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
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.
These experiments appear to be very successful. Can you remind me the way you arrived at them? I like the prose poem's voice at the start of your post. Might there be a way to experiment further with this form, to produce a longer piece?
ReplyDeleteHi Donald. In the first poem, which follows the alphabetical form, I tried to keep to tetrameter, with four words in the first five lines, and three in the final two. I knew I wanted the first line to have a 'but' in, something like Stevie Smith's 'not waving but drowning', and the poem then grew to talk about the opposition within civilization between individualism and charity - and that often our 'developments' hinder otherwise natural social urges, which I trace back to the dialectic in religion, between charity and yet fear of the other. It was difficult to expand on this topic within the 26 word limit, and so the poem probably seems quite pithy. I found it hard to evoke any imagery with this form. I'm trying to do another one based on the first stanza of Blake's Jerusalem with more description in. The second poem was loosely based on the Medici love poem. The story is that Lorenzo sang this to his amore and she was instantly won over - I wrote a poem inspired by the sounds of the Italian to render the feeling after an unsuccessful love and loss.
ReplyDeleteThe opening experiment I really enjoyed. I simply began writing freely, just after completing the poems, in a kind of loosely rhyming prose. I didn’t think about it, and in fact the rhyming helped me keep going, doing much of the thinking for me. The piece seems to be quite down to earth, conversational (and self-effacing) while at the same time quite intelligent and witty. I think such an ‘insouciant’ style helps, because in a quite bolshie way it just doesn’t care. It’s refreshingly non-serious. I didn’t in fact have any notion of the relation to Byron until after the first few lines, then made he came to mind and I made the reference to him (I slag him off, which of course shows my deep respect for him). In fact, rhyming in speech is something we feel very self-conscious about, and often try to avoid, and so it’s quite fun to write this way. You can see my literary/lyrical interests coming through too. I think I will try continuing it, I’ll have to think up a story for my persona to tell – a modern DJ? Perhaps, yes…
Yes, DJ Byron. Go for it!
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