And they all think they’re standing still…

And they all think they’re standing still…
but I know that each and every object, the
29 inch Sanyo television, the
Epson stylus photo 830U, the
CD case inexplicably marked:
38374653gd, the
one remaining Christmas card with a Santa surprised at work-
I know they’re all whizzing round the world at
a speed that is somewhat akin to that of a recently-
discovered comet which may or may not hit the Earth;
I know they’re all under the delusion that
they’re stationary, that the only moving object here is
me.

But when I walk to the kitchen, a walk that’s roughly Eastward,
I am perhaps going faster than they are, or maybe
slower, depending on which direction the earth is spinning.
My calculation is that Eastward is the way we sail, but
I’m open to correction, since I’m also under the
impression that the Southern hemisphere is actually in the North,
though to argue such a rearrangement would set the world aflame.
I’m easily misinformed, however; a stand-up comic’s joke can fool me,
a salesman at a party can sell me nonsense,
a grandmother can spout ancient wisdom and I will rest
happy in my new-found knowledge.

So when I’ve put the jug on, and come back to the lounge,
the jug races ahead of the rest of us;
though facing forwards, I’m walking
backwards, gaining time I lost on my Eastern trip.
Or so I think.   But not being one prone to
contemplation, it’s possible the
29 inch Sanyo television with Dynamic Platinum Flat Screen,
the Epson stylus 830U that prints photo quality reproductions,
the CD case marked 38374653gd as a code to identify its user,
the one left-over Christmas card with a Santa shuffling
two wrapped presents from side to side in an indeliberate manner
all have it over me in the analytical stakes,
and that while they sit they have
the time to discern whether the sun rises in the kitchen,
whether the world rolls like a cricket ball towards a never-to-be-found boundary,
whether the North denies the South’s rightful place,
and whether silent objects, the stuff of still life paintings,
have any ability to think upon their place upon the planet.

This poem was written some time ago, and is only now added to the blog. 

Update, 2014. This poem was accepted for an Australian speculative poetry anthology called Stars Like Sand, edited by Tim Jones and P S Cotter.

More on Villanelles

I've talked about Villanelles on this blog before, and included at least one example that I haven't written myself. 


I've just come across another, this time by Theodore Roethke.  I was reading this poem, courtesy of the daily Writer's Almanac email, and realised within a stanza or so that it was a Villanelle.   The title is The Waking, and you can read it here - where they have permission to reproduce it.   Here are the first three lines:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

The first and last line reappear (not always exactly, which is common in this form) throughout the poem.   Note the paradoxical theme as well - waking to sleep, learning by going where he has to go.  That second idea is something poets often pursue in the course of their writing: writing in order to find out what it is you want to say. 

Incarpaliar rock

Incarpaliar rock

The train cheats through the desert.

My elbow is warmed from its resting on the window.

What a fuss I left behind!

That singing brick, making music to soothe the papoose.

I might as well have a sandwich – so-called –

though the railway doesn’t know what a sandwich is.

Why can’t I sleep on trains?

That would stop me feeling hungry.

It’s worse on a plane – the cramped carpal tunnel.

It’s like your dreams are cheated when you try and sleep

on a plane.

On trains, I doze....

A train has rhythm  - (rhythm,

what a stinker of a word to spell).  Rhythm.  Rhythm.

On trains the rocking motion reminds you of being a papoose

listening to your mother’s music,

warmed up from inside out by her oh-so-familiar voice.

Not the voice that later would say, Get it? Get it??

when plainly I didn’t. 

As though she’d seen what sort of a fool she’d brought up.

What a fuss she’d make over it.

No wonder I’m dreaming of being on a train,

streaming through the desert.

cheating her, somehow. 

This poem, (not autobiographical, by the way), is the result of working out one of the exercises in The Exercise Book, edited by Bill Manhire and others. 

Montezuma’s Revenge

I got The Exercise Book out of the library yesterday - it's edited by Bill Manhire, amongst others.  It's a grab bag of ideas to stimulate your writing, and the poem below is the result of one of these stimulations...this is a first run at it - there may be improved versions still to come.   

Montezuma’s Revenge

One of the blankets I hung out to air

was dry when I first hung it out.

It’s now wet from the spitting rain,

so I’ve hung it in the glasshouse

to dry again.

The tomatoes in the glasshouse are a

very few red; the remainder green.

The blanket is child’s blue, green, red, a

child’s blanket kept to cover the dog’s

cage, where he sleeps at night, in the

kitchen, with the curtains closed, to

shut out the extra light.

We’ve been up in the night the

last three nights, letting the dog out

in the dark at least three times a

night – he’s had the backdoor trots,

(our back door rattles in the wind

as I write), Montezuma’s Revenge –

the runs, the summer complaint,

though for eating what I know not what.

Montezuma’s Revenge: why does a

Dutch a cappella rock-pop group

name itself after a South American

loosening of the guts? 

But they did just such.

They’ve called it quits once –

not the loosening, though most would

call quits (including the dog) on that as

quickly as. Three years ago

they quit, but last December

were touring as if detachment never

happened, their Dutch phizogs

bouyant on a poster for

Montezuma’s Revenge

Strikes Back: an a capella

circus.

Google translates the revival:

“It buzzed for a while in the

corridors and it is true!  After a

number of theatres with the

question of Montezuma was 

again not what we could do the 

heads together. Such a chance will

not let you lie...a fall or winter or 

summer break depression is

now time for a spring cleaning.

That sounds like we have met 

once the broom by the occupation.”

You can see Montezuma's Revenge's website here. 

Lying on one side

Lying on one side

Half my hair heats against the pillow.

One eyelash, linked to the lid, lies caught in linen.

One nostril breathes less freely than its brother.

One cheek is concave under cranial weight.

Half my chin presses to the pillow.

My left ear is flat beyond flattening.

A shoulder has its flagrant arm flung out, angular.

The other arm, not to be outdone by its brother,

finds a home across my wife’s breasts.

An awkward elbow, fitting nowhere, develops pins and needles. 

Fingers fit as finials, some under, some over. 

Some chest rests, with ribs partially crushed.

An arch beneath the bridge from chest to hip

and then the thigh, bastion of the lower half,

curls over, as my joystick, hardened,

postulates the holding up of my frame.

The thigh has that fame, and rolls down towards

the knee locked under the other knee, crossed under,

awkward huggings, impractical when walking.

Ankles, sticklers for the most convenient place to

place themselves, shift shiftily, knobble slips off knobble. 

Toes keep pace with the quietly shifting space:

those toes (unlike the ankles) soft and less defined,

grubs of differing heights set as extremities,

shift around each other, nuzzling in amongst each other,

comfort spaces betwixt between, sensuous with each other,

revelling in their sockless, shoeless freedom. 

Awake before 6 am

Awake before 6 am

I’m never sure if the distant roar I hear

is the waves hitting the shore

at St Kilda or St Clair, or

some pre-working-day collective snore

rising from ten thousand or more houses,

people dreaming behind closed doors

of the day gone, or the day before them.

In gardens all around is the pre-dawn

twittering of a thousand birdsongs soaring;

then, sun rising, an end to the outpouring:

a reverence and a waiting awe for

the new day, which to bow before
humans now deplore.

Thanks to Kay Cooke for her helpful suggestion on this poem. 

After reading The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Working with rhyme again, and trying to find a way that makes sense as I go along.  In his book, The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker makes a strong case for poems that rhyme.  


After reading The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Your challenge, Nick, is to write a poem

in which the lines have rhymes;

I now invite King Jeroboam –

a man whose various crimes

brought Israel to idolatrous knees –

to help me with this verse.

I wouldn’t have brought in such a sleeze

if ‘poem’ wasn’t such a curse

to rhyme with, as you no doubt know,

having struggled with the form;

but sans a lesser-known John Doe

I’m having to perform

with a King whose name just fits the bill –

the only one I’ve found –

and hopefully he’s taken his pill

and doesn’t want to expound

the reason why he led poor Israel off

its proper course of action;

otherwise I’ll have to scoff

to stop him gaining traction

regarding idols, groves and bulls

where worship goes awry,

and a self-centred king who pulls

the wool over everyone’s eye.

The Heaven-born Ploughman

The results of the 2012 Robert Burns Poetry Competition have just been announced, and since I didn't make the cut, I may as well include my entry here.....

The Heaven-born Ploughman

Remembered in life for his gallavanting,

his getting-with- child of too many women,

he’s remembered in death as a saint of the

people, this impoverished farmer of land

and wealthy farmer of words.

Dubbed the “people’s poet” in Russia:

his Scottish face reproduced on a

Russian postage stamp ten years

before the production of two commemorative

British ones: fourpence & one and threepence. 

Further portraiture fame came from the

Clydesdale Bank, on a five-pound note

(the reverse a field mouse and a rose):

the once impoverished poet

more profitable in death than life.

Remembered in places far-flung,                                                                

his antipodean statue  - seagulls seated on his

head – commands by place its status as

centrepiece to the Writers’ Walk

circumferencing Dunedin’s Octagon.

Like Mozart, like Schubert, like Chopin –

short-lived Masters of musical sound,

Burns was short-lived Master of the verbal:

rhythmic and wry, rustic, sincere, and

spontaneous heaven-born ploughman.

Split Infinitives

The following is the result of a nonsense conversation on Facebook...

Split Infinitives – for Matt Scott

The people who reject the rules

and sprinkle their orations  

With split infinitives and more

 egregious violations ..."  Anna Barham

My punctious pal says it’s

an ‘egregious violation

to gamely split infinitives,’

in Facebook conversation.

By ‘gamely’ does he mean in fun,

or doing it with vigour;

taking grammar at a run,

observing it with rigour?

To this the answer I’ve no thought,

but Strunk and White insist,

that split infinitives you ought

not never to dismiss.

No-nonsense Fowler

also works to rule;

considers it a howler

and thinks that you’re a fool.

But Mr Shakespeare, who

re language knew some little,

split infinitives - to show

he cared not a jot or a tittle.

A failure of the imagination

When it comes to evolution, I seem to have a failure of the imagination.   I just can't conceive how certain things could have done without certain other things, in the evolution 'process'.   The world seems so full of synchronicity that to imagine A without B just makes my head ache.   Hence the poem below, which hopefully won't be too below the belt for most readers....

I so so

So wanna believe in evolution,

but since no one can decide

which arrived first, the

chicken or the egg,

and since the eye has been

discredited as a possible

explanation for design,

being so cleverly designed that

only Evolution with a capital

E could have randomly come

up with it, then I have to con-

clude that when I ask how did the

penis manage to evolve without

the vagina, or the vagina without the

penis, that I’m just a no-hoper on the

scientific front, though not so much of a

no-hoper on the full frontal front.

But boastingly I digress;

what I’m trying to suggest is

that it’s a puzzle how the vagina

decided that it would arrive on the

scene just as the penis came into

prominence – as it were.  Or was

there a penis hanging around

(again I use the language somewhat

loosely) knowing in its own random,

evolutionary way, that there would be a

vagina slinking around in the bushes

somewhere, just kind of thinking,

(randomly, evolutionarily) that a

penis might be close by, and

useful.            


PS. In 2018 I read Darwin's Secret Sex Problem, which deals with exactly the issue I wrote about in the poem, and shows that I was right to query evolution. In fact, the writer F LaGard Smith, notes in the book: 
'How those first-ever sexually-reproducing organisms possibly could have evolved before sexual reproduction existed is quietly admitted by evolutionists to be the “Queen of Evolutionary Problems.”'

The tricks of a Sestina

I mentioned the Sestina in my last post, and gave a graphic version of it, which, when I came to try and use it, wasn't that easy to work with after all.   Stephen Fry lays out the ground plan for a Sestina like this:

ABCDEF 

FAEBDC

CFDABE

ECBFAD

DEACFB

BDFECA

That is, the word that corresponds in each case to A or B or C, etc, and appears at the end of a line, gets shifted around as the poem winds its way through the spiral.  At the end of the six stanzas we have an Envoi, a kind of final greeting to the reader, which uses this pattern  BE/DC/FA, squashing up the six key words into three lines.  

It's rather difficult to explain, so here's a properly formed example from W H Auden called Paysage Moralisé.   In this poem you can see how the key words at the end of the first six lines (valleys, mountains, water etc) wind their way around the poem.

Being keen to have a go at the Sestina, if only to say I've actually tried it, I produced the item below (notice I don't call it a poem).   I discovered shortly after I started that I'd begun to rhyme the key words instead of actually re-using them; hence the variations.  However I think the scheme is intact, and by the time I got to the envoi the words were back where they belonged again.   The metre isn't consistent because it's not easy to concentrate on getting the metre right as well as all the other juggling of words, but since this is only a practice run, I'm not fussing about that too much.   

I've written out the key words at the beginning, with their alphabetical symbol beside them.  I haven't thoroughly checked but I think they're intact, at least in terms of rhyming with the original.   The group of six letters are only at the side to give you an idea of where the key words/rhymes have gone to.   I was originally going to use a bunch of words that I came across in relation to trailer hitches, but they proved a bit of an obstacle in the way of getting the Sestina off the ground.  And anyway the 'poem' found its own way home.

A.     Hitch, B.  state, C. more, D.  this, E. sans, F. did

To start a poem with a trailer hitch               ABCDEF

Seems likely to put me in a state

Of dislocation, and furthermore

I haven’t a clue where I’m going with this

Which makes it a drive in the night sans

Headlights, which my brother-in-law did.

Well, now I’ve the problem that this grid      FAEBDC

Called Sestina needs to work one stitch

At a time, like a number of hands

All pulling, as if pulling their weight,

But in fact, pulling that way and this,

Between table and chair, window and door.

And now I’ve made it a chore                         CFDABE,

Since I should stick to the grid

And not rhyme; how did I miss

That instruction?  Surely some hitch

In my reading.  So I’m now in a state

And reverting to form as a man’s

Wont to do if he just lets his glands             ECBFAD

Rule him and acts like a boar

In a china shop throwing his weight

Everywhere, breaking this lid

And this plate, sending every which

Way and that crockery, with a hiss

And a roar, and unlikely to miss                    DEACFB

Any item he can lay his pig hands

On, or, with a whiskery twitch,

Like his cousin, the Minotaur,

(distant, I know) known to be hid-

den in his labyrinthic state

And rashly inclined to lie in wait                    BDFECA

For Heroes arriving in a bliss-

ful state of ignorance, fidd-

ling with their sword in their hands,

Relishing a fight and the gore

That would follow without hitch.

I’m sorry to state the heroes sans

Brains lose on this, and furthermore,

Only Theseus did the deed without hitch.

[This post got picked up for the weekly highlights on the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012 - An Aotearoa Affair site.  There are some interesting comments on the post there, including a note about Denise Duhamel's excellent Sestina: Delta Flight 659.  Note how she plays with the form....]

Still playing with the Villanelle

More playing with the Villanelle form - I'm looking at the Sestina and maybe the Ballade next...(blame Stephen Fry)

While all the world around me hoons

And guzzles caffeinated drinks,

I take a nap most afternoons. 

The radio croons its ‘Junes and moons;’

My mind it gently sinks and sinks,

While all the world around me hoons.

Siestas are, for Spaniards, boons,

(Accompanied by long, sticky drinks) -

They take a nap most afternoons. 

But as a Kiwi, Culture’s tunes

Deflect away from forty winks

While all the world around me hoons.

Far healthier than taking prunes

Or dealing with love handle kinks

Is my quiet nap most afternoons. 

Busyness eventually wounds

And proves to be a faithless minx;

While all the world around me hoons

I take a nap most afternoons.  

Villanelle again

Still working on the Villanelle form; it's difficult but not impossible.  Difficult mostly because it's easy (as the following poem demonstrates) to keep to short thoughts without any great ongoing flow.  Anyway, this one is probably still a work in progress.   See the notes at the bottom for some explanations.

All Governments suck up to the rich

With tax loopholes by the score;

The fat aren’t found dead in a ditch.

Every two years a major bank glitch

With the underpaid caught in the maw;

All Governments suck up to the rich.

A vacuous, empty human witch

Spends with extravagant hiss and roar:

The fat aren’t found dead in a ditch.

Politicians make a strong pitch

For tobacco exemptions in law

All Governments suck up to the rich.

Here’s a somewhat unpleasant hitch:

Pepper spray in the Occupy war;

The fat aren’t found dead in a ditch.

I’m struggling to maintain my pitch:

The affluent versus the constant poor.

Governments suck up to the rich -

The fat aren’t found dead in a ditch. 

The pepper spray incident at UC Davis was caught on camera by dozens of people using mobile phones, iPhones and more.  The link is to a ten-minute video of the whole event in which riot policeman Lt John Pike stood over a seated row of protesting students and purposely pepper-sprayed them.  Though it's not clear on the videos, it was done by other police as well, some of whom forced open students' mouths and sprayed down their throats. 

Villanelle

Reading Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled at the moment, and in particular the chapter on Villanelles. 

The Villanelle is a bit akin to a Sudoku, or a Cryptic Crossword: everything has to fit or it falls apart.  It's a form, and a quite specific one at that.  There are five stanzas of three lines each, and the sixth stanza has an extra line. 

The first and third lines of the first stanza get repeated alternately at the end of the subsequent stanzas and then both appear in the last stanza.  They have to rhyme.  The end word of the middle line in each stanza rhymes (with a different rhyme sound).   In the last stanza the first line rhymes with the very first line of the poem, the second line rhymes with the second line of the poem, and then we have the two repeated lines.   It sounds more complicated than it is.   Dylan Thomas' Do not go gentle into that good night is a well-known poem than many people don't realise is a fine example of a Villanelle. 

This wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop is also a Villanelle, though by running over the second line in some cases she takes slight liberties with the form.    The poem becomes increasingly moving as it goes on; the last line is exceptionally so.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster, Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three beloved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. -- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

From Bishop’s last book of poems, Geography III 

I've just had a play with the form, and produced the following bit of nonsense....which I'm sure can be improved.   It's a start, however!  I also play a little with the second repeat line; using rhymes that are similar in sound may not be the wisest move, although it was interesting to do.

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream,

Though I myself am fairly keen

To aspire to a villanellic scheme.

So I won’t wait for the Muse’s beam

But try somehow the rhymes to glean;

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream.

I thought at first that I might seem

To be a Villanelle machine;

As I aspired to a villanelley scheme.

I’d vie with the Cream of the Poetic Team,

Sharpen my tools to the finest sheen;

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream.

Of Villanelles I’d write a ream,

Of Villanelles become the Dean -

Still aspiring to a villanelleful scheme.

While fame and fortune wildly gleam

Villanellistically I’m still green;

Perhaps it’s not the prime of every poet’s dream,

Aspiring to a villanellistic scheme. 

Mike Crowl Nov 2011