Not avoiding the I

The following poem (which may yet go through some further revisions) is based around the idea of starting each line with the letter that the previous line ended with...I've only cheated once, I think, in the second half. (To my surprise, the poem neatly sorted itself out into two halves of twenty lines each.) 

It also alludes to the idea of limiting yourself to a single vowel, but that's beyond me at this stage of my career. However, two writers who've done work in this way, Georges Perec, and Christian Bök, both get a look in [that's Bök in the photo].  Christian Bök was apparently named, as a newborn, 'Christian Book,' but altered the spelling of his surname to avoid 'unseemly confusion with the Bible.' 

Not avoiding the I

‘You forbid yourself use of a vowel,

legislatively avoiding every I -

if possible.’ However, this poem

makes no attempt to avoid that letter,

rapidly realising that too many words

solidly take their place only because

each one has an I in it.  And

don’t let it imply that I’m referring

generatively to the first person pronoun;

no, I definitely mean the letter itself,

furnishing space for definitely or

realising, words that without those

eyes (as they sound) would come straight

to a halt. Definitely would sound

dismal as though missing the

echoing roof of the mouth, or

realising would struggle to be

even a fragment of itself, the mutter of

fatheads incapable of voicing the

exalted English language. 

Such restriction inhibits stiffly;

you amplify, in individual lines, utility,

intensifying I increasingly until as

sky far as the I can see a diatribe of that

third vowel swimmingly impinges, and

dismisses different vowels, so that

the I who’s hardly there in ‘in’ sees

some of what you’re up to, grows boastful,

latterly insists on an univocalic spirit.

This is soon declined by vowels impartial,

leniently none reminding I of Perec’s

singular E-voided novel,

La Disparition, or the Perec

counterparting work Les revenentes where

E appears alone.  And lonely.

Yet think, too, you vowels, of Christian

- nee Book (too close to biblical) - Bök

kindly offering his univocalic

cinque-chaptered Eunoia, where

each holy vowel receives pre-eminent place.

Note, though Eunoia is supposedly the shortest word in the language containing all the vowels, (it means beautiful thinking), it's (possibly) been superseded by Iouea, not only a shorter word, but one that still manages to have four syllables.  There's a delightful article about the word, which relates to a fossil sponge, and has a New Zealand connection.  The word was invented by M. W. de Laubenfels, but the name for the particular sponge may have been replaced by a newer name.  

Zen Poem

Playing again with found/collage lines to form a poem.  Here the lines came (mostly ready-made) from a variety of cuttings I have on file, including several poems.  In a few instances I've dropped a word or changed the tense or a pronoun.  I've called it a Zen Poem because it's somewhat reminiscent of that Zen approach in which a non sequiter often seems to follow a straightforward question.  However, the 'wisdom' that appears here may not be quite on a par with the tradition of Zen.  And it's possible some responses could be shifted to answer a different question....

Zen Poem

Why are you washing and smearing windows?

Sometimes you catch your face in a mirror.

What happens if we bring all the little pieces together?

The dawning awareness of the thinness of disembodied life.

Where was easily the most exciting game you ever played?

In the online ecosystem I’m inhabiting.

When is the placebo helpful, and when is it not?

Always in the supermarket, and out and about.

What are the usual superficial divisions between Right and Left?

A team snaps out of its streak and wins a bunch of games.

Why won’t attempts at control be abandoned?

The subjectivity of others is confirmed by a failure to point.

Why do you court silence as prayer?

Everything I do is instantly news.

What if you were patient and could spare the time?

I view relationships as based on utility and exchange.

Would you self-impose a moratorium?

Nothing so conclusively proves one’s ability to lead.

What if change was discontinuous with the past?

The depression years take up large chunks of my story.

Have you been reduced to doling out slops to pigs?

What I really want is someone rolling around in the text.

What is the sweet heat made from two bodies in the bed?

Despair, a side of mutton, roaming the slaughterhouse.

What if you became a hunch-backed old man?

I accept that we just have to live with sandflies.

What if I asked: what is it like to drown?

Vigilante tactics, smashing illegal stills, flogging drunks.

What is it about correlation and causation?

You can’t tell the story of rage in soccer without talking about managers.

Is solving for motivation the wrong solution?

In dreams of reason you may drink of life’s streams.

Are you going to die having missed nearly everything?

You can still get out of jail free.

The body returns...

The body returns to gravity
after lying deep in a
long hot bath

Twitter Collage Poem

In the past I've written found or collage poems, with varying degrees of success.  However, it occurred to me that Twitter provides a fruitful place for picking up interesting 'found' lines (rather like the abbreviated messages on postcards).  The following is one possibility formed in couplets that may or may not have connections.  And thanks to all the Twitters who inadvertently gave me lines to work with...I've acknowledged those I could retrace below. 


Twitter Collage Poem

He gets to the sandwiches at the lock-up first

fruitlessly to find meaning in spilled coffee grounds.

Sing out if you want to spend a bit of time -

in my youth my patience is limited.

Shivers of unendurable glee

brutally encased in formaldehyde.

It ain’t just the Aussies who produce dire pop songs;

feel free to send info on must do’s in Israel.

Off to drink Sangria in the park, then I’m off to the zoo -

they’ve been given an order and are openly insubordinate.

Everybody already has their lines prepared and it’s

these carry me along on a stream of sporadic notes.

Vaguely shaped like a rack of ribs: if I’m not interested in

something anymore then no one else should be interested either.

@_jjw_

@IanTLS

@BilgeEbiri

@nzlistener

@asdeos

@sixthformpoet

@chrisberg

Grandparents

This is an older poem that first appeared online here.  I've altered a couple of words.  (Please note, the first part is tongue-in-cheek, something that wasn't recognised when it was first published.)

Grandparents are best kept in separate houses.

Each pair thinks their mutual grandchild is theirs

And theirs alone. 

Sharing is a no-no, and the thought that others have

Input on a grandparent level is

Disturbing, to say the least.

It’s a strange thing that we two grandparents

Can give our whole hearts to our grandchildren

And yet, four other sets of grandparents

Have also given their whole hearts away.

Why aren’t the grandchildren

Swamped with all that love? 

Wouldn’t you think that the parents’ love,

And the paternal grandparents’ love,

And the maternal grandparents’ love,

And, in at least one case,

The great-grandparent’s love

Would be like a huge enveloping balloon,

A blimp full of love that made it hard to breathe?

Apparently not.

With childlike ease the grandchildren

Absorb it all and have room for more.

Phew!  Love like a whole world.

Phew!  Love like the universe expanding.

Phew!  Love as broad as eternity.

It’s just as well for grandparents to stay

Separate.

Otherwise the rest of the world might begin to

Soak up all that love and set itself alight.

Backpfeifengesicht

I came across this wonderful German word yesterday, and its even more wonderful meaning.  It's pronounced - if my long-distant German lessons serve me right - Bark fie fen gay zicked.  (Please note, this is extremely approximate!)

Backpfeifengesicht

English speakers have no word for

a face that badly needs a punch.

The German compound word is

Backpfeifengesicht

Which could easily seem to mean

a face like a smelly drain

Though transliterally it’s close to

a back-pipe face, which isn’t

Complementary.  And

on the face of it, the word looks like

Bagpipes make me sick¸ though

since I have a friend who’s learning

To play the bagpipes, using

Backpfeifengesicht

In a pretended translation

seems likely to bring me to a

Place where I might well have

a face that badly needs a punch. 

Two poems waiting for a home

Weather Report

Never mind that Waiouru's
frozen, iced and brutal,
or that Kaitaia, which is in the tropics anyway,

is constantly fine

and has no excuse to be otherwise;
or that Auckland rains flood in all seasons,
or that Wellington's swept off the map
with gusts and winds whose rate of knots
exceed the speed of light,
or the Garden City's smog smudges
homes, faces, windscreens
with a grey and pernicious smuttiness...

Always, always, in the Deep South
according to the (fair)-weathermen and -women
ensconced behind the Bombay Wall of Hills,
 it’s:

‘Snow,’
preferably down to 200 metres.

The Luddite Dreams

The Internet is down – for good.

Bookshops come back into their own;

Google has gone; librarians once again

Are the source of all knowledge. 

Everything you wanted to know in a hurry

You have to wait for, just as you did in the past.

You can’t order online, or pay online,

You have to communicate face to face,

With real faces, real voices, and discover

They are, for the most part, worth communicating with.

No more poker games online, no more

Pornography available at the touch of a key.

Life slows down, immeasurably, and

Millions of people find employment again.  

A parallelogram of light

Things have been a little quiet on the poetry front because of the amount of work being done on the musical I've written: Grimhilda!  However, here's a small offering to keep my fans from fretting...

A parallelogram of

light 

caught 

out of the

corner of my sight,

formed 

on a white

inner wall 

by a window.

Pantoum: The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Toad

Toads are less popular than frogs.

Ostriches bury their heads in sand.

The upright abhors toadying

When winter’s hibernation ends.

Ostriches bury their heads in sand.

The archetypical dwell in halls

When winter’s hibernation ends.

The eponymous hero promises.

The archetypical dwell in halls,

Endearing and obnoxious.

The eponymous hero promises.

The princess marries the prince.

Endearing and obnoxious,

His eyes look abnormally large.

The princess marries the prince.

The conceited ass never learns.

His eyes look abnormally large.

There are more to toads than meet the eye.

The conceited ass never learns.

Beauty’s ambivalence drives.

There are more to toads than meet the eye.

The upright abhors toadying.

Beauty’s ambivalence drives.

Toads are less popular than frogs.

If you're not familiar with the pantoum format, it consists (in English) of four lines in which the 2nd and 4th are repeated as the 1st and 3rd in the next verse, and so on.  When you're ready to come to an end, the original 1st and 3rd lines are placed as the 2nd and 4th of the last stanza.  There's a tendency for the pantoum to drum its way along at a fairly stolid pace (although that may depend on the poet) because of the repetitions.  However, the repetitions, coming as they do against new lines, tend to take on new meanings.  

This particular one is based on phrases and lines and words from this morning's Wordways (John Hale) in the ODT: The Ambivalent Amphibian. 

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....]