Gavin’s poems are quiet, elegant reflections on people—alive and dead—in danger of being forgotten, in towns not in the mainstream of modern life. His verse is quietly formal, usually rhymed, always rhythmic. Sometimes as brief as a sonnet, as with my personal favourite ‘Grand Opening’: an ex-serviceman, mopping floors and putting the coffee on at 4 a.m., running a business at which (apparently) four previous owners have failed, but simply doing what has to be done…
It isn’t so much hope behind these doors as work to do. (…) He reaches for the light. He sets his OPEN sign against the night.
There is an inherent mournfulness in these stories of people in places which once thrived but are now hanging on without major farming or industrial or commercial opportunities. Many poems are about people towards the end of their lives, or even later as the title suggests. And even when youth is included it shows up as a teen alone on a swing on a November evening, working her phone:
and nothing moves, but for the falling dark and the quiver of her thumbs at work.
Railway stations close, businesses relocate, fires happen, towns empty out… but people are still there, poorer, aging, their prospects reduced. The overall tone is an almost religious attitude of accepting where you are, fighting the good fight, doing what must be done… moving, as we all must, into life’s inevitable landscape of burial grounds.
Nine thousand quarts of orange juice Five thousand loaves of bread Eight hundred fifty bars of soap Three hundred lipsticks (red) A gross of bras A score of scarves A dozen wallets (black) Ten cars Eight dogs Six cats Three homes Two canes One granite plaque
Editor’s note: If this poem doesn’t look like formal verse to you, and the only structure you see is the declining number of the items listed, then read it aloud to pick up the swing!
Melissa Balmain writes: “As you might guess, this one came about when I’d been doing some birdwatching. I considered starting one of those ‘life lists’ that birders have—then thought: what if there were other kinds of life lists? I never did get around to listing birds.”
Speaking of shopping, Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, can be preordered from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of comic verse. Her poems and prose have appeared in such places as The American Bystander, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Lighten Up Online,The Hopkins Review, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and The Washington Post. Her other poetry collections are Walking in on People (chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award) and The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults.A member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010, she lives nearby with her husband and (for now) one of their two children. She is a recovering mime.
Is love a beaming, eye to eye? An oath—you-only-till-I-die? A U that comes before an I? A hullabaloo-cum-lullaby? A flirt? A tilting of the neck? An art? A Machu Picchu trek back in time to that valiant peck on virgin cheek, that what-the-heck?
A brace of lovebirds who embrace instead of pecking cheeks, a plaice whose eyes achieve a state of grace—as one on one side of its face? A willing ear we learn to ration between soliloquies? A fashion? The winning chips we hope to cash in from laying on the wheel of passion?
A bridle? Or a bridal dress? An if-you-love-me-you’ll… duress? A scandal in the gutter press? A touch-me-there-uh-huh caress? A smile without the crow’s-feet creases? A summer fling that never ceases? A joining of two jigsaw pieces? A joke? A yoke with quick-releases?
Love grins with its beret askew, climbs up the sky and paints it blue then turns the sun to shine on you and says, “You’re puzzled? Hey, me too!”
*****
John Beaton writes: “This started with recollection of a joke by British comedian, Benny Hill: there’s quite a difference between ‘What is this thing called love?’ and ‘What is this thing called, love?’ I decided to come up with humorous answers and they started occurring to me in pairs of rhymed pairs. I want this to be light and playful. I cobbled the answers together in octameter lines, each with two rhymed tetrameter halves, and configured the lines in three quatrains (aabb) and a rhymed couplet. The result has elements of the sonnet form—fourteen lines and a turn at the end of line twelve. I’ve also played with alliteration and internal rhyme.”
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. (It is also in the Potcake Chapbook Rogues and Roses.) Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. https://www.john-beaton.com/
Life is one long horrible disease. As victim or as witness it’s the same: There are no opportunities to seize, And helplessness leaves no one left to blame. The path ahead seems only downward, slick As running water on a plastic slide, And pausing seems to be a magic trick That never works however hard you’ve tried. Eventually of course that blame gets laid, No matter what you want. A gap, a fault, A wall, some outside force that can’t be stayed, And you become at one with the gestalt. Some love, some fear, some cry, some laugh to death. You cannot talk to addicts. Save your breath.
*****
Marcus Bales writes: “This sonnet began as a set-up for a re-write of one of the terrible-pun-spoonerism poems from February 2023, and it sort of got away from me. It happens sometimes — you start out with one idea of what a poem is about and then the poem just won’t cooperate. At every line i was trying to tell the story of the alcoholic swami with cirrhosis who had been unfortunate enough to have married a woman who was impatient of inheriting, and who finally killed him when she weighed down upon the swami’s liver. As you can see, the poem was determined to have none of that, and went its own way, cleverly taking all the addiction and death for itself and leaving me with nothing I could use for my purposes. So to punish it I let it sit for a few months, hoping it would come to its senses and realize that the only way to see the light of day was to accept the purposes I had had in mind for it, but even there it was too smart for me, and kept quietly to itself until a day came when I hadn’t finished anything else. With a sigh and a shake of my head I posted it. So 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’).
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 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
Companion, constant presence in my life, my guardian, trusty servant, I rely on you the way a savage does his knife and with my every order you comply. When not required, on standby, you remain impassive in the corner of my room like furniture, prosaic and mundane, then, on command, you waken and resume your daily tasks but sometimes I detect a certain stubbornness akin to pique, an attitude of sneering disrespect, antagonism when you should be meek. Some subtle change is happening I fear. This time next year will I be master here?
*****
Richard Fleming writes: “As our electronic devices increasingly hold us in thrall, I’ve noticed that two of the issues which seem to be causing most unease, as humanity becomes increasingly dependent on “intelligent” robots, are the fear that we may become subservient to them, and that they will seek to harm us. I’ve tried to weave these twin concerns into this poem.”
Editor’s comments: The formality of this Shakespearean sonnet pairs well with the unformed future into which we are heading. Through ChatGPT and the like, we are interacting increasingly with a range of developing Artificial Intelligences, developing without a coherent plan or a forseeable end point. The most interesting exploration of this that I know of is John Varley’s ‘Steel Beach’ which is 30 years old, but deals with the problems of the Central Computer – which interacts with every person on the planet, but with an individualized personality for each – beginning to suffer from fragmentation and in effect schizophrenia… and what a personality breakdown in massive A.I. would lead to. It’s one of my favorite SF novels
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/
Form in Formless Times 