Week 4: Two Poems to be Read Aloud

Sailing

A boat of lycra coated hunks

Shouting

Pineapple, Pineapple, Pineapple – Chunks!

Oars soar and silently splash, sink

And come back up again to gasp.

A gathering and a surge

So much like life.

A beat, a ripple,

A wave.

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c

Mercury: A Sonnet

Rows of roses, rose from the ground,

Each a heart’s content continent.

Worlds of words and words of worlds, whirl

The darling Girl, the buoyant Boy

Breaking upon the carousel.

In parting pittances alls spent,

The shaft is shot through priceless pearl –

Not forever, not now, not never, girl.

Life is hard, but harder stills the

Thought of that is all.

Poor remedy, yes down my throat,

It’s venom, verily, to love connote.

Such was I – to ends in wonder led:

The middle man, of all the things unsaid.

Stanzaic Chance and Polyglossia Poems

Stanzaic Chance Poem: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

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Lolita of life I tangle Aeolian.

Observation redolent,

The hedge entered.

Cousin of neglected family – extremely – some she, in orange, nobody shut.

Optical face,

Annabel,

Wanted half-hidden in the toward;

We experienced during our wanderings encouragement. Died.

Miserable and life excessive.

-

Like observation ladies intense take, and

Over, reader,

The hers enable

Come of nymphet: faunlet enchanted, strong, survived, in open number. Sensations

Of female

Anatomist:

While handmaids I tell eight,

Winking into dust of weeks ever dreadful,

Monique almost love enraged.

Polyglossia: Sound Translation and Reformation of Virgil’s Eclogues, I:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena;
nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva.
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit.
namque erit ille mihi semper deus, illius aram
saepe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus.
ille meas errare boves, ut cernis, et ipsum
ludere quae vellem calamo permisit agresti.

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Tighter, two by two they recouped and supped in effigy’s

Silver stream. Ten of us must have made it, surveying here;

Us but three finished in dull cheer. Liquids must halve

Us, but them, fug i’ mouth. Two, tighter, lent us a number

For most them rest on our doses. Am I really this vast?

.

My liberty, day’s no peace, aches out here. Face it.

‘Nah m’okay,’ I writ: I’ll maybe seem by day, Ill is who I am.

‘Say pay a tenner an’ I’ll risk a bother-bus,’ imbued Agnes.

Illy my Sarah bothers, out Sir Nice and tips ‘em.

Louder aqua vellum, claim or permit to rest?

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Tighter, two by two they recouped and dined.

‘Ten of us have made it,’ the old man cried.

Stools stood empty, plenty room to move,

Yet he gathered in sharing out the loaves.

Each to each he bowed down to his repast

As if to ward off that sole sense of loss.

Each to each was filled up with rosy glass

And embalming their bodies forgot the last.

.

My liberty enjoys no peace. It aches,

Instead, to have no excuse not to take.

You pays your money and you makes your choice;

Louder, the registers chime, the counters voice:

Put your money where your mouth is.

'As Easy as ABC' is becoming ironic. Another Try.

Cradle to Grave

And barely carried did each foot

Grapple. Heaving, inured, Jesus

Mounted night on portent quarters:

Remember Socrates, too taken

Under – while vainly

Yoke X’s Zounds.

Week 2 - Experiments in Poetry - Form and Process

O Christ! It was a poem I decided to write. Here you have them, listed below. O what great Woe! But don’t let my attempts at insouciance fool you – I am a class-A literary hack. Though my talents admittedly may lack, I more than make up for it in enthusiasm, contradiction and purified bullshit. Yes, you have seen this all before, only I’m more of a whore than an aristocrat – none of that Don Juan crap. No, I seek to please you rather than myself (no not like that, Byron!) – yet if I seem captivated the while, think of it as a waiter’s smile. You may find enjoyment (if imperfect) in the fact that I simply do not adore (i.e. abhor) this trite style, this stale trout I dish up to you. But there is a gun to my back, O the perennial fortune of the literary hack. (Simply I lack, but it’ll be much more fun to imagine the gun as real – a great deal). A man once said to me: ‘Artists are pussies, like we’re wusses or we end up getting fucked / And other kinds of folks are dicks, tall, smart and strong’.[1] The point is that Lewis (not M.G. but Jeffery) thinks that art’s about being messed up, not carefree; and that cool cats, though whacked with wood, will eventually ‘put out something good’. My philosophy, you see, is quite easy: it extends to you too, like the stickiness of Bobby Darin glue. We’re in this together – you read me, and I read never. So where do we start? (Of course, neither you nor I know – but the question is rhetoric) ‘The beginning!’ you say – but then what was this? A pile of preliminary piss? Has all history contrived to fill your glass, only for me to spew it out from my irascible hash? No, we’ve already begun and, please forgive the pun (he says), we are in media res!

.

Alphabeat

Astride but carelessly deranged,

Everyone finds generous hope

In justifying kind living.

Mankind, nor otherwise: primate’s

Quizzical reason strives to

Undermine voluntary will.

Xenophobia, yells Zion.

.

Transformation

Quant'è bella giovinezza,
Che si fugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol essere lieto, sia:
Di doman non c'è certezza

- Lorenzo di Medici, 15th century

.

What quantity of bells joyously peal

And yet leave me, longing for the departing sound –

When symphony stops. The key is in the lock,

Unturned, like you were once to me. Aback,

Taken, in those longing repulsive arms of rose.

An episode full, like the brimming cup, of portent.

In God’s domain there is no sureness.

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[1] Jeffery Lewis, Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror, (towards very end of song)

Experiment for Week One

Streetlamps

I walk in the middle of streets for you,

I don’t know why but it’s what I do.

The setting sun cedes to sultry night

And streetlamps, striding, offer darker light.

With day’s end comes the artificial day:

In some ways more real than the rest.

A space, a stasis, so utterly your own

Where shadows roam the greater grown.

To keep the camber beneath my feet,

And both kerbs equidistant,

A travelling and a davening

Which leads me to my end;

Or some way to keep my feet from wet

When the rains are pulled in louring clouds.

A height it offers, a retrospect,

For old scenes made anew.

I’d like to think you’re somewhere too,

Walking streets as well,

And that we’d both step off our paths

To run as one together.

But now I shall walk them for someone else,

And someone else again,

Until I realise I walk them only

For and by myself.