“Rudyard Kipling, gifted stripling”… a lot of his work is superb: the voices caught in his poems and short stories, the endlessly rereadable Just So Stories with his own lush illustrations and catchy peripheral poems, his novels. It’s more than just the verse that has lasting strength.
Researching (i.e. idly Googling) Kipling, I came across this rather good bit of verse printed in the San Francisco Examiner of 1890. It’s a reaction to the sudden and seemingly unstoppable vogue for the works of Kipling. The Examiner credits it to the Saturday Review, but since the references are mostly American, I don’t think this would be the London Saturday.
An ambulance howls like a hurt cat; parts traffic as Moses did the waves. Worms burrow in awaiting graves. A police car buzzes like a gnat.
Stuck in a jam of steaming cars, I contemplate how life transforms in moments. How they wait, those worms, so patiently, for us, for ours.
*****
Richard Fleming writes: “Ambulance sirens have been part of the soundtrack of my adult life, from the troubled years in Belfast to, more recently, my relatively tranquil life on the island of Guernsey. There’s something about the sound, like that of a modern-day banshee, that chills the blood like no other. In common with all those who love unreservedly, I live with a constant fear of loss and a keen awareness of the terrible fragility of those things that we hold dear. This short poem attempts to articulate that fear.”
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet 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/
We dress ourselves from the Goodwill store since Art has kept us genteelly poor and we laugh together at how we’ve slummed amid vocalises and arias hummed and the mirth for both of us seemed sincere so I joked, where others would overhear, about our finds in the plaids and prints
and saw you wince.
*****
Maryann Corbett writes: “Perhaps every poem that seems to portray one small moment is really a goulash of hundreds of moments. That’s certainly true of ‘Dissonance‘. There really was a friend who was a fellow singer, fellow poet, and fellow fan of the bargains to be found in charity shops. And there really was an awkward moment when I misjudged her feelings about artistic penury, a penury I’d escaped in a very un-artistic job. But folded into the writing of the poem were all my student years, years when I was much younger, much poorer, and much more in solidarity with friends still following their dreams.”
‘Dissonance‘ was first published in Mezzo Cammin, and gave its name to a 2009 chapbook collection published by Scienter Press.
Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and five full-length collections. Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry. Her sixth book, The O in the Air, is forthcoming from Franciscan University Press.
The man who had a perfect lawn forced his three kids to toil outside till every dandelion was gone.
His wife, gentle and put-upon, dusted the trophies of his pride (for tennis, not his perfect lawn).
His son, advancing like a pawn to keep his father satisfied, chose, when his girl and job were gone,
to hit a bridge (or gun) head-on. The neighbors whispered “suicide” while walking past that perfect lawn.
The youngest, timid and withdrawn, lived with her parents till she died of cancer, but the oldest, gone
for decades, had skipped town one dawn. When she died too, her parents lied that she was fine. Their perfect lawn remains. But all the kids are gone.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “From the ages of six to sixteen, I lived on a suburban cul-de-sac, a more elegant term for a dead end. The neighbors I knew best, whose three children were around the same ages as the oldest three children in my family, came to symbolize for me the dark side of suburbia, the disturbing realities that lie behind the manicured exteriors and are never spoken of. Not until the father of that family died did we learn, from his obituary, that his oldest daughter, the one who was my age, had died several years earlier, of undisclosed causes. The mother, who played bridge weekly with my mother, had always said when asked about that daughter that she was ‘fine’.
I chose to tell this story in a variant on a villanelle in which only the last words of the repeating lines reappear: ‘perfect lawn’ and ‘gone’. That loosening of the form allowed more narrative to fill the lines, but the tolling repetitions of those words encapsulate, for me, the irony and tragedy of keeping up appearances in suburbia. The villanelle itself can be a straitjacket of a form, and the short tetrameter lines tighten it further, till it feels as though there is no way out.”
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
Take a mountain. Scale the pink-arsed flanks of it, limb over limb. Find Poseidon. Extract from him a wave and a horse’s hoof. Pluck a tree; kill the grip of it by showing it your thoughts. Make your peace with the grave. Eat apples, all of them. Taste in them the sin of being a woman. Let that smack you in the gut, you deserve it. Straddle the equator. Suck up its spin, take it with you; feel your body snapping shut. Learn to count each breath as an act of sedition. Pull the lungs from a sleeping leopard. Be a speck. Be a planet. Be a long-dead apparition. Stuff a storm into your patch pocket, huge and wet, but tell no one. Invent two new ways of shucking a heart from a blown glass moon. Find a man. Fuck him.
*****
Nina Parmenter writes: “This poem (first published by Atrium Poetry) was written in an online workshop in response to the prompt “a spell”. I wanted my spell to be impossible, to reflect the ineffability of motherhood, but I also wanted to talk about how the act of giving birth puts us right on the threshold of life and death. I felt that some kind of form was right for a spell, but needed the poem to feel raw rather than singy-songy, so I chose this unmetered sonnet form. The last line was really a happy accident; I wrote the penultimate line (which originally ended with sucking, not shucking!) and then thought, “What rhymes with sucking?… OH.”
Nina Parmenter‘s first collection “Split, Twist Apocalypse” is published by Indigo Dreams. Her work has appeared in Snakeskin, Light, Allegro, Raceme, Honest Ulsterman, The Lyric and Potcake Chapbooks ‘Houses and Homes Forever’. Her home, work and family are in Wiltshire. https://ninaparmenter.com/
The Head was ambitious and nobody’s fool, A big man, efficient, and proud of his school.
At the start of the term, as he sorted his post, The item of mail that intrigued him the most
Was a piece puffing National Poetry Day, Including a list of the poets who’d stay
And workshop and somehow persuade the whole school That poets were ‘groovy’ and poems were ‘cool’.
‘Here’s status,’ the Head thought. ‘It’s not to be missed.’ The one problem, though, was the names on the list;
Though doubtless they wrote quite respectable stuff, Not one of them, frankly, was famous enough.
His school deserved more; his ambition took wing, And so he decided to do his own thing.
With his usual flair, and with chutzpah exquisite, He invited the whole English canon to visit.
Geoffrey Chaucer came first, on an equable horse, And Spenser, and Marlowe, and Shakespeare, of course
(Who was grabbed by the teachers of English, imploring ‘Do come and persuade the Year Nines you’re not boring.’)
Keats arrived coughing, Kipling marched vigorously; Matthew Arnold began to inspect the school rigorously –
Which delighted the Head, who with pride and elation Showed the bards of the ages today’s education.
Vaughan was ecstatic, though Clough was more sceptical. Ernest Dowson puked up in a litter receptacle.
Coleridge sneaked off to discover the rates Of an unshaven person outside the school gates;
Soon he’d sunk in a private and picturesque dream, While Auden was ogling the basketball team.
Plath lectured the girls: ‘Get ahead! Go insane!’ Algernon Swinburne cried: ‘Bring back the cane!’
Dylan Thomas soon found the head’s cupboard of booze, And Swift was disdainfully sniffing the loos.
And then the Head twigged, with a horrified jolt, That something had sparked a Romantic revolt.
Shelley’d gathered the students out in the main quad, And roused them to rise against school, Head, and God.
Byron soon joined him, and started to speak. (He showed his best profile, and spouted in Greek.)
The bards of the thirties were equally Red, And Milton explained how to chop off a head.
Decadents undermined all the foundations. Surrealists threw lobsters and rancid carnations.
Pre-Raphaelites trashed the technology room And the First World War poets trudged off to their doom.
Sidney with gallantry led a great charge in (Tennyson cheering them on from the margin).
The Deputy Head, who was rather a dope, Got precisely impaled on a couplet by Pope
(Who, while not so Romantic, was never the chap To run from a fight or keep out of a scrap).
Then the whole solid edifice started to shake As it was prophetically blasted by Blake.
Soon the School was destroyed. Eliot paced through the waste, And reflected with sorrow and learning and taste,
Which he fused in a poem, an excellent thing, Though rather obscure and a little right-wing.
He gave this to the Head, who just threw it aside As he knelt by the wreck of his school, and he cried
Salty tears that went fizz as they hit the school’s ashes. He said words that I’d better imply by mere dashes:
‘——– Poets! ——– Poetry – rhyme and free verse! Let them wilt in the face of a Headmaster’s curse!
‘Let poetry wither! How sweet it would be If all of the world were prosaic as me!’
*****
George Simmers writes: “Poets in Residence was written as a celebration of National Poetry Day many years ago. Several people had been mouthing blandly off about how lovely poetry was in contrast to that horrible pop music young people listen to. Schools were being encouraged to give children a lot of poetry because it was nice and beautiful, and would make them nice. ‘Do these people have no idea of how incendiary the English canon is?’ I wondered. I really enjoyed demolishing the school around the ears of the pompous and pretentious head. I was a teacher at the time.”
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’.
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.
Where are the flushed and frantic teens, The hormones’ fevered ebbs and flows? (Fire buckets, water, verbal screens.) The girls –good grief! – that parents chose And others – how the mind’s eye glows! − Who floated inches off the floor? (Flout censor’s ruling – fish-net hose.) With dodo, great auk, dinosaur.
Where are the doubtful magazines? The female form from head to toes (Dim lights. Spill simulated beans.) In postures aimed to half-disclose Behinds, aboves, and down belows, With clefts and crevices galore? (Check pressure here, in case it blows.) With dodo, great auk, dinosaur.
Where are the eyeball-popping queens Of X-films like the great Bardot’s? (Props: G-string, well-packed blouse and jeans.) Brigitte – with so much to expose Far finer than the best French prose – Removing most, and, sometimes, more . . .? (Cue key-change, envoi, Villon, ‘snows’.) With dodo, great auk, dinosaur.
Envoi Prince, not again! The whole world knows Time’s answer must be, as before, (Stand by the curtain ! Down it goes!) With dodo, great auk, dinosaur.
*****
Jerome Betts writes: “Ballade of Inevitable Extinction started off in callow youth as a sort of Finnegan’s Wake verbally mashed-up extravaganza sparked off by a news item about Brigitte Bardot. Then years later it became a rather clunky Spectator competition entry and even more years later evolved into something accepted by Kate Benedict for Tilt-A-Whirl and more recently by Beth Houston for her ‘Extreme Formal Poems‘ anthology. Not only is the rhyme-scheme in English a challenge but also getting some sort of development or progression into the three main stanzas (or even a coherent narrative as Joan Butler managed in her Ballade of the Ugly Sister in Lighten Up Online Issue 12 December 2010). In this case, the suggestion of a three act play with stage directions and epilogue seemed a possible solution.”
Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the quarterly Lighten Up Online. Pushcart-nominated twice, his verse has appeared in a wide variety of UK publications and in anthologies such as Love Affairs At The Villa Nelle, Limerick Nation, The Potcake Chapbooks 1, 2 and 12, and Beth Houston’s three Extreme collections. British, European, and North American web venues include Amsterdam Quarterly, Better Than Starbucks, Light, The Asses of Parnassus, The Hypertexts, The New Verse News, and Snakeskin.
I think I owe some kind of explanation As I grow tired and listless fingers writhe Above the unpecked keyboard pad. I’m not Quite out to blame you or your generation For where I’m at tonight. You paid the tithe That life exacts. It’s sanctimonious rot If we deny the pain of paying it– And our denials never help one bit.
Unlike you, I found myself involved In protest politics when I was young. I spouted crap about the working class While searching for a problem to be solved. I mocked you then, since stirring tunes are sung In brayed crescendos, with a blaze of brass Booming triumphs won against the odds– Unjust societies and jealous Gods.
You seemed so cautious–tastefully attired With modest ties and polished wing-tipped shoes, A cautious, kindly smile that reached your eyes. A man to be respected, not admired, Neither adulated nor abused. Ambitions of an ordinary size Were often past your reach. A nagging doubt Set in, and now I know what that’s about.
Tonight, I type these words as it gets late, And no one calls to beckon me to bed. I scoffed at what you’d craved–the tenure track, The slow-accruing pension from the state, The wife (who left you). Though you’re good and dead (And at this hour, my eyes are going slack) And though you cannot answer, I’ll report –While having to imagine your retort–
That we’re no happier than you, and can’t Quite seem to sit for tests that you had failed. Our phones are packed with numbers we won’t call. The televisions blast a constant rant That we ignore like letters still unmailed– Or unconceived. Clichés about a ball That’s dropped don’t work–or maybe don’t apply. We never picked it up. I wonder why.
This recognition’s only dawning now As streetlights speckle glimmers on your urn Beside my unmade bed, and as I write These words to you in lieu of sleep. Somehow, The brays of drunks outside my window turn Almost comforting, as if the night Is full of us–insomniac, astray, And muttering defiance at the day.
*****
Quincy R. Lehr writes: “As for that poem, my father died in 2003, when I was twenty-seven. The content pretty much speaks for itself, I think. I was young, lonely, and frequently drunk when I wrote it.”
Editor’s comment: I admire the technical skill of the poem: the steady iambic pentameter; the abcabcdd rhyme scheme with the final couplet providing a punch; the integrity of the individual stanzas, each patiently laying out a mood, a thought, a situation. And I relate to the young man’s restless, unquiet, unsettled life, and the comparison to his father’s existence, his dismissal of his father’s achievements, his simultaneous recognition of the inevitable connections. It is a satisfying telling of an individual’s unique early life, in the context of the universal discord between generations.
Born in Oklahoma, Quincy R. Lehr is the author of several books of poetry, and his poems and criticism appear widely in venues in North America, Europe, and Australia. His book-length poem ‘Heimat‘ was published in 2014. His most recent books are ‘The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar‘ (2015) and ‘Near Hits and Lost Classics‘ (2021), a selection of early poems. He lives in Los Angeles. https://www.amazon.com/Quincy-R.-Lehr/e/B003VMY9AG
Bit by bit they deconstruct the thing: no frets, no pegs, no bridge, removing its harmonic parts until at last each string is slack, and lacking resonating bits. They put the rest, the body, neck, and head, aside as too much like a prop for those whose earnestness is all they need instead of craft and art to fake that they can sing. So there they are, on either stage or page: The foremost poets of the modern age, Who, writing their relineated prose, Will swagger as they grimace, strut, and pose Pretending they are better than they are While playing nothing but an air guitar.
*****
Marcus Bales writes: “Back in the day I spent more time than I should have arguing that freeverse was prose, and that freeversers are prose writers, not poets at all. Of course, when you strike at the core of a belief-system those who believe it feel you are attacking them personally, and respond with insults. They cannot address the reasoning of the arguments, so they resort to ad hominem. I was searching for a metaphor to substitute for argument, something that would reveal the fundamental paucity of the entire freeverser credo that prose is poetry if only they say it is. What I was looking for was something to demonstrate the posers as mere posers. What, besides writing prose and then arbitrarily or whimsically relineating it to resemble the ragged-right look of poetry on the page and calling it poetry, was an even more ridiculous example of that pose? Here it is.”
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’).
Form in Formless Times 