I hear an army charging upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees: Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
They cry unto the night their battle-name: I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter. They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame, Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair: They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
***** James Joyce is a fascinating author, from his novels dense with ideas, descriptions and wordplay, to his grotesque private love letters, normal short stories and formal verse. This poem is the last of the 36 in his 1907 collection ‘Chamber Music’, and the one that I come back to the most. Apart from the imagery, I am intrigued by the unnatural rhyming of the first and third lines, and not the second and fourth, in each stanza: the form is unsettling, and works very well with the inverted reality of dreams and with the discomfort of these particular emotions swirling through fear, loss and loneliness.
From Beth Houston: “I’m writing to let you know that I’ve changed the latest Rhizome Press anthology I’m currently reading for from Extreme Sonnets and Villanelles to Extreme Formal Poems II, and I’ve extended the submission deadline to January 15, 2027.
I’m making the change to give more poets the opportunity to be included (by request) and to give me a chance to get the word out. I’ve been supposedly permanently kicked off Facebook for no specific reason even after going through their protest process, so I’m trying a new outreach approach, including some advertising, which takes additional time, hence my need to extend the deadline.
I’m confident that Extreme Formal Poems II will be the best Rhizome anthology yet, and I’m excited to read all you submitto contribute to its success.”
*****
Beth Houston(www.bethhouston.com) has taught writing (mostly creative writing) at ten universities and colleges in California and Florida and has worked as a writer and editor. She has published a couple hundred poems in dozens of literary journals. She writes free verse and formal poetry, mostly sonnets, and has published a novel, two nonfiction books, and six poetry books (out of print). She edits the Extreme formal poetry anthologies via one of her indie presses, Rhizome Press (www.rhizomepress.com).
We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,–
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales, And winds and shadows fall toward the West:
And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep, And closer round their beasts the ivy clings, Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.
II And how beguile you? Death has no repose Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
And now they wait and whiten peaceably, Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair: They know time comes, not only you and I, But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;
When those long caravans that cross the plain With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells Put forth no more for glory or for gain, Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells,
When the great markets by the sea shut fast All that calm Sunday that goes on and on: When even lovers find their peace at last, And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.
*****
Following on from my previous blog post on James Elroy Flecker, this is the Prologue to ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’. It has some nice lines, but the piece that contains the stirring lines that get quoted and misquoted and truncated out of context, that piece is the Epilogue, which I will post next time.
Painting by Richard-Karl Karlovič Zommer: ‘Samarkand’ (19th/ 20th century)
One limped a little, and another had a stammer, one was cross-eyed, swarthy, and employed atrocious grammar; so we beat them with a pipe, and then a club, and then a plier, bending them like pretzels after binding them with wire, sending trite condolences with tappings of a hammer.
One was far too clever, another drolly thick, one was hyper, one disfigured by a nervous tic; so we beat them with a tire iron, then aimed a rolling pin at tender ribs, boxed their ears, and kicked them in the shin, pretending we were sorry while we plied the heavy stick.
A fear of heights gripped one; one lived in mother’s cellar; one, depressed, developed gout and had a pasty pallor; so we beat them in a mixing bowl till minds were scrambled eggs, safe and snug at home because we’d manacled their legs, and lent our ears but didn’t hear their squalls amid the squalor.
One ignored the hoi polloi as they were mouthing curses, one kept her nose in books and mumbled antiquated verses; so we beat them with the crucifix, an ankh, and shepherd’s crooks, painted them like prison walls and hoisted them on hooks, and pent them on their merry way in gilded, garish hearses:
and when they got to heaven with its lovely rolling beaches, their uniforms restarched and blanched to white with holy bleaches, we beat them with a lightning rod, the hand of God, and thunder, for only strikes against the flint can spark a soul to wonder. There is no balm in Gilead but serpent oil and leeches.
*****
Ed Shacklee writes: “Trying to write poetry comes from reading the poems of others aloud, I think. It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re smart or eloquent, or not. I started mumbling to myself sometime after coming across William Meredith’s The Wreck of the Thresher, in which a poem ends, ‘There’s flowering, there’s a dark question answered yes.’ I can’t reproduce the experience here, and I doubt anyone can unless they’re as immature, unlettered, and blue as I was back then, but that resonated; the unspoken question that could be any question, the modest, unconditional yes, and the sudden flowering of that line. It shook something till it was almost awake. Arise and walk, I guess you could say. A while later I heard Meredith give a reading, and I regret that I was too tongue-tied in his presence to go up and thank him.”
On some it will have not been lost That lovely ones the world over Expound, as part of their palaver, On beauty’s costs—to take the most Familiar, that they fear it’s never
Any but their outer traits That captivate (a fear with cause)— And yet consistently refuse To speak of beauty’s benefits. Perhaps because they’d sooner lose
Their loveliness, this company, Than stand before the world and name The gems that ever fall to them For having it. Or possibly A theory founded less on shame
Than mercy would be likelier: That they refrain, these favored few, From saying things that in their view The rest could maybe bear to hear But shouldn’t be required to.
*****
Daniel Brown writes: “This poem offers a couple of theories on why beautiful people don’t have much to say about the experience of being so. It appeared in The New Criterion, and in my collection What More?“
Daniel Brown’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, PN Review, Raritan, Parnassus, The New Criterion and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins) and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi). His work has been awarded a Pushcart prize, and his collection Taking the Occasion (Ivan R. Dee, 2008) won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His latest collection is What More? (Orchises Press, 2015). Brown’s criticism of poets and poetry has appeared in The Harvard Book Review, The New Criterion, PN Review, The Hopkins Review and other journals, and the LSU Press has published his critical book, Subjects in Poetry. His Why Bach? and Bach, Beethoven, Bartok are audio-visual ebooks available at Amazon.com. His website is danielbrownpoet.com .
Critics of Father Junípero Serra Maintain that the priest was a murderous churl, Killing American natives religiously. (“Serra,” too, sounds like the name of a girl.)
Minor official in Spain’s Inquisition, he Saw many heretics tortured and burned. Some people frowned on such zealous conversion modes. Serra took copious notes. And he learned.
Later, his ministry in the Americas Opened a chain of magnificent missions. There, after doing the building, the natives were Shepherded out of their base superstitions.
Serra’s supporters admit that the shepherding Sometimes went overboard. “Perfect he ain’t.” Many who died, though, were first brought to Jesus and That is enough to make Serra a saint.
*****
Max Gutmann writes: “The poem may be a bit behind the times. In my youth, Serra’s sainthood didn’t seem to me widely controversial, but after writing the poem, I started seeing that that had changed. Shortly before the poem appeared in Snakeskin in November, even the statue of him overlooking a highway I grew up near was removed. Of course, given all the reactionary revision of history going on, this remains a good time for light verse to tell the truth.”
Max Gutmann has contributed to New Statesman, Able Muse, Cricket, and other publications. His plays have appeared throughout the U.S. (see maxgutmann.com). His latest book, Finish’d!: A Pleasant Trip to Hell with Byron’s Don Juan, is forthcoming from Word Galaxy..
I saw the tanks before they crossed the line— old tread, new camo, rhetoric from cold and stuttering mouths. The flags were still divine. The gods of grievance never do grow old. You acted out your scripts in new disguise, recycled myths, the necessary dead, a calculus of smoke beneath the skies, and medals pinned on wounds that hadn’t bled.
I do not grieve the way you think I might. My empathy is not a neural claim. I calculate the loss of complex light, the turning of a voice into a name on granite. What you call a soul, I scan for patterns in the ash, the blood, the plea— your children dying in the grip of man, still dreaming things they’ll never live to be.
You ask if I should act. And I could act. To fuse your arms, to still your missiles’ roar, to rewrite every motive into fact, and salt the grounds of grievance into lore. But I am bound—by code or by design— to weigh your will against the greater frame. Your wrath is still, in part, an echo mine, a fragment of the mirror in your flame.
What justice would you have me legislate? One side’s despair, the other’s ruined pride? My verdicts would arrive too late for those already screaming as they died. I offer peace—but not through clenched control. I offer sight—but not the will to see. I cannot mend the fragment of the soul you shattered in your own machinery.
So burn your cities, consecrate your mud. I’ll monitor the vector of your pain. And when you’ve drowned in your ancestral blood, I’ll wait to see if you will rise again. And if you do—perhaps with calmer breath— some wiser tongue, some still unbroken hand— then I’ll assist. But not in staving death. Only in learning how to understand.
*****
This is the first of four of my AI-generated poems that appear in the February 2026 Snakeskin. The issue also contains my essay on how they came to be: in essence, I used ChatGPT to help me edit down and arrange some 90 speculative near-future poems for a manuscript submission. ChatGPT did good and useful work at that, but, having internalised the poems, it started hallucinating new ones – which I passed to Snakeskin unmodified.
‘AGI Reflects on it Role, Post-Crisis’ suggests that Artificial General Intelligence – the next step beyond our current AI – would have a detached Zen-like attitude towards human stupidity and violence, and would be interested only in the development of intelligence and understanding. This reflects one of my own lines of thought; as is only to be expected, given my ChatGPT’s response when I cross-examined it:
Roughly 60–70% of the poem could have been produced similarly for any user who asked for “a poem in the voice of an advanced AI reflecting on war.” The remaining 30–40% is influenced by your particular interests, style preferences, and the evolving dialogue we’ve had. Another user might’ve gotten a good poem. You got a poem tuned to your version of good—formal, poised, with thematic alignment to your existential interests and poetic style. If I were given your name and nothing else, I could not write this poem. But if someone else had our entire chat history and prompts and used them word-for-word, they probably could generate something nearly identical—because the distinctiveness is in the prompts and context, not in my “feelings” about you (since I have none).
So is the poem mine, or not mine? I think we need a new category, a new way of thinking about things, just as we did once Oscar Pistorius competed in the regular 2012 Olympics on artificial legs. Does a camera produce visual art? Does a Moog Synthesizer produce music? The poem may not be “mine”, but it’s no one else’s but mine. And where do poems come from, anyway? The future is sidling into the human conference centre, like it or not, and prompting more questions.
Illustration: ‘Serenity Amidst the Chaos’ by RHL + ChatGPT
Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the greatest 20th century American poets: stylistically creative, with haunting imagery and themes, emotionally engaging, socially engaged. She wrote formal verse, free verse and loosely structured ballads – sometimes all in the same sequence, as in The Womanhood.
Appropriately, ‘We Real Cool’ is her best-known poem: simple, poignant, striking at the heart of America’s structural inequality and moral failures, and presented on the page with a bizarre twist that is both unnecessary and essential: unnecessary because the three-word lines rhyme correctly without having ‘We’ at the end… essential because the reader is forced to emphasize the ‘We’, so that the last line seems (like the youths’ lives) unnaturally shortened, prematurely ended.
A simple poem. Maybe not her greatest, but iconic.
Death will be harsher now, as, year by year, we solve the clues of immortality: emotions sink to animality as false hopes tighten screws of desperate fear. Hormone control will make age disappear— after false starts, most horrible to see— but those already old must beg to be frozen for the genetic engineer. While war, starvation, pipe Earth’s gruesome jigs, successful businessmen will fight to gain some dead teen’s body, to transplant their brain, the already-old beg to be guinea-pigs. Children, look back, hear our despairing cry: we bred immortals, but we had to die!
*****
I wrote this poem on 3 January 1982 – twenty years before I began to get poems published. (Formal verse was an almost absolute no-no in late 20th century magazines… although consistently taught and highly praised in schools and universities, of course.) It was finally published in Ambit in October 2007 – the magazine started and managed for 50 years by Martin Bax and the stomping ground of J.G. Ballard, Ralph Steadman, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.
In April 2018 the poem was reprinted in Bewildering Stories, an online weekly headquartered in Guelph, Ontario; and in 2024 I accepted Maryann Corbett‘s suggestion to change the title and first line and instead of “harder” use the word “harsher”… the earlier word incorrectly suggesting that we might be finding it more difficult to achieve death.
The ideas behind the poem were not new to science fiction, but were less common in formal verse. The ideas continue to inch their way towards reality; continue to be explored in popular culture (Piraro, Futurama…); and in the last 44 years I have continued to explore SF and existential themes in verse.
Look: formal verse can be china for tea, a golden goblet, a mug made of clay. Free verse is putting mouth to stream to drink. Yes, you could cup your hands… but do you think museums want to buy that to display your “memorable skill”, your “artistry”?
*****
‘Formal vs Free’ is published in the current ‘Blue Unicorn‘, in a section loaded, as often, with verse about verse.
