My looming silhouette, obese and bald,
As well as my distinctive semi-slur
Still resonate, and even now I’m called
The cinema’s preeminent auteur,
Epitomising what François Truffaut
Revered: a moviemaker in control
Of everything on screen. I ran the show:
Finessing scripts and casting every role,
Selecting music and the mise-en-scène.
Unwilling as I was to look beyond
Simplistic plots that featured guiltless men
Plus pretty women (preferably blonde)
Entangled in intrigues, they all had doubt,
Not payoffs, situated at their heart:
Set bombs a-ticking, tension builds throughout,
Explode them and you blow it all apart.
Rob Stuart writes: “This poem was previously published in ‘Snakeskin’ although I have revised it since.
“Is this my best poem? Probably not, but it’s certainly the fiddliest I’ve ever written and consequently the most satisfying to have (perhaps) finished. A rhymed acrostic gives one very limited room for manoeuvre as it imposes constraints at both the beginning and end of each line, and this led to all manner of contrived rhymes and clunky word choices in my early drafts, including the version that was originally published a few years ago, and I have literally spent hours poring over lists of verbs beginning with a ‘u’ and synonyms for ‘suspense’ in the search for suitable replacements. I may yet go on to revise the poem further (I’m still not sure that the second to last line quite works), but I think it reads pretty damned well now. It’s a dinky little lesson in film history, too.”
Rob Stuart’s poems and short stories have been published in numerous magazines, newspapers and webzines including Ink Sweat and Tears, Light, Lighten Up Online, M58, Magma, New Statesman, The Oldie, Otoliths, Popshot, The Projectionist’s Playground, Snakeskin, The Spectator and The Washington Post. His work appears in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Careers and Other Catastrophes‘ and ‘Wordplayful‘. He lives in Surrey, England with his family.
Form in Formless Times 
Loved this one. The smooth feel of it belies the hard work that must have gone into it.
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Agreed, Richard. Rob Stuart puts a lot of work into very complicated things – ‘The Colour of Her Riah’ in the Wordplayful chapbook being an excellent example. https://www.robstuart.co.uk/riah
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It is tough stuff to adhere to the rules, and no one can imagine the effort involved. It is satisfying if you are happy with the result. The problem is staying satisfied, for then comes the revisions… Satisfaction, I find, is rarely lasting. Then it’s damn well leave it or write it off.
Just a note from someone passing through!
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Revisions has never been one of my strengths. I may take a few days before a poem is finished, and I may spontaneously change a couple of things on rereading a couple of years later… but for the most part I treat poems as historical artifacts: they are what they are, some good, some bad.
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