Comic: Zach Weinersmith, SMBC, ‘Crank’

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*****

Added harshness in this comic comes from the rollover text: “The crank doesn’t actually do anything, but it makes the humans happy” – plus the red button’s additional picture of the poet thinking “I hope the STEM crankers don’t look down on me.”

I am delighted by this comic, as usual; even though as a poet impressed with the ever-increasing quality of AI-driven or -augmented verse, I suspect that Zach Weinersmith is worryingly prophetic.

Illustration: ‘Crank‘ by Zach Weinersmith, who publishes a Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics (or SMBC) cartoon daily. He is the author of several brilliant and provocative books, including the previously reviewed ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness‘.

Sonnet: George Witte, ‘Progress’

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From sidewalk and cracked windowpane,
demolished wall, foundation, beam,
cement, charred rebar, median,
bare highway undercut by stream,

through paver, panel, gutter, tile,
amenities exposed to snow
corroding granite, marble, steel,
oak porch and bluestone patio,

begot by fecund apertures
into an unrecorded day
green filaments emerge, gold furze,
no tool or fingertip or spray

deployed for terminal reverse—
dominion, put another way.

*****

George Witte writes: “Progress was inspired by Samuel Miller McDonald’s book of the same name, which is a history of “progress” as defined by humanity, where extraction and exploitation of resources has brought the planet to a precipice. I confess to a perhaps morbid attraction to brief poems about end times, with Frost’s Fire and Ice being the exemplar, and Byron’s Darkness being a vision.”

‘Progress’ was first published in The Sonneteer.

George Witte’s four books of poems are An Abundance of Caution (Unbound Edition Press, 2023), Does She Have a Name?, Deniability, and The Apparitioners. New poems are published or forthcoming in Dappled Things, Nimrod, Poems for Persons of Interest, and Revel.
Links: unboundedition.com/authors/george-witte
georgewittepoet.com/poems-online-george-witte

“weeds in sidewalk cracks” by nicknormal is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Excerpt, semi-formal: Matthew Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’ (2)

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And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor doth he know how there prevail,
Despotic on that sea,
Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

*****

This fragment is the response to the previous excerpt from Matthew Arnold’s ‘A Summer Night’ that I blogged two days ago. As a teen in a well-regimented boarding school I found that previous fragment terrifying with its prospect of living as a bored wage-slave forever, and this second fragment exhilarating in its freedom despite the expectation of catastrophe. Altogether a very subversive poem, and I thank my schooling for including such works. For the next couple of decades I followed the wild path, failing to earn a degree at universities in three countries, never holding a job for more than 18 months, frequently moving. Eventually I found an occupation that was constantly changing, where Eliza and I were our own bosses, and that took us to dozens of countries to teach business seminars. So that successfully combined the wage-slave and the freed prisoner, and it all worked out.

Arnold originally ended his poem:

Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave must man be one?

But ten years later he added a much more wishy-washy piece about learning from the pure heavens and seeing what a nice life you could make for yourself. I always thought he should have stopped with the original “madman or slave” view of life: much more dramatic! But his later addition was probably justified…

“Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” by hyperion327 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. (Note: the painting is by J.M.W. Turner, of course.)

Excerpt, semi-formal: Matthew Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’ (1)

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For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

*****

I’m very grateful to my schooling for putting Matthew Arnold on the curriculum – this subversive little passage seems designed to undermine the office and factory culture which has flourished since his time, to undermine even the student writing endless essays. Arnold was an inspector of schools as well as a poet and social critic, so we can assume he knew what he was doing. But isn’t it suggesting that a dissatisfied person should just drop out? More on that in the next post.

The other thing I like about the piece is its easy, flowing style. Every line rhymes, but without pattern. The lines are iambic, mostly pentameter, but a scattering of them are shorter. It feels very conversational, and it is certainly very easy to learn by heart (which is one of the reasons that poetry evolved in the first place). The only hiccup to natural speech are the displacement of ‘live’ and ‘give’ to the ends of their lines for the sake of the rhyme and even that, though artificial, is done conventionally enough to read smoothly. The rest of it is in normal speech. When T.S. Eliot came out with ‘Prufrock‘ some decades later, though it had a different, Imagist sensibility, the only real difference in style was in dropping the thou’s and thee’s that Arnold still clung to.

Photo: “Office workers in Executive Building Room No. 123 prior to alterations, Brisbane” by Queensland State Archives is marked with CC PDM 1.0

RHL, ‘Cold Immortality’

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The candle, blown out, still retains a spark;
Nor is it burnt up, though the room is dark.
No one cares. Its job is done.

But sparks could still rekindle into flame
Or stubs, restrung, redipped, refill its frame.
But not both things together.

Yet if the candle could keep sparks in wick,
We’d keep it live, remake it long and thick…
Continuous, unsevered.

Like Lincoln’s axe, whose haft’s been replaced thrice,
And the steel axe head changed out once or twice…
Same axe? Or stupid-clever?

Then keep some spark alive when I have ‘died’;
Freeze, then unfreeze, rebuild. No homicide
Of brain cells lost forever.

Come on, cryonics, sign me up, for one.
That’s immortality’s first step begun.
I would outlive the sun.

*****

I love this life, and am always interested to see how things are going to play out. Not interested in dying, but I’ve been fascinated by issues of death and extended lifespans since at least my teens; have been signed up with the Cryonics Institute for the last 30 years. Now with the rapidly increasing developments through AI, I hope we all soon reach the point where every additional year you live increases your life expectancy by more than one year, i.e. Longevity Escape Velocity. It’s coming, folks – hang on!

‘Cold Immortality’ was first published in a recent Bewildering Stories. Don Webb changed the title from just ‘Immortality’ – I’m not sure how much the addition of the word “cold” shifts the thrust of the poem… Certainly, cryonics is just an ambulance to the future, second-best to getting there unscathed.

“the beginning is nigh” by Adam Rummer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet variation: Sally Thomas, ‘Eventide’

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The sea unfolds itself onto the sand
Again, again. It drags its yellow hem
Across our feet and back. You hold my hand

And sing to me, the first bar of a hymn:
Abide with me. The phrase, unfinished, slides
Away into the dusk. The world’s wet rim

Keeps wrinkling on the sky. The eventide’s
Upon us now, the turning of the day,
The long slow ebb as everything subsides

Into the dark. The sea in disarray
Repeats itself. There’s nothing more to see.
The waves rush thinly in, then pull away

As, louder now, you sing, Abide with me,
Above the slow unfolding of the sea.

*****

Sally Thomas writes: “Sometime in the spring, Ken Gordon of The Sonneteer mentioned to me that he’d love for me to send him something, and I said that I didn’t have anything to send. I’d just published a big sonnet sequence that I had been writing over a number of years, but I wasn’t writing sonnets currently. Well, said Ken, I’ll wait. And because he was waiting, I thought I might as well make a new stab at something. I like terza rima and the various ways you can play with tying it off, and I had Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” at the forefront of my mind, because I’d had my spring workshop students read it. This poem fairly quickly fell into terza rima and, once it had done that, it wrote itself.”

‘Eventide’ was first published in The Sonneteer

Sally Thomas is the author of two books of poetry, Motherland and Among the Living, both published by Able Muse Press, as well as an anthology, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, a novel, and a collection of short stories. She is Visiting Professor of Poetry in the low-residency MFA program at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, and a regular contributor to the Substack newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern. 

“#Sunset at the #laxmanpurbeach #neil #island #andaman . Thanks a lot to the #lovely #couple . #silhoutte #beach #sea #dusk #soi #streetsofindia #_mobilography_ #mypixeldiary #photographers_of_india #soi #indiaclicks #igramming_india” by KasoKaishyap is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Len Krisak, ‘A Life’

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The streets, albeit not with gold, were paved,
The path both broad and even; wide the way
And easy, with no uniform to don.
By almost nothing was he put upon.
Old age had been foreseen, and so he saved,
The modicum matched with its rainy day.
The sheets were clean, as were the neat clothes worn
From bawling babe, to teen, to man, and on.
Few were the oaths required to be sworn,
And almost nothing had been sacrificed,
Or found worthwhile, or worth the dying for.
As to the depredations brought by war,
None had been undergone. All things sufficed,
Since almost nothing crucial had been needed.
Yes, easy, broad, and even, he conceded,
Though through it all, what all of it had meant
He couldn’t say. No, not in any event.

*****

Len Krisak writes: “the speaker, slightly morose (?), confesses both to a life of no particular hardship and to an inability to decide on the meaning or quality of such an existence.”

‘A Life’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Len Krisak’s translation of the Aeneid appeared in 2016. His translation of the Inferno will be out from Routledge in September, as will his own poems, Magpie. The past winner of the Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost prizes, he is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!

“empty suits” by paul goyette is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Paul Burgess, ‘Sea Turtles’

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The cruelest welcome party greets their birth.
Instead of feeding at a mother’s teat,
they’re stretched upon a table for the mirth
of birds and crabs that hunger for their meat.
No time for toddling, sprinting from the first,
the lucky reach a second party where
their thinning band of comrades is immersed
in pools of creatures glad to eat them rare.

The world’s so honest with them from the start —
no lullabies, no fairy tales believed,
no revelation of the brutal part,
no sudden grief at having been deceived.
They learn so young of running for one’s life
to earn the chance to swim in seas of strife.

*****

Paul Burgess writes: “Even though I’ve spent much of my adult life far from the ocean, my hometown is Hilton Head Island, which is a barrier island off the southern part of the U.S.’s East Coast. There are many provisions there to protect the loggerhead sea turtle nesting sites and to avoid disturbing the hatchlings scrambling to get to the ocean. However, even when humans refrain from making things worse, the reality of what the turtles face from the second they hatch is one of the bleakest existential scenes nature has ever produced. The image and its symbolic potential suddenly hit me one day out of the blue, and I had to write this poem.”

‘Sea Turtles’ was originally published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Paul Burgess is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has recently contributed work to The Road Not Taken, Blue Unicorn, Light, The Orchards, Pulsebeat, Snakeskin, Lighten Up Online, and several other publications. https://paulburgesswritingandlanguage.blog/

“seagull eating baby turtle” by maveric2003 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Janice D. Soderling, ‘Lost Friends’

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It’s sad to lose a friend, you know,
In bloom of youth,
In healthy glow,
Full of vigor, ethics, truth.
It’s sad to lose that friend.

It’s sad to lose a friend of old,
His fumbling brain,
Old jokes retold,
Full of misery, aches and pain.
It’s sad to lose that friend.

But sadder still to lose a friend
To politics,
The ugly end.
To hate and scorn and fascist tricks.
Oh, how I miss that friend.

*****

Janice D. Soderling writes: “This is one of those poems that sometimes comes in a rush and you have to grab a pencil to write it down before it disappears. But of course I had been ruminating, pondering; who has not in these divisive times? We are many who have lost a dear friend, perhaps even a family member, someone who once was compassionate and kind and fun to be with, but suddenly, or gradually, has become unrecognizable, full of blame and contempt, even hate, for the Other. Not for a person, but for a vague collective, the Other.”

‘Lost Friends’ was published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Janice D. Soderling has poems, short stories, and flash in many literary journals and anthologies. Her most recent poetry collection is Naming the Names which includes “Lost Friends.” Soon to be released is Short Circuits, about one hundred very short poems, none longer than twelve lines. Both collections are published under the Kultivera Production imprint.

“A Single Leaf” by Miss C.J. is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Lindsay McLeod, ‘Blind Date’

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It’s a roll of the dice
it’s the turn of a card
makes me feel Jesus Christ
it shouldn’t be this hard,

to find someone who’s nice
and attractive to me
but on this carousel
I’ve found only… let’s see
 
Trace was full blown racist
I suspected Venus had a penis,
Enid was a children’s author
ironic, Enid was the meanest,
 
dear Scarlet near insisted
we should hop straight into bed
but I resisted because her eyes
rolled round like marbles in her head
 
met Quasimodo by the tower
then there was Cerberus by the gate,
met Manson then met Alice
(Alice, she was running late)
 
mother Mary was still in mourning
she outlined all she chose to hate,
next came Tessie (that got messy)
who posted me her ‘target’ weight
 
nasty Stella the astrologer
could not believe that I’d refuse,
‘You must have Neptune late in retrograde.’
I told her, ‘That’s not it… it’s you.’
 
Some were happy, some were damaged
(and now I know that I am too),
some were easy, some were hard
some wanted things I couldn’t do.
 
So why put myself out there
why should I bother, even try?
 
I suppose it’s because,
initial hellos can be awkward
but it’s better than
living inside of goodbye.

*****

Lindsay McLeod writes: “‘Blind Date’ was my attempt to chronicle my search for love via the internet with a humorous spin. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it without some small warning of its darker side.”

‘Blind Date’ was first published in Rat’s Ass Review.

Lindsay McLeod lives down the Port in South Australia with his cattle dog, Mary. His writing has won awards and been published all over (in spite of rhyme and reason) and found homes most recently with THE HUMAN WRITERS, MENISCUS, EPHEMERAL ELEGIES, TIPTON POETRY, SNAKESKIN, PULSEBEAT and THE MARTELLO. Forced into early retirement, Lindsay is said to be considering a life of crime to support his poetry habit.

“Blind Date 2 with Ahmed the African American Attorney” by bbcworldservice is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.