_1031 (2)

Desire – what is it good for?

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.

photo taken in Sitges, Catalonia.

Shay over at: Desperate Poets 

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.

Jericho Beach Mid-May 2

14 Replies

Jericho Beach Mid May

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.

Father’s Day / Landline

2 Replies

Father’s Day

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.

The Town of High Dudgeon (redux)

1 Reply

IMG_0129 (3)

The Town of High Dudgeon

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.

Indignatron B (as seen on TV…again)

Leave a reply

looking at me

Indignatron B (as seen on TV)

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.

Naming Things

13 Replies

Naming Things

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….

This poem first appeared in The Galway Review.

It also appeared a while back in Open Link weekend over at earthweal