Free poem

Flammable

3am payload

from the interim

of index and middle finger

The white tube

murderous

smoulders, carpet bombing

You roll

in your sleep

smoked as the future comes

As firemen through

the neighbour’s yard

rubber handed, ungentle

Despite your

partial thickness

spirit succoured burning

Inspired by Paula Meehan's 'Six Sycamores' 2

The poem – or perhaps sequence of poems - that I’ve responded to  is ‘Six Sycamores’, which moves through the history of St Stephen’s Green, including, in Number Fifty-One, its pre-history.  I think in a way I’ve just reframed a certain ahistorical tendency in the use of the park which Meehan has already indicated in the wider poem.  I’ve followed the form, more or less, of The Sycamore’s Contract with the Citizens but to a much less resonant effect – I suppose unsurprising given the that the focus of what I’m doing operates explicitly on one, immediate level.  I’m not sure of the efficacy of using a sonnet to reject history, there’s a contradiction there, but Meehan’s sonnets in this sequence are so lovely, it would seem churlish not to acknowledge the formal dimension of what she’s doing.  (I am interested to ask her about her use of form, here and elsewhere).

Inspired by Paula Meehan's 'Six Sycamores'

Stephen’s Green

Trees don’t care about these strictures

least of all the sycamore, the weed tree:

it strews its seeds across planners’ pictures

of tidy flower beds, of green formality.

And the people don’t care, spilling cans,

stubbing out their fags on the statues,

pissing, in passing, in the bandstands:

their park’s in no part home to virtues.

There’s no regard either for the ducks,

those defecators at the water’s edge:

the wildlife here doesn’t give two fucks,

duck-spattering you right off your sandwich.

Not history, nor ordinances, nor metaphors:

forgotten initials and entwinements, under sycamores.

Blank verse

Perhaps we are less verbose, now:  voluble, yes, but in shorter bursts.  I know that I look at the almost always extensive regularity of works written in blank verse, and my heart sinks, slightly.  The more turgid moments of the 19th century come to mind.   And this is a very odd association, given the form’s history, swathes of Shakespeare, all that drama.  But what I think of, to be honest, is Wordsworth, of struggling through the Prelude…  Oddly, in one way I think it’s a visual difficulty that I have with it - those long, regular towers of text – there seems no reasonable way to access them. 

So my own foray into blank verse is only 16 lines: not too exhausting.  I wrote a sort of an obituary to my cat, put to sleep this week.    I thought that the roominess of pentameter would afford space for the sort of descriptive tribute an obituary calls for, even if the achievements of a cat couldn’t stretch it to any great length.  I did my best with the meter, I think it’s more or less iambic.  Here it is:

Obituary

There’s no black cat now at the back window

shouting displeasure at failing doormen,

the vagaries of rain. No more scrape of

claws down the frame.  At last, she has no need

for cushions, laps, for fragments of tuna.

All gloss, a model type, she soothed no-one.

She brought no ambience, she was sullen

as unlit coal. She was a pitch, witching

complaint, fishwife among felines, Hammer

Horror perfect, come perpetually

to stay.  Always standoffish, she kept her

hurts interior: to the end still chased

shed leaves, like mice she could no longer catch. 

Our familiar, never lovable - 

and now she is a black gap at the door,

a silence on the morning’s window sill.

Doorbell journal

Doorbell Journal, Monday to Friday

Hallowe’en

11.34 Danielle, without keys

14.37 Kate, Paul and Karen: one witch, one cowgirl, one man with a beard

18.14 Alice, Marianne, Oscar, Maisie and Ben: witches and skeletons, politely taking one pack of sweets each.

18.29 Two boys: one pirate, one ghost, grabby hands.

18.38 Three children aged about ten: one witch, 2 indeterminate but with white painted faces.  The sweet tin looks bereft.

18.45 Eva and her friend, and Caroline: witches and a ballerina. A polite conversation about Michael running the Dublin City Marathon. 4 hours plus a bit.

19.02 A man touting for a paving company, out weirdly late. Not offered sweets. Paving declined.

19.18 More boys, under ten. Pirates and whatnot.  Remaining sweets plundered.

20.04 Two last boys.  No more fun-size Crunchies.

1st November

11.37 The postman, with some books.

13.04 Another postman, with a plastic wrapped parcel containing running shoes.

2nd November

10.18   Kate and Karen, to play.

14.23 Danielle, no keys.

20.14 Dog’s Trust collector in hi-vis vest.  He’s soaking wet.

3rd November

14.39 My mother, with coconut cake

4th November

11.46 Postman, with a box of children’s toys.  No ungainly pregnant dashes to the shops in the offing. 

13.14 Danielle and Catherine, cold from the bike.

18.16 Me.

Open forms

Open form: I found myself a little at sea, which certainly clarifies the uses of traditional forms – there may be a limit to what you can do with a sestina, but that limit can be fruitful.  I sought a theme, as Yeats has it: the wide open nature of the open form – everything else, as it is – in suggesting everything, suggests nothing as well.  On the other hand, there are, as is pointed out, resonant engagements with the fragmentary remains of form in the anthologised works.   The example of the rag and bone shop is apposite; a form-to-function thing, admirable.  Because he hasn’t entirely deserted traditional scaffoldings, but here they are adapted, a bit shopworn, metre and stanzas but stretched, an engagement in form with questions of form. 


The anthologized poems are, in fact, a serious selection, as though this sort of engagement, this interrogation of the structure of the poem, proceeds in tandem with wider interrogations, large themes. 
It is interesting that so many of the North American poets here write poems addressed directly to America.  Why does an open form lend itself to such address?  Or maybe, why don't more traditional forms?  Why America? Because America represents a break with the old order?  I can't, in all seriousness, address myself to the aul' sod in these terms.  I suppose a long disturbing history of personification to some violent end makes one a little dubious about that sort of formatting. But I thought in the light of these models and that of the national circumstance, that this week’s endeavour should at least skirt around the serious.

And in my mind was another of Wallace Stevens' poems, which fits the brief – a serious piece of work about empty rituals, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’ In terms of form, I like Stevens' recourse to rhyme towards the end (in the ‘dead’ section of the poem).  Ice-creams - I think you can barely use the word, really, without invoking the Stevens' poem - presidents and the shockingly supine, albeit anxious, response of the Irish public to our current travails: these blended.  Waiting for a bus suggested itself, the powerlessness of the public transport user.   Here’s the current draft, still a long way from anything it should be:

The Irish for Ice-Cream

Nine presidents on: the office seems exhausted as the woman at the bus stop who would trade her gas bill for a Cornetto.

Soon it’ll rain.  Our electoral errand melts from memory: ice-creamish, preceding 

a sugar crash.

Nauseous, we’re waiting at this bus stop and all that’s passed has been an ice-cream van on its way home from the Park. 

There’s any number of us waiting, we are exhaling visible air while the ice-cream van still jangles though it’s done with sales for today.

Here’s the rain, sooner than any transport.  We forget Magnums, we forget Orange Splits, waiting in wet furrows for the oncoming

bus.

A misreading (misprision)

Msprism

Not the cracking of the light

though that’s how it seemed at the time

our physics all unsettled

Oracular, you bounced

these golds, these blues, magenta

undreamt, that’s how it seemed

But it was my mis-taking, a chemical

not chimerical flux:

not the light breaking, an ordinary

error.

The sonnet

I fiddled about with the sonnet a bit earlier this year: at the time I was thinking of the sorts of sonneteering undertaken by Renaissance English poets, not so much in the specifics of the form but in the uses that it was put to - love lyrics competitively composed, not so much about love as mastery (of form, I mainly mean).  At the time I wrote a couple of unrhymed 14 liners on pornography, more or less in response to this thought - I'll attach one of them (probably best not read in the company of children, as pretty crude in more than the formal sense). 

 Of course, there's far more to the sonnet than this one note reaction, so in the also attached attempt I've made for class, I tried to stay roughly iambic, used the turn and stayed within shouting distance of traditional sonnet subject matter.  I did decide against rhyme (perhaps the villanelle used up my rhyming capacity for October...): I am very fond of the Armitage poem that Paul circulated, so in this, followed his lead.

It is an interesting question, how much of the form is required to retain the classification, though I think jettisoning one element in any outing does it no real injury.  It’s interesting that many of the contemporary versions I’ve looked at do employ some version of a rhyming scheme, at least a slanted one, though they often bear no relation to the traditional sonnet scheme – Paul Muldoon’s Moy Sand and Gravel springs to mind, but then I suppose tricking around with poetry’s parts is his modus operandi, regardless of the form under consideration.  I think in the end, as with other forms, that if it doesn’t have the elasticity required to carry a contemporary poetic impulse, then it’ll fade away except in the context of these sorts of exercises: part of the kit in the poet’s gym, as it were.


Here’s a two part blog on the sonnet I found while I was thinking about this, in case anyone’s interested:
http://www.robertpeake.com/archives/335-The-Trouble-With-Sonnets.html
http://www.robertpeake.com/archives/336-Tactics-For-Contemporary-Sonnets.html
And here’s the Dana Gioia sonnet that’s mentioned in the blog:
http://www.danagioia.net/poems/sundaynight.htm

Here's my sonnet for this week:

When you are a beekeeper

You come in cold from the garden, with rain

blistering your glasses, a blackening

coming under the greens and yellows left

in your wake.  You come in flaring, Autumn’s

rough wind ruddling your skin, drying your lips,

to trip over the traces of your life:

soiled bear, Duplo, discarded sweeping brush.

You come in damp,  prefiguring Winter -

but here’s the warmth of  your house to greet you,

and the space you’ve been clearing in your mind -

gravelled, fenced, softly humming - follows you

and is echoed by us, love, in the early-lit kitchen,

with shrieks, a kiss, tea-steam: your hands’ work like

the coming summer’s bee-song, and  honey.

And here's the earlier, cruder effort:

Pornography 1

The blonde has no name. Best that way. She eyes

the camera or does not eye it, eyed in all time zones,

nameless in every country: offers up a generic, her own

shaved cunt transformed.  Anybody’s.  She does not look directly

at anyone: eyes skate past, maybe to the clock behind you

in your crumpled room, where you are shaded, hunched.

She cannot hear you breathe. The blonde does not care

who you are. She is twenty, or sixteen, or thirty eight:

you do not care who she is, or how long she has been here.

Now she is stalled, cock in mouth, buffering:  if you were

a dentist, you would know that look.  Streaming again,

your breath not eased: it has a wet sound to it. From the screen,

grunts, off-timed: here, the men are machines,

doing work you cannot do with your own hands, for you.

Found poem

Fascinating thing to do - I used line breaks and punctuation to break down a short paragraph from one of the Sunday newspapers.  I'm not convinced it works as a poem but the malleability of the meaning of the same words in different relation to each other is instructive.

Here's the poem, followed by the source:

What happened on 27 October 1986?

What was open? Outcry. Unlike: so many

other types.

Of revolution, the big bang

was characterised by the disappearance of screaming.

Crowds. The practice of share-trading being.

Conducted: verbally. Face to face on one. Market.

Floor was replaced with computer and telephone.

Communications between dealing.

Rooms spread across the city.

An edit, since I failed to explain what I thought I was doing with this on Monday:  
I was interested in what happens when a completely impersonal piece of text like this is subjected to a semblance of the formatting of the modern lyric, the trajectory it takes towards the personal when rearranged in such fashion.   I think it catches, however imprecisely, the inter-personal element - perhaps failures - of the process of changing modes of interaction which the original text outlines, with its references to share-trading being, and the anomie of the spreading separateness of rooms.  Possibly it would work better if I subjected it to further modification rather than just re-punctuating and reformatting it, though.

The villanelle

Perhaps it’s because I am more familiar with Bishop’s breezy toned ‘One Art’ than any other villanelle, but I couldn’t really approach writing in the form in an entirely serious fashion.  I know the Bishop poem actually adumbrates a range of human sorrows, from the trivial to the unbearable, but it does so in an idiom of resilience which is almost cheerful: for me, this sticks to the form. 

On the other hand, its circularity makes it a great vehicle for looking at life’s intractabilities: it lends itself to the Sisyphean.  I thought it would be interesting to use the repetition to look at something repetitious, like most people’s experience of work; to be honest, the regular reiteration of particular lines, around and around, directly reminded me of my repeated failure to successfully circumnavigate  Dublin’s myriad roundabouts the last time I tried to learn to drive, and my deep sympathy for my driving instructor, who had to put up with that and similar on an hourly basis, every day…  Like all of these things, the trick is finding fairly adaptable end-words, words which echo through innumerable other words: it almost felt like cheating to use a word like ‘again’ as an end word, given that so many words in English end with that sound.

So here’s my villanelle:

Driving School Villanelle

Second gear, indicate, change lane:

halfway across, this one always stalls.

We go around the roundabout again.

Eleven o’clock’s old dear is all inane

chatter and jumping at mobile calls.

Second gear, indicate, change lane.

Fourth lesson, in the driving rain:

enthusiasm falters, interest palls.

We go around the roundabout again.

After lunch, jerking along, the strain

shows; time and traffic crawls.

Second gear, indicate, change lane.

Four o’clock: today’s last boy’s insane,

brake-shy, he swerves, he swears, he bawls.

We go around the roundabout again.

The Accident’s, I endlessly explain,

a discordance of timidity and balls.

Second gear, indicate, change lane:

we go around the roundabout again.

 

Pastoral 2

A few further comments:  I’m actually quite interested in the pastoral mode.  I think it can be used to explore the sorts of displacements that are inherent in contemporary life.  I’m posting a (kind of over-written, now that I think about it) poem I wrote earlier this year which to my mind functions at its core as a pastoral: it has, I think, that integral distancing which I think is arguably the  central method of pastoral, a division between the speaker’s vantage point and the natural phenomenon s/he’s ostensibly examining, where the poem’s ultimate focus is the vantage point.  This distancing is more eloquently demonstrated in the James Wright poem ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ (The Making of a Poem, p219) where the speaker identifies himself as separate from the landscape he observes, despairingly so, in the last line.

Certainly, where it is interesting, it is often for uses far more varied and often political than simply eulogising the natural world: it never was that simple a thing, even in its earliest Classical manifestations, which have a highly political, conservative bent as I understand it, as have later manifestations – Renaissance country house poems, for example, are pastorals which function to sustain the status quo.  Then there’s John Clare’s 19th century quite contrary use of the pastoral to bemoan the enclosure of the land, there’s the use it has been put to in a post-colonial context by poets like Derek Walcott and of course, in Irish twentieth century poetry: it’s more or less a default mode for Heaney, for example.  It is an efficient mode to use where questions of identity and place arise, of course, so it’s not surprising that Irish poets would have used it, even if they have often done so in quite an ‘anti-pastoral’ fashion (think Kavanagh’s ‘stony grey soil’). 

My own earlier effort:

What we know of the desert we learned from TV: elegy for the Saharan cheetah caught by a camera trap in the deserts of Termit, Niger, January 2011

Those wastes harbour part-ghosts, on night-japes both

serious and seldom, photographed once

or perhaps twice, staring baldly backwards. 

Here’s what the light caught: this flash-lit mirage. 

The desert stock flees. Till now there has been

only a Bedouin indication,

old drawings’ odd symmetries –  here at last,

the desert’s beast, its grey imperative

shadowed by scientists and for its

eco-audience, by the BBC.

A trade of cold nights, hot days we imagine,

the unrelenting grit.  We are prepared

for snakes curvate crossing the sands, we are

braced for tenebrous rattlings: scorpions,

insects.  But what the desert smells like and

whether it has bird song and what fabulous,

unexpected carnivores it flashes,

once, for the desk-bound and then not again, 

is fading, too lovely, kin to a curse.

Pastoral

In the poem I’m working on for this session, I’ve tried to incorporate a number of themes directly from the pastoral tradition – the shepherd, an indication of a rural idyll, a distance in the perspective which I’m hoping recalls the particular urban to rural gaze which has been a key perspective in pastoral through most of its history, an intimation of elegy and also the more contemporary concern of pastoral as it shades into eco-poetry. It’s based on a memory I have from when I was perhaps six or seven, of taking a herd of sheep to be dipped in what must have been a public sheep dip with my uncle and my father.  I think the practice must have been discontinued not that long afterwards, since it was basically a large concrete tank of organo-phosphates and I certainly remember in other years that the sheep were treated on the farm with some sort of (no doubt equally noxious) powder.

Here's the current draft (I'll circulate it by mail tomorrow in case that's easier for printing purposes):

Dipping the sheep

Summer, balmy: here’s a milk bath for the ewes,

phosphorescent under the horse chestnut trees.

We funnel them down the hill for this,

their grey blur of panic spilling into the margins,

the green ditches. Bird alarms answer sheep-shouting.

I sang and bounced all the way on the sun-softened tarmac,

near-English child loosed in a tunnel

of hawthorn, wild carrot, cloud-piled sky -

but kept well back from Rose, her teeth under that velvet lip:

a good dog for the sheep and my uncle, the brown cudgel,

emanation of tree roots and cow dung

who drives them into the concrete bath and wades after,

no way soft as a shepherd.

I stand under the horse chestnut trees holding my breath.

The ewes thrash through it, swim-jumping,

the whites of their eyes no whiter

than the fluid they’re trying not to choke in.

No maggots this season.  My uncle hauls them out,

gloveless. You won’t have maggots either

my father says, but he’s not smiling, well clear with the dog.

The blackening trunks of the horse chestnut trees

lean away from this roadside parlour.

Somewhere further up the hill, a magpie rattles.

 

26 words

Memento mori

After birth comes death.

Everything’s finite:

gravity, hope,

ill-considered jokes

kill

like malaria, napalm or polonium.

Quick-silver, relentless,

some terror,

undoing vigilance,

will

x-out your zen….

Ode

After last week's sestina, I find I don't have much of a taste for writing in too defined a form this week - no Pindarics here.  I though my subject wanted a fairly loose touch anyway - am hoping the run on from 'of' and the general listiness of the thing gives it a reasonable momentum - perhaps too much alliteration though, admittedly.

An ode I like - and I'm taking the ode now to mean a work honouring something, not a formal animal in even the irregular, Romantic sense - Matthew Dickman's 'Public Parks'  

The sestina

So, sestinas are hard to write: the difficulty is finding sufficiently flexible end words to sustain interest over 39 lines, and that’s not to even get into the problem of incorporating the final tercet.  Like any form, it lends itself well to particular kinds of use -  Heaney’s ‘Two Lorries’ and Bishop’s elegant ‘Sestina’ are two which work well using narrative: Bishop’s using fairly straightforward nouns as end-words, both using a mix of end-stopped and run-on lines.  The run-on lines prevent the form from becoming static; looking at two other examples – Swinburne’s ‘Sestina’ and Pound’s ‘Sestina: Alteforte,’ both of which employ substantially more end-stopping, in Pound's, it’s only the force of the content – violent, declarative – that gives the work any real momentum, and in Swinburne’s case – well, it’s a work about dream states, so too much momentum would probably be unseemly.

I thought I’d try writing one that embraces the potentially repetitious awfulness to which it can clearly descend: insomnia seemed a suitable subject, a sort of alter ego for the Swinburne, I suppose.  But it’s hard to make a virtue of awfulness…  It is indeed a rigorous exercise, though, if nothing else.

Additional reading this week: Rossetti’s ‘Goblin market’ (memory pricked by Dr Ni Dhuibne’s class), this Autumn’s Poetry Ireland Review, which includes a few new poems by Jane Yeh (British based American poet, gifted and humorous, a rare enough combination in a poet).  Also took a look at some sestinas in McSweeney’s archive : this one is fun - http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wtf-sestina