Category Archives: Poetry

Using form in translation: Virgil, tr. George Simmers, ‘Rumour’

Leave a reply

Through Africa vile Rumour raced,
Of all the plagues the fastest-paced.
She’s supple, smart, light on her toes,
And gains momentum as she goes.
She may start small as creeping mouse
But soon she’ll overtop the house
Till, though in muck her feet may stand,
Her head is in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
Watch Rumour go! Her huge black wings
Hide fearful eyes, a tongue that stings,
Lungs that can bellow till they burst
And ears fine-tuned to hear the worst.
By night she’ll hiss round that odd place
Nor earth nor sky, but cyberspace,
And through those small hours she will keep
Alert and growing — she won’t sleep.
Come daylight she’ll observe with malice
Events in cottage and in palace.
Great cities then will shake in fear
At the enormities they hear,
And shudder when they taste the brew
In which she’s mixed the false and true.
Whenever men, fraught with disgust,
All eye each other with mistrust,
Great Rumour grins, her strength unfurled.
She relishes our post-truth world!

from Aeneid, Book Four

*****

George Simmers writes: “Plodding through a book of the Aeneid for O-level Latin when I was fifteen, many many years ago, I took a strong dislike to Virgil. But several decades later, a talk I attended made me think he might not be entirely tedious. The talk’s handout included a prose translation of this ‘Rumour’ passage. I decided to versify it myself, and found that it slipped quite easily into tetrameters. The eight-syllable line is fast and sharp, and avoids the temptation to ponderousness that always lurks within the pentameter.
Since then I’ve read more of Virgil, and have found that he is one of those poets whose writings have the knack of seeming topical. I have attempted some more translations. If I had to choose a top ten of poems that say something profound about the human condition, I would include his description of the souls purged of suffering, re-crossing the Styx to attempt a new life.”

Editor’s note: Both ‘Rumour’ and the Styx-recrossing passage that Simmers mentions are in his recent volume of translations, Riffs, along with his translations from Ovid, Catullus, the Greek Anthology and Francois Villon. Riffs costs £5, and should be available from Amazon, but if you’d like a signed copy, email him: simmersgeorge@yahoo.co.uk and he’ll arrange one for you at no extra cost.

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 collection is ‘Old and Bookish’.

Photo: “Dark Angel” by Novafly is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Using form: John Beaton, ‘Killing a Coho’

2 Replies

I grip its tail, hammock its back,
and swing its head down with a crack
on rock, then feel its spasms judder
through my hands as, with a shudder,
it stills,
a grand finale that fulfills
some ancient impulse in my mind.

Poking my finger through a gill,
I cause the raker fronds to spill
blood that drip drips as I carry
the silver deadweight of my quarry,
my kill,
toward a tidal pool
the sunset has incarnadined.

My knife begins behind its throat
and blood-clouds billow out and bloat
then seep into an outflow, seaward,
where baitfish burrow in the seaboard
in schools,
their heads in sand, small fools
kidding themselves they’re hard to find.

I slit its stomach. From that sac
their half-digested eyes peer back,
sandlance dumbstruck at being hunted
in shallow flats this prowler haunted,
this fish
whose every feeding flash
signalled flesh to seals behind.

Somewhere nearby a black bear roars;
wolves salivate; an antler gores
a starving cougar; orcas cripple
humpbacks, bite their fins, then grapple
great bulks
till bleeding, savaged hulks
sink; and then there’s humankind.

No kindness here. This salmon swam
full speed to seize my lure then, wham,
became a madcap, hell-for-leather,
death-row inmate on a tether
and fed
the caveman in my head.
This coast is one big hunting blind.

*****

John Beaton writes: “I’m a lifelong fly-fisher but I’ve always had twinges of conscience about hurting and killing fish. Catch-and-release makes me question whether I’m being cruel. But there’s also a part of me that still connects with the beautiful brutality of the eat-or-be-eaten ecosystems in which we live. This poem tries to express that perspective in the context of an actual experience—the catching and killing of a coho salmon off a rocky shoreline near Tofino.

I chose a form to tell the story with some element of shock and violence. Each stanza has seven lines: one and two are tetrameter with masculine rhymes; three and four are also tetrameter but with feminine rhymes to cushion what comes next; five and six are monometer and trimeter respectively with masculine rhymes and these cropped lines set up a sense of surprise and violence; and line seven is tetrameter with a masculine ending that ties the poem together by rhyming with all the other seventh lines.

There’s some justification for killing the coho—the victim is itself a killer. And the turn at the end of the penultimate stanza connects humans with the savagery of the wildlife.

Sometimes you find a ‘eureka’ word—one that fits rhyme, meter, and sense so well you think ‘wow.’ This poem has one I think of that way: incarnadined.”

John Beaton’s metrical poetry has been widely published and has won numerous awards. He recites from memory as a spoken word performer and is author of Leaving Camustianavaig published by Word Galaxy Press, which includes this poem. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
https://www.john-beaton.com/

Photo: “Coho Spawning on the Salmon River” by BLM Oregon & Washington is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Ann Drysdale, ‘Winter Song’

3 Replies

When blizzards blow under the tiles
and the dishcloth crisps on the draining board
and the snowscape stretches for miles and miles
and only the idiot ventures abroad.
When it’s early to bed, and thank heavens for that,
then coldly keens the cast-out cat:
Miaow! Miaow! – a doleful din –
and who will rise and let him in?

When slippery stones by the pond
make filling a bucket an effort of will
and you’re walled-up for weeks in the back of beyond
in a farm at the foot of a hell of a hill
then it’s early to bed, and thank heavens for that,
till coldly keens the cast-out cat:
Miaow! Miaow! – a doleful din –
and who will rise and let him in?

*****

Ann Drysdale writes: “It was published in my very first collection, The Turn of the Cucumber (Peterloo Poets 1995) and dates from a time when I was bringing up three children as a single mum on a hand-to-mouth smallholding on the North York Moors.”

Editor’s note: Ann Drysdale takes the structure, but not the precise metre, of Shakespeare’s ‘Winter Song’ from Love’s Labours Lost. Her rollicking metre allows her “and the snowscape stretches for miles and miles” and the wonderful “in a farm at the foot of a hell of a hill”, for a bigger wintry landscape than Shakespeare shows.

Ann Drysdale now lives in South Wales and has been a hill farmer, water-gypsy, newspaper columnist and single parent – not necessarily in that order. Her eighth volume of poetry, Feeling Unusual, has recently joined a mixed list of published writing, including memoir, essays and a gonzo guidebook to the City of Newport.
http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/anndrysdalepage.html
http://www.shoestring-press.com

Photo: “Hole of Horkum, North York Moors” by reinholdbehringer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: villanelle: Ann Drysdale, ‘A Harmless, Necessary Cat…’

Leave a reply

(Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, IV, I)

Sing, in the season when convention brings
Frivolous gifts and merry masquerade,
A song of harmless, necessary things.

See how each household purposefully strings
Its fairylights, a debt of honour paid
To obligation that December brings.

Joy to the world! Hark how the welkin rings!
Joy to the merchant and his stock-in-trade!
Let us not think of necessary things!

Across the world the timeless story sings:
A homeless baby, refugees afraid,
The human need that dispossession brings,

Yet round and round the hurdy-gurdy swings
And up and down the characters parade
With scant regard for necessary things.

A placid cat, angels with cardboard wings
And all things heaven-given and home-made
Are at the heart of what this message brings.
I wish you harmless, necessary things.

*****

Ann Drysdale writes: “It was originally written as a Christmas card and was circulated only among friends. Compliments of the season to you and yours.”

Ann Drysdale now lives in South Wales and has been a hill farmer, water-gypsy, newspaper columnist and single parent – not necessarily in that order. Her eighth volume of poetry, Feeling Unusual, has recently joined a mixed list of published writing, including memoir, essays and a gonzo guidebook to the City of Newport.
http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/anndrysdalepage.html
http://www.shoestring-press.com

Using form: ghazal: Barbara Lydecker Crane, ‘Love Refrains’

Leave a reply

Mom banged her hairbrush down in a reprimand of love.
“What an awful question! You don’t understand love.

“Of course Dad loves you. How can you question that?
He doesn’t have to blare it out, like a brass band of love.

“You aren’t a princess to be coddled on a lap or praised
without good reason. That’s a never-never land of love.

“Your father works hard, with a great deal on his mind.
Now don’t go causing trouble, making a demand of love.

“Yes, I know he yells and sends you to your room a lot.
But be glad he never hits you with the backhand of love.

“Once, banished to your room, you drew a picture poem
for him. I watched him beam at you with unplanned love.

“He said he’s proud of you. I’ve heard him tell you twice.”
She brushed my hair, hard. “Barbara, that’s a brand of love.”

Barbara Lydecker Crane writes: “Based on a real interaction with my mother when I was about five, I think this poem reflects a different style of parenting back then (this was in the 50’s), perhaps a British approach: “don’t spoil your children with a lot of praise or affection.” I like modern ways better! As for the form, I love ghazals because you always know where you are headed–the fun is choosing your route to get there.”

Barbara Lydecker Crane was a finalist for two recent Rattle Poetry Prizes, including with this poem.  She has received two Pushcart nominations and various awards from the Maria W. Faust and the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contests. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, THINK, Valparaiso Literary Review, Writer’s Almanac, many others, and in several anthologies. Her fourth collection, You Will Remember Me (ekphrastic, persona sonnets) was recently published by Able Muse Press, and is available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/You-Will-Remember-Me-Ekphrastic/dp/1773491261. Barb lives with her husband near Boston.

Photo: “She’s On The Naughty List” by Cayusa is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: John Beaton, ‘Legacy’ (excerpt)

Leave a reply

Inside his penthouse office
he views his Inuit artwork,
carvings from a culture
reduced to buy-and-hold,
then scans the evening city,
his bar chart on the skyline
where real estate has grown his stake
but cost him bonds he’s had to break –
he hadn’t meant to so forsake
his parents. They looked old

that day outside the croft house
when cowed farewells were murmured
as cattle lowed in wind blasts
keening from the sea.
His mother and his father
stood waving from the porch step;
next year she’d crack her pelvic bone,
when winter iced that slab of stone,
and never walk again. I’ll phone,
and he was history.

(…)

He downs his drink and glances
again at his computer –
an email from a neighbour:
Your father died last night.
He’d lately gotten thinner
and seldom had a fire on –
what little peat he had was soft.
Some things of yours are in the loft
so mind them when you sell the croft.
The city lights are bright;

he turns again and faces
his metamorphic sculptures
of walruses in soapstone
that never will break free
from rock that locks the sea waves –
past fused against the future.
Another gin? That’s six. Or eight?
So be it. Clarity’s too late.
His real estate’s no real estate –
he’s left his legacy.

*****

John Beaton writes: “This is a composite. Elements of it are taken from my life but I’ve borrowed significantly from the trajectories of others, especially some of my father’s contemporaries who left Camustianavaig physically but never in their hearts. There are also aspects of the lives of some people I’ve known in business. 

I worked out the form so that each stanza would start out steadily and rhythmically for six trimeter lines then build pace for three rhymed tetrameter lines and rein to a halt with a single trimeter line that has a masculine rhyme with line four. Even though they limit word-choices, I thought feminine endings for the first three lines and lines five and six were worth it for the rhythm. And I like how they form a sort of rhyme and closure gradient with lines four and seven to ten.”

John Beaton’s metrical poetry has been widely published and has won numerous awards. He recites from memory as a spoken word performer and is author of Leaving Camustianavaig published by Word Galaxy Press, which includes this poem. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
https://www.john-beaton.com/

Photo: “‘V for Vendetta’, United States, New York, New York City, West Village, Skyline View” by WanderingtheWorld (www.ChrisFord.com) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Rondeau: Gail White, ‘Opera Rondeau’

Leave a reply

And then she dies—since men are no damn good—
Mimi, consumptive and misunderstood,
or Desdemona, most defamed of brides—
the woman is abandoned on all sides—
she so believes in love (as women should)
and in the end she burns like firewood.

Here Tosca on the tower a moment stands,
first throwing back her hood and then her hands
and then one step—invisibly she flies—
and then she dies.

Poor Butterfly, who meant to be so good.
Tough Carmen, using all the wiles she could
to get her man. So many suicides,
so many murders. Violetta hides
but can’t escape—she’s found, she’s understood—
and then she dies.

*****

Gail White writes: “One of my favorites in my new book Paper Cuts is ‘Opera Rondeau’.  It was written after a friend pointed out to me that most summaries of opera plots could end with the words “then she dies.” Although the poem doesn’t conform perfectly to the rondeau rhyme scheme, it does provide the perfect refrain. And gives me a chance to mention a few of the many opera heroines who win, lose, or miss love altogether – and die.”

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. ‘Opera Rondeau’ was first published in Mezzo Cammin and is collected in her new light verse chapbook, ‘Paper Cuts‘, also available on Amazon.

Photo: “Heroine – a female lament” by Yo! Opera is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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

Leave a reply

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.

Joe Crocker, ‘What Sunflowers See’

Leave a reply

They lift and fix their heavy insect eyes
upon the East, from where the sun will send
the bees to stroke and lick and fertilize.
 
They wait, where once they craned their necks to see
his passing arc. They wait, amazed. Surprise
has painted yellow lashes, perfectly
 
coronal round a crowded, dark eclipse.
Its buzzing beauty pixelates and stares.
An alien array of cells unzips.
 
A thousand thousand sisters nurse the same
regret. His warmth is gone. And left behind
to hang their heads, disconsolate, they blame
themselves. Their tears drop hard and black and blind

*****

Joe Crocker writes: “The French call them Tournesols because, when they are growing, the follow the sun. But when the flowerhead is fully formed, they all face East so they warm up quickly and are more attractive to the bees. The poem came about because I’ve been seeing them more frequently in our local supermarkets and my wife grew some this year. Seeing them close up, I was reminded of the reaction a friend from many years ago used to have. She liked them but kept her distance because she was spooked by their dense busy centres. So the insect eye was the starting metaphor and then the poem led me on. Big, beautiful, disturbing, and in the end, sad.”

Joe Crocker is no relation of the Sheffield-born rock singer. But he does live in Yorkshire and gets by (with a little help from his friends). He is a bit old now to be starting out in poetry but was infected by the muse during Covid lockdown a couple of years ago and has had a few things published, mainly in Snakeskin magazine (where this poem first appeared) and other online venues. He doesn’t have a website but if you Google him, you’ll learn a lot more about a certain Sheffield-born rock singer.

Photo: accompanied the poem in Snakeskin.

Using form: biform poem: Daniel Galef, ‘A Poke of Gold to the Lady That’s Known as Lou’

Leave a reply

I saw the sigh in your pretty eye
    When you dreamed that I’d be yours,
But those who steal me fast reveal
    My shine is the start of wars.

First I passed through the purse of a miner who nursed
    A chill. He seemed to be
Just a helping of hurt in a flannelette shirt
    From Plumtree, Tennessee.

It’s the goal of gold to be bought and sold
    And melted and poured in a mould.
From the day they scratched me out of that patch
    Of dirt, I’ve been near as cold.

Now again I change hands, and again the sands
    Run out, and men lie dead.
Good chances, I’d rate, that the heftier weight
    Is a couple of rounds of lead.

I’ve been sought by those men—half a dozen or ten—
    Who flash gold in pokes and pounds,
Who begged you for dances and killed for your glances—
    It’s not as nice as it sounds.

I saw the sigh in your pretty eye when you dreamed
That I’d be yours, but those who steal me fast
Reveal in my shine is the start of wars. First I passed
Through the purse of a miner who nursed a chill. He seemed
To be just a helping of hurt in a flannelette shirt
From Plumtree, Tennessee. It’s the goal of gold
To be bought and sold and melted and poured in a mould.
From the day they scratched me out of that patch of dirt,
I’ve been near as cold. Now again I change hands, and again
The sands run out, and men lie dead. Good chances,
I’d rate, that the heftier weight is a couple of rounds
Of lead. I’ve been sought by those men—half a dozen or ten—
Who flash gold in pokes and pounds, who begged you for dances
And killed for your glances—It’s not as nice as it sounds.

*****

Daniel Galef writes: “Last month Robin posted ‘Casey to His Bat,’ a poem which scans as both a sonnet and as fourteeners in ballad meter. The intro mentioned that I’d written a few more of this type of poem after ‘Casey,’ one of which was titled ‘A Poke of Gold to the Lady That’s Known as Lou.’
As much as I loved the challenge of writing the Casey sonnet, I felt the form had to be justified somehow by the subject, and so, just as ‘Casey’ followed Ernest Thayer* in its alternate scheme of iambic heptameter couplets, each of the subsequent convertible sonnets, part of my Imaginary Sonnets series of persona poems, is also a response to or parody of a specific existing poem in a different meter which the sonnet doubles.
The second convertible sonnet, ‘A Poke of Gold to the Lady That’s Known as Lou’, is a riff on the famous narrative poems of Robert Service ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ in his 1907 collection Songs of a Sourdough. (Like Thayer, Service is sometimes scorned as a jingle-writer partly because of his popularity and his populism, writing in the vernacular voice of Yukon prospectors.) Both of these narrative poems are written in a much looser anapestic ballad meter with more inversions and extra syllables than sonnets normally allow. While ‘McGrew’ has the basic ballad rhyme scheme, scanning as heptameter couplets like ‘Casey,’ ‘McGee’ has a much denser scheme, adding on top of these end-rhymes a pattern of dimeter internal rhyme. I loved the much greater challenge of compounding this rhyme scheme with that of a Petrarchan sonnet, but, due to the anapests, the finished product feels less like a sonnet than ‘Casey ‘did.
This poem appeared in Snakeskin Poetry in 2017, and, although it is not included in my book Imaginary Sonnets published this year, you will find, in the poems there, these same immortal threads: gold (p. 41), murder (p. 71), poetic parody (p. 72), and Canada (p. 19). danielgalef.com/book/
*Thayer’s poem, possibly the last American poem to have massive popular appeal to the extent that it was commonly memorized for fun and performed on the vaudeville stage, was published in 1888, the same year as the florid Victorian sonneteer Eugene Lee-Hamilton published Imaginary Sonnets, which inspired my book.”

*****

Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, is a collection of persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures and objects, including Nossis the Epizephyrian, Christopher Smart’s cat, and a breakfast taco. Besides poetry, he has written plays that won the McGill University Drama Festival, flash fiction selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology, and last year he placed second in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, which doesn’t really mean anything but he’s been telling everyone anyway.