Monthly Archives: November 2023

Formless poem: RHL, ‘Marty Ravellette’

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The man with no arms sat on the stool in the diner;
he was shoeless: How else could he drink his coffee,
eat his scrambled eggs?

The man with no arms parked his truck and got out barefoot.
He fired up his chainsaw; he had a landscaping business.
With the log out of the way, he could cut the grass,
push the lawnmower around with his chest.

The man with no arms saw the woman in the burning van,
barefoot, he kicked in the window, so his wife
could reach in and unlock the door, help the woman escape.

Somewhere Kipling’s Creator of All Things must have told him “Play –
play at being who you are,” and he played.

Somewhere Lear’s Aunt Jobiska must have told him “This is the best.”
And he lived, happy with who he was, glad for no arms
because no arms made him who he was, and he liked who he was.

Nor was the man with no arms alone.
The boy with no hands sat in the laundromat, knitting.
He had metal pincers. His mother was washing the clothes.
The girl with two heads, or rather the twins with only one body,
they live, argue, love, share.
And the men with no legs have a chance to run faster than all,
will require a new type of Olympics.
And the child born to die – does that disturb you, “the child born to die”?
The child born to die is me and is you, is all humans, all life,
all planets, stars, galaxies, all.
Listen to Lear’s Aunt Jobiska: This is the best.
Listen to Kipling’s Creator of All Things, and play.

*****

Marty Ravellette was a highly respected inhabitant of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he lived the last 16 years of his life – running his landscaping business, taking a break in a local diner, frequently a guest lecturer in journalism at UNC. He was a Baha’i convert, and a hero.

Occasionally I break my own rules about poetry, and write a poem in a style which I consider to be really flash fiction (or flash non-fiction in this case). The things I had to say didn’t present themselves in anything hinting at traditional verse, and therefore I just said them as best I could. But both Snakeskin and The HyperTexts consider it poetry, so I won’t argue. I’m not sure it should be in the formalverse.com blog, however…

Photo: Figure 8 Films

Brian Allgar, ‘Genesis’

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One sunny morning, strolling in my garden,
I stumbled, and my foot crushed something’s head.
“Me dammit!” I exclaimed, “I beg your pardon”,
Looked down, and saw my Serpent lying dead.
 
Now this was most vexatious, for I’d planned
That this poor snake would implement my scheme
To give my little friends a helping hand,
And lead them gently from their childish dream.
 
The Serpent was supposed to tempt the couple
With luscious fruit that Eden’s trees bedecks;
My chosen agent, sinuous and supple,
Would lead the pair to knowledge – and to sex.
 
Omniscience can have its limitations,
And even Godly schemes may gang agley.
I’d once envisaged teeming populations,
But this, perhaps, was better, in its way.
 
No Spanish Inquisition, no Crusades,
No slaves, and no Industrial Revolution,
No mining sites where once were leafy glades,
No factory chimneys belching out pollution.
 
No nation-states, no border wars to settle,
No Holocaust, no tribal genocide,
No Rap, no Hip-Hop, Punk or Heavy Metal,
No hamburgers with coleslaw on the side.
 
No guns, no bullets, no demented shooters,
Since nothing could be made, except of wood;
No mobile phones (thank Me!) and no computers …
I looked on all of this, and found it good.
 
Yet what of those who should have lived hereafter?
No Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart, Botticelli?
No P. G. Wodehouse? (I was fond of laughter,
Though, being God, I didn’t have a belly).
 
Descendants all, but only if they had ’em.
(No Michelangelo, no Sistine Chapel?)
My mind made up, I called to Eve and Adam:
“I wondered if you’d care to try an apple?”

*****

Brian Allgar writes: “As a devout atheist, I felt it my duty to shed some light on the truth behind the Creation myth.”

Brian Allgar was born a mere 22 months before Adolf Hitler committed suicide, although no causal connection between the two events has ever been firmly established. Despite having lived in Paris since 1982, he remains immutably English. He started entering humorous competitions in 1967, but took a 35-year break, finally re-emerging in 2011 as a kind of Rip Van Winkle of the literary competition world. He also drinks malt whisky and writes music, which may explain his fondness for Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

He is the author of “The Ayterzedd: A Bestiary of (mostly) Alien Beings” and “An Answer from the Past, being the story of Rasselas and Figaro”, both available from Kelsay Books and Amazon.

Photo: “Mary’s Feet” by elycefeliz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Melissa Balmain, ‘Tale of a Relationship, in Four Parts’

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Kissing.
Hissing.
Dissing.
Missing.

*****

Melissa Balmain writes: “Often, monorhymes end up feeling a bit forced, so I’m happy when I manage to write one that feels natural (at least to me). Plus, it’s always nice to have a poem in the love-gone-wrong category. Not only is this a prerequisite when you apply for your poetic license, but it can land you in great company. (See Kiss and Part, a 2005 anthology edited by Gail White, where ‘Tale of a Relationship’ rubs elbows with verse by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Wendy Cope, XJ Kennedy, and many poets whose work has appeared in Form in Formless Times.)”

‘Tale of a Relationship, in Four Parts’ is from Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010. She will teach a three-day workshop on comic poetry at the Poetry by the Sea conference in Madison, CT, in May 2024.

Photo: “Broken Kiss; Love Lost” by angelaathomas is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Your Lot’

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From prairie city to an island town;
from city festivals to empty sea;
from continental seasons, white, green, brown
to changeless warmth and high humidity.
No one could hope for love more fierce, more loyal,
more honest, constant through good times, harsh tests,
raising our varied children as they boil
off along individual paths and quests
with a fierce love for them in their success
and even more, their fulfilled happiness.
You miss the north’s reliable forethought,
but not your parents, siblings and cold strife.
There’s always trade-offs, getting where you’ve got.
Just don’t look back. You chose your lot in life.

*****

Two questions: Is it a “sonnet” if the rhyme scheme is non-standard and there’s no real volta? And is it better to accept the unconventional form that the poem was comfortable in, or to try to beat it into more standard shape?

Obviously, I chose to leave it with its imperfections as I wrote it; but that might be from laziness more than anything else. Yes, I *do* work on poems after the first draft… usually… but once I’ve got something halfway acceptable I tend to stop. If I’ve got it to the point where I could easily learn to recite it, then it’s good enough.

But non-traditional sonnets are simply not as engaging, as well-balanced, as rhetorically forceful, as either the Petrarchan or the Shakespearean can be. Those forms have an elegance, a beauty, a structure that leads to a sudden insight or a punchline in a way that at its best (partly due to the rhyme scheme and partly due to the unbalanced “halves” separated by the volta) feels not just well-phrased but unquestionably true.

So this sonnet, if it is a sonnet, is second best. Still good enough to have been published recently in Pulsebeat – thanks, David Stephenson!

Photo: “Part of Governor’s Harbour, Across the Bay” by tylerkaraszewski is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Susan McLean, ‘High School Pride’

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Sleek in their strength and beauty, haughty, lithe,
prowling alone or stalking in a pack,
they cut down herds of victims like a scythe,
then search for fresh meat, never looking back.
The world is theirs, and all the grazers in it.
They cull the weak, the callow, the unwary.
The pack itself can change at any minute,
for all alliances are temporary.

How fine to be the hunters, not the prey,
to ambush, wound, or take down all they see!
While we, their hapless quarry, would contrive
to be as cruel and merciless as they
if we could share in their ascendancy—
not noticing how few of them survive.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “High school can be as harsh as any nature documentary in demonstrating Darwinian survival of the fittest. It is a time when popularity and fitting in can seem all-important, and when those at the top of the social hierarchy often take pleasure in harassing or snubbing those below. Two scientific studies gave the impetus for this poem. One was a study of apex predators such as lions, which showed that despite their power and ferocity, they had a surprisingly high mortality rate. The other was a study of people who were unpopular in high school, which found that later in life they tended to be happier and better adjusted than those who had been popular in high school. The whole concept of “high school pride,” which stoked artificial rivalries between schools that were then played out on the battlefield of sports and other competitions, was part of a mentality that endorsed winning and belittled losers.

“This sonnet first appeared in the online journal 14 by 14, and later was published in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife. The octave follows the pattern of an English sonnet, with quatrains rhymed in alternating lines: ABABCDCD. But the sestet switches to the less predictable rhyme scheme of the Italian sonnet: in this case, EFGEFG. The surprises of the rhyme scheme are meant to mirror the surprises in the twists of the conclusion.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Clique” by San Diego Shooter is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Non-traditional sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘The Durable Rain’

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The durable rain was conducting its drumming descent
Without any decent regard for the dawning of day
As if a dim evening was all of the morning it meant
To allow from a sun that was doing a landscape in grey.
Never begin with the weather the boffins have said.
If nature’s as stormy and dark as a novelist’s mind
The reader will sneer at the metaphor. Offer instead
A prose that’s so difficult readers are left far behind.
But back to my tale. Is it cozy inside, or does rain
Express what discursive description would talk past in vain?
Does a cry break a heart when the kettle releases its steam
Or, piping, awaken a lover up out of their dream?
What it will mean will depend on your context and age.
A poem exists in the reader and not on the page.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “The first four lines rolled out without much trouble. I had let the dogs out after they’d woken me at what they thought was the right time but which to me was five in the a.m. It was cold and grey but not rainy at all. Who can figure how the brain works. I did worry briefly about the alliteration but finally put it off, hoping it would sound like rain on the roof. Sort of. And it seemed portentous and poetry-like, but where to go from that?

“I don’t know where I first heard that you’re not supposed to open with the weather. It sounds like one of those pieces of advice the internet kicks up from time to time purportedly by Elmore Leonard, along the lines of “You know those parts that readers skip over? Don’t write those.” Or “You got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.” Advice that is absolutely both spot-on and worthless at one and the same time. If you know you don’t need any advice; if you need advice, it’s because you don’t know. It makes sense in that maddening way of all advice, but it is untakeable. However much you may agree that the reader doesn’t care what the weather is, they care what happens and who it happens to, there I still was without anyone there to have something happen to, except the damn rain.

“Sitting at breakfast reading my usual dollop of Wodehouse, I noticed that when things are going well for his characters the weather gets some generous play, and when not, not. Then I reflected that really I don’t have a large supply of written descriptions of the weather from anywhere. There’s ‘Neutral Tones’, of course, where the weather is a metaphor for the breaking relationship, and “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” And ‘Stopping By Woods’ where the weather is the reason for the stopping, or the first lines of ‘Journey of the Magi’. There’s Auden’s ‘In Memory of Yeats’, Housman’s cherries hung like snow, if that even works, though who Snow was and how Housman knew is a mystery. And after that it’s vague references to this or that month or season generally in Keats, Poe, Byron, or Shelley, and the inference that all of Yeats happens in the summer what with swans and people fighting the horses of the sea, and all. And finally, again, all those descriptions of the morning in the Blandings and the golf stories. After that my memory starts to flail about. This isn’t the sort of thing where research is indicated at five in the ack emma. Perhaps you remember more examples of how the weather is used in prose and poetry, but it’s too late now, isn’t it.

“I wasn’t sure how to go on. It seemed as if nearly the whole practice of poetry in English was against me, aside from the sub-genre of song with all those deep and crisp and evens, and sleigh rides that began to echo in the back of my head, along with all those singers who seem to be perpetually crying or dancing or walking in the rain. Then I thought well, why not use that? I might get three or four lines out of it, and then maybe something else would occur to me. Well, I got my four lines and arrived at the volta of the sonnet, if sonnet it turned out to be. What now?

“Turning at the question that had stopped me I trod upon that patch for a few lines, and then I had got to the couplet. Well, I really had nothing, did I, among all this meta- bit, and what I had seemed to call for some digging into the whats and whys of how literature worked. Well, of course no one knows. I worried some about having failed to provide any context for the reader to see me through, and put it aside to eat breakfast.

“After that, and a shower, and a bit of humor watching the dogs return to the scene of the five o’clock crime outside to chase a squirrel in the yard, somehow the notion of context reasserted itself, and I remembered a sort of juicy quote from a professor 50 years ago who was gassing on about how a poem isn’t the sounds or the words or the meanings as the poet meant them, but rather the unpredicatable ways that the people misread poems. I recall he had half a dozen examples right to hand, as scholars so annoyingly seem to do, but I couldn’t bring a single one to mind. Fortunately, I’m a poet, not a scholar, so I don’t have to be able to give good – or any – examples, so I decided to steal his assertion and let it go at that.

“And there it is. A complete mishmash of false starts, interrupted middles, and squishy endings. Enjoy!”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Rainy Day” by SammCox is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Light verse: RHL, ‘Question the Universe’

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Odin wrote runey verse
Rumi wrote Sunni verse
Edward Lear? Loony verse.
Question the universe
with your buffoony verse.

*****

Sometimes you jot down a little light piece inspired more by wordplay than anything else, and the more you look at it the more it resonates. This is one such. The characters are diverse, coming from pre-literate Scandinavia, Renaissance-inspiring Islam, and Victorian England – they touch the roots of my cultural identity. They are from the past, but their searches are timeless, fully modern, quintessentially human. And I fully subscribe to the idea that we should question everything, and that the Fool‘s tools of succinct and enigmatic wordplay may be as good an approach as any in trying to formulate – let alone answer – all questions, physical and existential.

It further resonates for me in being published (which I find important); in being published just now in Light (which is a wonderfully reassuring place to be); in having been improved in response to Light’s editorial comments (meaning, yes, I am proud that sometimes I am open to criticism and it’s useful); and in being my 400th poem published (by one of my conflicting counts).

Nothing is definite, not the historical reality of historical and semi-historical figures, not the permanence of printed words, not the definition of a poem, not the count of things hard to define, not the nature of physical reality. So though we have to make prosaic choices based on appearances and best guesses, that should be balanced by questioning everything. Preferably in verse.

TL;DR: Even short poems can be unpacked.

Illustration: DALL-E by RHL, ‘Rumi, Odin and Edward Lear are writing poetry to question the universe’

Light verse: Edmund Conti, ‘Man O’ War’

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The men of war
in the man o’ war
(and the many more)
who rode the ship’s bottom
where the admirals put ’em
would often think
this has to stink
If we ever sink
we’re sunk.

At least
that’s what
I think
they thunk.

*****

Edmund Conti writes: “I guess I was thinking if there is a Man O’ War, then there have to be Men O’ War. And where would they be put to be kept out of the way until called on. One idea led to another, one simple rhyme led to more, and voila!”

Edmund Conti has recent poems published in Light, Lighten-Up Online, The Lyric, The Asses of Parnassus, newversenews, Verse-Virtual and Open Arts Forum. His book of poems, Just So You Know, released by Kelsay Books
https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/
was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-rag

Photo: “The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805” by lluisribesmateᥩ is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Evocative fragment: W.H. Auden, ‘On the Circuit’

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Another morning comes: I see,
Dwindling below me on the plane,
The roofs of one more audience
I will not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although
I don’t remember which was which:
God bless the U.S.A., so large,
So friendly, and so rich.

*****

Auden emigrated from the UK to the US in 1939, and lived as an Anglo-American academic who lectured all over the country. A left-wing poet, his ‘On the Circuit’ shows his amusement at living well in the United States. His wry reflections are built on a simple ABCB rhyme scheme in iambic tetrameter, with the last line of each stanza shortened to a trimeter for the stanza’s punchline. I’ve quoted the last two of 16 stanzas.

Speaking as a foreigner who lived in the US for 25 years, teaching business seminars across the continent to corporate audiences, I confirm the resonance of Auden’s general attitude. Parenthetically I note that despite his approval of the US as a place to live and work, it’s not where he chose to vacation each year, or where he bought a house, or where he ended his days.

Photo: “From yesterday: @southwestair #flight 2500 #DAL-#SAT with #downtown #dallas behind the #winglet. I’m doing the opposite route later today heading back to #KC for the night before another trip. #latergram #swapic #city #texas #plane #airplane #instaplane #” by JL Johnson // User47.com is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘Friendship, Not Passion’

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I had a friendship, more than passionate love, for you;
we could have been so good, easy, together.
But there’s that issue of your strong religious thoughts,
whereas I let my thoughts change with the weather.

I… well, and who’s the I you think that you address?
I ramble, googly-eyed, my arms elastic.
There are so many sweet but sadly firm believers.
I’m – more than atheist – iconoclastic.

*****

If you’re used to iambic pentameter the meter of this poem feels just a little off, with its lines of alternating 12 and 11 syllables, i.e. alternating hexameters and feminine-ending pentameters… not quite comfortable. Which is perfectly in keeping with the relationship described. And I don’t remember precisely which long-ago not-quite-girlfriend I had in mind when I wrote it; I’ve been attracted to more than one charming female, wonderfully calm and sane except for some unfortunate religious orientation or other.

I’m reminded of the 19th century Punch cartoon of the two guests at a dinner party:
She: “And what is your religion, sir?”
He: “Madam, all men of sense are of the same religion.”
She: “And which religion is that, pray tell?”
He: “Madam, men of sense never say.”

Which is all very well for friendship, but hardly a solid basis for a deeper relationship. You’re better off if you hold out for someone philosophically compatible, unless you (and they) really don’t care. In which case, you’re philosophically compatible!

‘Friendship, Not Passion’ was originally published in Lighten Up Online, edited by Jerome Betts.

Illustration: “Friendship” by h.koppdelaney is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.