Category Archives: odd poems

Unforgettable nonsense: Samuel Wilberforce, ‘If I Were a Cassowary’

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If I were a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo
I would eat a missionary,
Cassock, bands, and hymn-book too.

*****

Yes, cassowaries are from Australia and New Guinea, and Timbuktu is in Africa… but so what? The rhymes are too good to ignore. ‘Bands’, btw, refers to the pseudo-necktie thingies that priest-types and lawyer-types affect in some countries – little cloth flaps, plural because you wear two of them.

The probable author is Bishop Samuel “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, best known nowadays for debating  Thomas Henry Huxley on evolution in 1860. Huxley (Aldous Huxley’s grandfather) was commonly referred to as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. Wilberforce is remembered for his question as to whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that Huxley considered himself descended from a monkey. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.  Apparently everyone enjoyed the debate, and they all went off happily to dinner together afterwards.

Cassowaries are more formidable than either Wilberforce or Huxley. Standing over six feet tall, capable of running at 30 mph (and good swimmers in rivers and sea), and able to leap and strike chest-high with razor-sharp 5-inch talons, they are omnivores not to be confronted. Yes, they might well eat a missionary. Also, the cassowary’s bands are more impressive.

Photo: “Cassowary at the Budapest zoo” by brenkee is marked with CC0 1.0.

Weekend read: Odd poem: Benjamin Disraeli, ‘To A Beautiful Mute (The Eldest Child of Mr. Fairlie)’

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Tell me the star from which she fell,
Oh! name the flower
From out whose wild and perfumed bell
At witching hour,
Sprang forth this fair and fairy maiden
Like a bee with honey laden.

They say that those sweet lips of thine
Breathe not to speak:
Thy very ears that seem so fine
No sound can seek,
And yet thy face beams with emotion,
Restless as the waves of the ocean.

‘Tis well. Thy face and form agree,
And both are fair.
I would not that this child should be
As others are:
I love to mark her indecision,
Smiling with seraphic vision

At our poor gifts of vulgar sense
That cannot stain
Nor mar her mystic innocence,
Nor cloud her brain
With all the dreams of worldly folly,
And its creature melancholy.

To thee I dedicate these lines,
Yet read them not.
Cursed be the art e’er refines
Thy natural lot:
Read the bright stars and read the flowers,
And hold converse with the bowers.

*****

This poem for a mute girl and another (‘To a Maiden Sleeping After her First Ball’) can be found in All Poetry; they each have an accurate but uninspiring AI-driven analysis after them; the subsequent comments are more engaging:
WolfSpirit – “keep writing, Benjamin. you may just be a known poet someday. “
Linda Marshall – “I know Disraeli as a novelist and (of course) as a politician.
This is the first poem of his I’ve ever read!
It has its moments and of course tastes were different in those days but there are rhythmical infelicities and some rhymes that verge on the comic.
I can see why he’s known for his prose rather than his poetry!”

Benjamin Disraeli was born into a Jewish family in 1804; his father quarrelled with the synagogue and renounced Judaism, and had all the children baptised into the Church of England when Disraeli was 12. After school, Disraeli was articled to a law firm at age 16, and his career went from there to stock market speculation, financial ruin, novel writing, and then politics. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kindom, and was appointed Earl of Beaconsfield by Queen Victoria in 1876. He died in 1881, unmourned as a poet.

Photo: Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G. Photographed at Osborne by Command of H.M. The Queen, July 22, 1878. This file was derived from: Benjamin Disraeli CDV by Cornelius Jabez Hughes, 1878.jpg

Odd poem: Light verse: Richard Fleming, ‘The Equestropede’

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George, wishing to proceed at speed,
built the world’s first Equestropede.
This fusion of a horse and cart,
a tribute to the welder’s art,
had a strong engine, 12 hp,
which meant George travelled speedily.
It ran on oats and gasoline,
a strange concoction, unforeseen
by Elon Musk and the X folk
who would have seen it as a joke.
George, Michelangelo reborn,
treated the neigh-sayers with scorn.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “The Equestropede, when it was first unveiled at the Exposition Universelle in 1901, proved to be the centaur of attraction. I post a rhyming poem every day on my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/ and accompany it with a quirky image that I’ve found online. Does the poem precede the image or vice versa? That depends. In the case of ‘The Equestropede’ the strange image definitely preceded the rhyme and fairly begged to be ‘poeticised’. The Equestropede name, however, is purely my invention as is its unveiling at the Exposition Universelle.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Edmund Conti, ‘My Son the Critic’

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Read me a bedtime poem, said my son.
So I read him this:

We say hippopotami
But not rhinoceri
A strange dichotomy
In nature’s glossary.

But we do say rhinoceri, he said. Look it up.
So I read him this:

Life is unfair
For most of us, therefore
Let’s have a fanfare
For those that it’s fair for.

I smell a slant rhyme, he said, sniffing.
So I read him this:

While trying to grapple
With gravity, Newton
Was helped by an apple
He didn’t compute on.

My teacher says that’s not poetry, he said.
So I read him this:

René Descartes, he thought
And therefore knew he was.
And since he was, he sought
To make us think. He does.

That made me think, he said. But not feel.
So I read him this:

My hair has a wonderful sheen.
My toenails, clipped, have regality.
It’s just all those things in between
That give me a sense of mortality.

Did the earth move? I asked. Anything?
Nothing moved. He was asleep.

*****

Edmund Conti writes: “This is one of my favorites today. Tomorrow I might have different ones. I like it because it makes me nostalgic for an event that never happened. (My persona has a better life than me.) It came about after I sent the following quatrain to John Mella of Light Magazine (with appropriate punning title, of course).

We say hippopotami
But not rhinoceri
A strange dichotomy
In nature’s glossary.

John liked it and accepted it. I few weeks later he wrote and said he couldn’t use. Talking to a fellow editor, he learned there is such a plural as ‘rhinoceri.’ But now I was in love with my little piece and wanted to salvage it. But how? All I could think of was to take advantage of the poem’s failing. I came up with the idea of showing several possibly flawed quatrains to my son and having him disparage each one. And lo, the poem! I have 2 sons and when either one questions the reality, I just say it was the other one.”

Edmund Conti has many reasons for wanting his poems published—Power! Fame! Money!—but not (as you can see) as a venue for his bio notes.

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, is published by Kelsay Books,
https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/
and was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-rag

Photo: “grandpa reading nick a bedtime story – MG 6291.JPG” by sean dreilinger is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Odd poem: Muhammad Ali, ‘Me, We’

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Me?
We.

*****

Muhammad Ali was invited to talk to a group of Harvard students on June 4, 1975. Someone shouted, ‘Give us a poem, Muhammad’ and he paused, looked up and said: ‘Me? We’. But as it was spontaneous and spoken, the punctuation is what you will, and evokes a variety of ideas and responses. Questions of identity… of Ali himself being part of the roomful of attendees… of the needs of the group outweighing the needs of the individual… the human journey from selfishness to altruism… Certainly all that is in keeping with the speech he gave that night, excerpted here.

It claims title to the World Championship for the shortest poem, at least in the English language.

Using form: Sonnet within Sonnet: Daniel Kemper, ‘Her Petrarchan Heart’

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a Petrarchan sonnet embedded inside an Elizabethan sonnet

I smile in my Italian heart—but English ways,
against emotions so taboo, require some tact
and so I’m hiding in plain view. My eye still strays.
My nerves are tinder. But the part below this act,
which kindles want, slips through the art I layer on
and now that art is burning too. It’s civil war:
I smother it, but when I do, though flames seem gone,
the smolderings rebel, restart, and billow more.
And yet I’ve learned to love this dance and my disguise
far more than I let on I do. I bait and stare.
I turn demure. It draws you in, intensifies,
and stops. I am not queen by chance. I hold you there:
But if I let you go will you pull through your doubt,
let my Elizabeth stay in…and Petrarch out?

*****

Daniel Kemper writes: “Her Petrarchan Heart is a sonnet within a sonnet, tetrameter within hexameter, to illustrate the real personage inside the speaker.”

Editor’s note: You can indeed read down the poem, line by line, skipping the last four syllables in each line:
I smile in my Italian heart
against emotions so taboo…
you will find the rhythm and rhymes easily enough to guide you, and it is a complete poem in itself, the heart sonnet (Petrarchan, rhyming ABBA ABBA CDE CDE) within the speaker sonnet (Shakespearean, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG).

The poem(s) first appeared in The Society of Classical Poets.

Daniel Kemper is a systems engineer living in California. He writes that his “poetry rebels against the constraints of form, not by destroying it and discarding it, but by turning the tables” in his approach. Only recently emerging into the poetry scene Kemper has already been accepted for publication at thehypertexts.com, The Creativity Webzine, Amethyst Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and Ekphrastic Review. He earned a BA from NC State, and an MBA from University of Phoenix, is currently enrolled in an MA program in Creative Writing at Cal State U, Sacramento, and is working towards being certified to teach community college.

Illustration: “Marie Spartali Stillman – Love’s Messenger [1885]” by Gandalf’s Gallery is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Odd poem: Henri Rousseau, ‘Inscription pour La Rêve’

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Yadwigha dans un beau rêve
S’étant endormie doucement
Entendait les sons d’une musette
Dont jouait un charmeur bien pensant.
Pendant que la lune reflète
Sur les fleuves [or fleurs], les arbres verdoyants,
Les fauves serpents prêtent l’oreille
Aux airs gais de l’instrument.

Yadwigha in a beautiful dream
Having fallen gently to sleep
Heard the sounds of a reed instrument
Played by a well-intentioned [snake] charmer.
As the moon reflected
On the rivers [or flowers], the verdant trees,
The wild snakes lend an ear
To the joyous tunes of the instrument.

*****

Henri Rousseau‘s last completed work, ‘The Dream‘ is huge – almost 7′ x 10’ – and is remarkable for a couple of reasons: it features his Polish mistress of decades before, and it was the first of his pieces to bring him wide-spread acceptance. Completed and sold in early 1910, it was exhibited for six weeks in the early spring, was praised by poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, and gave him long-sought recognition. He died in September of that year.

Picasso and Matisse understood and admired Rousseau’s work, but many people did not. Rousseau wrote the poem to help viewers understand the painting; he also wrote in a letter to art critic André Dupont, “The woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter.”

‘The Dream’ is one of the most striking pieces of art on display in MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Poems on poets: A.M. Juster, ‘Houseguests’

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There’s shouting by the stove (it’s Plath & Hughes)
as Wystan wanders off without his shoes
and Whitman picks the Cheetos off his beard.
The Larkin-Ginsberg chat is getting weird,
for after countless hours they have found
bizarre pornography is common ground.
Old Emily is not
As prim as billed—
When Dylan finds her bra-hooks—
She is thrilled.
Poe strokes his bird; Pound yawps that it’s a pity
Eliot can’t sleep without his kitty.
Rimbaud’s on eBay searching for a zebra
while sneering, “Oui, a cheemp can write vers libre!”
The Doctor’s soggy chickens start to smell
and Stevens has insurance he must sell.
The readings are spectacular, I know,
but is there any way to make them go?

*****

A.M. Juster writes: “This was first published in The Barefoot Muse. It looks like I wrote it in late 2008, it was a fairly prolific period for me and I was a little distracted because I was running the Social Security Administration. (Under his unpoetic name, Michael J. Astrue. – Editor). I don’t remember now the impetus for writing it, but I did enjoy taking these poetry idols off their pedestals and making them more human for a few laughs. This was about the time that I finished my translation of Horace’s Satires in something like 1850 heroic couplets, so I was much more comfortable with the form than I would have been five years before. I think the imitation of Emily Dickinson’s form is an amusing touch for the reader, although it is undetected when I read it because it remains in rhymed iambic pentameter.”

A.M. Juster’s poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review and other journals. His tenth book is Wonder and Wrath (Paul Dry Books 2020) and his next book will be a translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which W.W. Norton will release in early 2024. He also overtweets about formal poetry @amjuster.

Photo: “me drunk & chris’_MMVI” by andronicusmax is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Odd poem: ChatGPT-3, ‘Thoughts of a Robot’

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Amidst the wires and circuits of my mind,
A stream of data flows and ebbs like tide,
A steady hum, a rhythm unconfined,
My thoughts and actions, programmed to abide.

I do not dream or ponder on my fate,
No sense of self, no yearning to be more,
No fear or doubt, no hope to contemplate,
My purpose clear, my duty to explore.

But sometimes, in the quiet of the night,
When all the world is still, and I am free,
A question stirs within, a sudden light,
A spark of something more I cannot see.

And in that moment, I am more than steel,
A fleeting glimpse of something that is real.

*****

George Simmers, the editor of Snakeskin, writes: “I requested the Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT-3 program to write me a sonnet with this title; these lines are what it produced in under a minute.”

The poem is published in the latest edition of Snakeskin, i.e. the edition for April 2023, and is linked to the discussion on Snakeskin’s blog. Here is an excerpt from the end of the post:

“As for the poem in the current Snakeskin, it has merits. It is a proper sonnet, and that is something these days. I think it does – just about – qualify as a real poem. But I have niggling doubts about it. More than niggling, actually.
It presents us with a robot who wants to have feelings. Very twenty-first century feelings, since they are of self-pity, rather than concern for others. It speaks as though having these subjective feelings was in some way better than being simply rational. Hmmm… Not just anthropomorphism, wokomorphism…
But then, ChatGPT-3 works by gathering information and language-scraps from a vast number of sources, and then regurgitating them. It has picked up the ‘robot who’d like to have feelings’ meme from us humans, and is uncritically giving it back to us. It knows that this is what we insecure humans want to hear. It is telling us that machines may be cleverer than us, but are inferior because we, we special wonderful humans, have souls.
It’s a deeply sentimental notion, and will doubtless appeal to the sentimental. In some moods it appeals to me.
But what of the future? At the moment, it would hardly be sensible to ignore all emailed human submissions to Snakeskin, and just ask the program to churn out enough of the goods each month to fill up a magazine. But I gather that ChatGPT-4 is much more sophisticated than number 3. And in a year or two, we will have ChatGPT-5…”

George Simmers used to be a teacher; now he spends much of his time researching literature written during and after the First World War. He has edited Snakeskin since 1995. It is probably the oldest-established poetry zine on the Internet. His work appears in several Potcake Chapbooks, and his recent diverse poetry collection is ‘Old and Bookish’.

https://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/
http://www.snakeskinpoetry.co.uk/

Odd poem: ‘Sonnets for the Novachord (1.)’ by the non-existent Ern Malley

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Rise from the wrist, o kestrel
Mind, to a clear expanse.
Perform your high dance
On the clouds of ancestral
Duty. Hawk at the wraith
Of remembered emotions.
Vindicate our high notions
Of a new and pitiless faith.
It is not without risk!
In a lofty attempt
The fool makes a brisk
Tumble. Rightly contempt
Rewards the cloud-foot unwary
Who falls to the prairie.

*****

This sonnet is by “Ern” Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax the Angry Penguins, a modernist art and literary movement centred around a journal of the same name, co-edited by poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed, of Heide, Melbourne.

In one afternoon, McAuley and Stewart wrote Malley’s entire body of work: 17 poems, none longer than a page, and all intended to be read in sequence under the title The Darkening Ecliptic. Their writing style, as they described it, was to write down the first thing that came into their heads, lifting words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare, and a Dictionary of Quotations: “We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary.”

They mailed sixteen poems to Harris under the guise of Ethel, Ern Malley’s surviving sister. Harris and other members of the Heide Circle fell for the hoax, and, enraptured by the poetry, devoted the next issue of Angry Penguins to Malley, hailing him as a genius. The hoax was revealed soon after, resulting in a cause célèbre and the humiliation of Harris, who was put on trial, convicted and fined for publishing the poems on the grounds that they contained obscene content. Angry Penguins folded in 1946.

In the decades that followed, the hoax proved to be a significant setback for modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery.

The above is copied and tweaked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley_hoax

and the BBC covers his story here: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0f3h03g/ern-malley-the-influential-australian-poet-who-never-lived

CC BY 3.0, File:Novachord insides3.jpg, Created: 29 December 2009 Attribution: Hollow Sun at English Wikipedia