Must... write... poems

Somewhere between the finishing of my thesis, polishing of two manuscripts and a mountain of freelance work to pay the bills, I seem to have written no new poetry for a while. It's a bad habit to lose, as it were. But a hoo-haa about what counts as rhyme over at Poets on Fire has given me a few ideas - for technical exercise really, but it's something to go on. I won't post my list of ideas here, since the last time I did so it was the death knell for them all.

Still: cat... dog...

Draft poem

[ZIP]

Grimericks

It's raining and raining and raining.
The stink of the wet vegetation
anointing the air
is causing a stir.
A diesel pulls into the station.

Some sparrows live under the eaves,
quick tokens of our lives.
It's true we don't know
our neighbours. They go
in and out with inhuman moves

The cranes are arranging the city
and I think that there's nothing so pretty
as tumbledown houses
deprived of their trousers
surviving the death of the city.

A wheelbarrow propped on its end
gives the garden spirits a tent.
The rain's steady drum
's a metallic boom,
a tin roof, a taciturn friend.

Yet more Benn

And this - variations on Benn's famous 'Gesange' (umlaut walkabout alert), specifically of Babette Deutsch's famous translation (which I won't post here as it is so widely available):

Variations on a Form by Gottfried Benn

1
I
O that we were our Tsarist predecessors.
A little clump of dimwits in a country house.
Then life and death, and tea and cards and talk
would still be something really very nice.

A landlord’s agent or a simple dunce,
wig-wearing, plump, yet strong-toothed like a vice.
A peck of grain, a goose, an evening with a girl —
help yourself, old boy, we’d chortle; don’t think twice!

II
Despicable, the sergeants and the commissars.
Preferment, justice, farming, all are vile.
We are such effective bureaucrats,
but write off-duty ditties in a lumpen style.

The arctic inlet. The woods’ darkling cries.
The grave stars, huge on the rumbling tanks.
The submarine rises soundlessly from the lake.
And the shore is bleak. And always Joseph rants. —

2
I
O that we were the pioneers of English botany.
A scene of livewires in the Civil War.
Then wort and reed and buttockspur and clod
might be our contribution to the lore.

A leaf of alga or a massive fungal bloom,
piquant and swollen like my lady’s womb.
Angel’s-wing or fly’s-head orchid; name
and name and name. But still the sense of doom.

II
Despicable, the walkers and the lists,
taxa, knowledge, hybrids in a vial.
It makes me sick: we play too much the gods
yet my heart stops at the sun on a sundial.

Standing water. The yet unsurveyed wood.
Tiny stars among the flowering snowdrops.
The bug squats nameless on the tree’s bark.
I pin it in a drawer. And there it stops. —

3
I
O that we wear our Primal Scream t-shirts.
A little line of speed in a pub bog.
Then drink and sex, and pregnancy and birth
would matter less than our next trip to Prague.

A Rizla paper or a simple pint,
gassy and full in my rooted clutch.
Gulls alongside the boat, a schoolgirl giving head.
I learn ‘a coffee shop’ in Dutch.

II
Desirable, the lovers and the mockers,
daring, longing, hopefully we smile.
We are such sickly, such corrupted gods.
One of us vomits halfway down the aisle.

The gentle harbour. The lack of dreams.
The pop stars, transient as summer snow.
We shuffle blearily towards the waiting coach
and we’re ashore. And off to buy some blow. —

4
I
O that we were our primate ancestors.
A little bunch of apes at the forest’s edge.
Then life and death, and pregnancy and birth
would mean chewing constantly on roots of sedge.

A life as alpha or a simpering runt,
airborne yet tethered by its four-limbed clutch.
Swinging a handy rock, smashing in a head
would be our culture, thank you very much. —

II
Disposable, romantic love, ideals.
Opinions, voting, principles, in vain.
We shun the sick, and let corruption grow
yet flatter ourselves with more than monkey-brains.

Banana splits. The forest’s frenzied dreams.
The distant stars in their grand inscrutable shapes.
The shadows leap wordlessly through the trees.
Our wide eyes stare. And we are also apes. —

5
I
Odette, we were in our prime. Alan says so.
A little club of two in a warm bed.
Then life handed us a permanent breach
via that plump nymph you’d asked me not to wed.

I leave for Calgary or somewhere soon.
When safely out I’ll make for you. I clutch
a girl on a swing, it’s what I reckon by.
But we’re altered long ago, and stuff. Your touch —

II
Dispensed my uppers and my downers,
a spare, long without hope, forlorn, I
prepare such sick, such abrupt words.
I’ve lived my life backwards, I realise.

Gently I replace the handset. An answering machine.
The grave stares. You bother me no more.
In my pants I sleep through the sound of the trees,
sure that this is me always. And then old Alan calls. —

NaDaGoWriNoPoDro

Like many others, I am writing a poem a day for April, or at least the draft of something that I blush to call a poem, here.

Variations on a Form

A venerable poet once advised me not to be satisfied with a short poem but to keep on (re)writing it to see what happens. I suppose it's a way of interrogating the form of an utterance - of particular interest to poets but also, one would hope, to readers. So:

All the leaves fell from the tree
A slight breeze bothered the remainder

All the people left the city
Those who were left sat down to talk

All the rooms are occupied
I suppose she could squat down in the yard

All the drink in the house is gone
I have a half-bottle of ouzo somewhere

All that could be done was done
Within reason

All the seats are taken
– Except that electric chair

Objet Trouve

Found the following just now, which I had emailed to myself from the field and forgotten about some weeks ago. It's a graphomaniac poem:

Geisslerlieder/Flagellant Songs

/phut/

Now I'm wondering if Flagellant Songs might be a good title for the sequence. The current incumbent is Archaeopteryx. Any thoughts?

Barbary Lions 2

That first draft about lions has disappeared now; I've been thinking about how to proceed, but have rather stalled over an idea to base the whole poem on an image of the lion's eye and what it can or can't see/contain. All I have is the line,

That dark universe is rheumed with galaxies,

which pleases me greatly, but will hardly do by itself.

Barbary Lions

Here's the draft poem about Barbary lions - very much a first draft, and one that needs completely taking down and rebuilding. It's a start.

/flash!/

Cross with acrostics

One feature of the graphomaniac sequence I've been writing is that the graphomaniac is characteristically fascinated by form for its own sake - formal ornament as an end in itself, not as an element in the overall aesthetic effect.

As a result I've been indulging various formal tricks - well, showboating - including the acrostic. The acrostic is a particularly pertinent example because, unlike features like rhyme which contribute something to the poem as experienced by the reader (who hears the rhyme), the acrostic even if perfectly achieved remains 'outside' the poem - it makes no real contribution to sound; and its contribution to meaning is only articulated in a separate act of reading, not in the 'primary' reading that proceeds in the normal way. It's an afterthought, comment or other intrusion on the text on the writer's part; and the whiff of secrecy and collusion that it involves makes it useful in my sequence, where the texts are artefact, and moreover artefacts of an embattled mind.

But poetic technique is habit-forming, and I've found myself being temted to use the acrostic as an organising formal principle in other poems, despite the fact that as an organising principle it is basically spurious - arbitrary, like rhyme, without bringing any of the benefits. Consider the following draft of a poem in which I was interested in writing about a late- or post-imperial civilisation. Note how the acrostic which names the theme - Das Narrenschyff, the Ship of Fools - ends up bullying the poem's content into what it always risked becoming, a flat pastiche of Auden's 'The Fall of Rome':

Mosaic for All the Emperors

Dead Jonah’s curled inside the whale, a small
Addition to the sums of homicide,
Salted and shrivelled by our livid dreams—

Nervous, narcotic, fevered things that float
Across the bows of recently enamelled yachts.
Romantic decency and funds
Recede towards ancestral lands, where foreign
Exiles entertain such as they can.
Names mean for a while longer; strangers
Sue for spoliation of their arts.
Candles on such a vessel swing their blades,
Heraldic palace guards grown
Yeasty and villainous. A showering salesman
Feels the Hotel Euxine heave, the old earth swell.
Fountains run brown, then dry; as do the parables.

Yet I am very much interested in writing about the late Roman world as an implicit analogue of contemporary England. That's why my to-write list a few posts back included 'a poem about an ailing Byzantine emperor'. Later I wondered if the focus of the poem should be not the emperor but some symbol of imperial power - maybe some ragged old Barbary lions in the court of the late Western Empire. I've been working on a draft, which I may post later; the idea is that it will be a loose blank verse, cataloguing the variously glamorous and decrepit elements of the scene. It isn't working, yet.

Notes

Note for an epitaph

The train was longer than the platform and
I got off somewhere else

Title for statue of the unknown student

The stoniness of the stoned

Epigrammatic fragments/the poet's I Ching

The best clothes are suitable for all occasions.

The weather is changeable

The future keeps concubines; the present is monogamous

I am waiting for the next funeral

My butcher is bald

A second draft of the underground poem

Here's a second draft of the poem I posted earlier in the week. I've addressed the clutter that Jim identified and added the paraphernalia associated with the sequence. Again, it won't stay up for long.

/zonk!/

Writing my walking poem

I've been planning a poem about walking, specifically a Horatian ode. I've been playing around with odes for a while, and thought the form might suit the subject - a leisurely wander through the topic, as it were. This was my first stanza, composed at the bus stop on Wednesday:

Bathed in a dust-cloud of travellers,
The string-dog crusty crew who share
---One half of taste and creed,
------I owe the road

All I have not got on my back.

And so on. But there are two problems here, one specific to this sentence and one general to the form. First, the sentence doesn't really make sense. It isn't ungrammatical, but it hardly presents a convincing concatenation of images and ideas. There is a suspicion that the debt to the road is only tenuously connected with the image of the dust-cloud; to put it another way, the first image isn't developed properly and doesn't lead into the second. And whilst I think that one of the charms of the Horatian ode is the way it can slide slightly obliquely from one crystallisation of its topic to another, here I think that effect is not charming but merely bad writing - form-led writing.

The second problem is to do with the stanza shape. It's very pert, the two lines of tetrameter followed by the trimeter and dimeter which advertise the formality as ornament. It's dainty, and could work well for lots of subjects, but the effect is likely to come across as cleverness, a kind of feverish polish a la Empson, and here I was thinking rather of a good-natured rambling in the manner of later Auden. So I think the solution might be to take apart this stanza and mine it for images and ideas, and put it into a looser form which hints at rhyme and metre without taking them on as strict constraints.

I'm also aware that a poem about walking risks turning into a Wordsworthian sermon, so I don't want just to go on about how it feels and what might happen - some of that ranging cleverness is a necessary element. For my second draft I went back to a draft I wrote a few months ago about nomads, to see if I can combine the two and write a poem about movement as a proper human activity. That draft opens:

Nomads carry their warm cone rolled
Across the tundra, a bundle
Of paraffin, glasnost, salt and cribbage,
The lit faces of Sergei and Aleksandr
Whose wraiths sit at the prow and set
Their death-masks to the lunar drift.

So now I need a means of proceeding from the imagined specific to the general case. And I'm aware of the bathos of a man hiking about northern England seeing himself as a Siberian reindeer herder. So I'm thinking the next strophe has to begin with the nomads themselves rolled inside my mind as dreamed equivalents. Similarly, it's clear that I never actually meet the travellers, or reach my destination. Now all I have to do is write.

Yes my name is Iggle-Piggle

...which shibboleth those of you with young children (and many without) will recognise, nod, and let me through. The others, learning it refers to In the Night Garden, the bonkers toddler drug-pastoral narrated by Derek Jacobi, will no doubt scorn it as a newer version of the Teletubbies. How wrong you are.

Which has nothing whatever to do with the following, a draft I wrote on the train this morning to go in my sequence about a 1920s Central European graphomaniac. In this episode, his escape fantasy turns to the anti-sky. It won't stay online long, reducing the chances of anyone actually reading it still further. Who's more deluded, poet or narrator?

/implodes/

My To-Write List

Riddles

A Liturgy

Lives - probably in unrhymed 5-stress lines, drawing on sense-impressions/external objects. No personal pronouns. Agricultural/fatalistic/sober.

An Unsweetened Zodiac

An Horatian Ode on Walking

A poem about talking to a hedge, drunk

A poem about a Byzantine emperor

Mellors without the Chatterleys

A poem about moles

A poem drawing on a couple of MR James stories - The Mezzotint and one other - haunted country house fare