Like an obsequious waiter runs the attendant Equator round the fat gut of our obscenely glutted world. This great gobbed globe of God’s glory, spat by Him into space and spinning in spirals and falling forever further from Faith’s Face.
*****
A religious poem? I don’t know, I like the sound of it though. Anyway, the continuing and global nature of the drift away from Faith suggests it is all part of God’s plan…
“Water causes the mind to become.” Pratītyasamutpāda
Impossible love is the spirit of poems escaping the rhythms, and forms, and the former expressions of lovers like Shakespeare and Ovid. Reshaping traditions re-feathers the beds for the sensual sessions and canopy-shaking delights of The Muse, yet neither The Lady, so dark and complex, nor Corinna her equal, nor any persona She dons, entertains the idea of a breather; instead, with a tumble of laughter, it’s time for a sequel. Impossible love is eternal renewal; The Muse’s allure is forever unique, yet the heart of her dances is primal and deep. The relationship calms and confuses the poet: the infinite love. But the finite romances. The union of poet and Muse re-invents and recovers the poetry born of the love of impossible lovers.
*****
Daniel Kemper writes: “On first read The Muse will likely be understood as “the muse,” IOW, the actual, earthly woman who inspires a poet. The bit about “any persona she dons” will get read as merely “her varied moods” or some such. But there’s a reason for the Buddhist epigram. There’s a reason for capitalizing The Muse. This is The Muse as a spirit, a spirit whose visit inspires and is itself an inspiration who arrives, created (or summoned?) by aspiration. Writing then, is making love to The Muse, who sometimes inhabits the bodies of mortals, the personae she dons… Alas, is it possible for spirit and flesh to commingle?
“Clearly this poem is all-in on the classical style, save that it’s a sonnet in amphibrachian meter (x / x). Few poems exist at all in the canon in amphibrachs, but there are some. All sloppy. No sonnets. Few realize that when you read through the end of the line, as generally one should, these become a simple anapestic meter (x x /) like “…[Christ]mas and ALL through the HOUSE not a CREATure was STIRRing not EVen a MOUSE.]
x / x x / x x / x x / x x / x x / x x / x x / x becomes x / x x /x x /x x /x x /x x /x x /x x / x
meh. Anyway…
“PS: There’s a little meta-textual play where the poem talks about “escaping the rhythms and forms and former expressions.” The line is self-referential. This poem, being a sonnet in a meter that no sonnet has yet been written in, is itself “escaping the rhythms and forms and former…”
‘Impossible Love’ is previously unpublished.
Daniel Kemper, a former tournament-winning wrestler, black belt in traditional Shotokan karate, and infantryman has earned a BA in English, an MCSE (Systems Engineering), an MBA, and an MA in English and had works accepted for publication at more than a dozen magazines, including a pushcart nomination. He’s been an invited presenter at PAMLA 2024 and presided over the Poetics Panel in 2025 and has been the feature poet at several Sacramento venues.
Richard experimented with AI. He gave it simple tasks. It did them well.
It seemed to him the limit was the sky: give AI any task, it would excel.
He then instructed AI to supply a composition worthy of Purcell.
It did so very well: on the first try it thrilled him with a Purcell that was swell.
A portrait next, and when the paint was dry it could have been the work of Raphael.
“I want a new play by that Shakeseare guy: a Hamlet sequel’s surely bound to sell,”
demanded Richard. Sweet as apple pie, up on the PC screen, Hamlet-Nouvelle,
a faux Shakespearean drama, met his eye. Was this a long-lost play? No one could tell.
*****
Richard Fleming writes: “I’m very positive about AI, in the face of much weeping and squealing from a few other writers of my acquaintance who seem almost paranoid about it. I’ve used ChatGPT for a number of matters, both great and trivial, to great effect. The image, created jointly by myself and ChatGPT, I think works well.”
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/ or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com
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.”
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…
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.
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 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.”
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.”
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!
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.”
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/
Form in Formless Times 