Tag Archives: formal verse

Marcus Bales, ‘Sailing to Margaritaville’

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That is the country we go to, all of us
Made young again by music, smooth with oil
And lust, all generations generous
With youth and laughter. Couples coil
And uncoil, casually amorous,
With booze in the blender and shrimp beginning to boil.
Everybody dreams they have the chance
To chase the charms and challenge of romance.

A laughing bard is the essential thing.
A patterned shirt, an old six-string guitar,
Who urges us to sing and louder sing
And clap and dance and order from the bar,
And thank hard-working servers as they bring
The stuff that lubricates this whole bazaar.
And though the bard is covering the bill,
Tip well when you’re in Margaritaville.

Oh, parrotheads — imagination’s fire
Illuminates the marvel of it all,
And conjures every sorcery we require,
The call to the response, response to call,
A consummation fevered with desire,
Beatified by the local alcohol.
The song creates the dream. The dream creates
Another song the dreamer celebrates.

And once reality is far away,
Our youth returned, our stamina restored,
We eat and drink and sing and dance and play
And manifest ourselves within each chord
As if we might entrance ourselves to stay
Within this reverie we’ve found aboard
The magic vessel Margaritaville,
Distilling what distillers can’t distill.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Someone immediately floated a raft of shit my way over this poem, claiming, in a local Cleveland group generally given to local music, that I’m normalizing alcoholism. I know — it’s an astonishing misinterpretation, but there it is. And in spite of my protestations, he insisted on shouting that I was a lush, a drunk, and an idiot for promoting and approving a disease. Well, it’s not as if poets aren’t used to being misunderstood.

The odd thing to me about this is that I work hard to trigger people through poetry. That’s what art does, in my view, confront us with our frauds and foibles, and makes us look at them in detail. If, of course, we read poetry at all. There must be some corollary to Murphy’s Law that states that when a poem can be misinterpreted it will be misinterpreted. Normally I’m delighted by responses to my poems that are outraged and offended, because normally those responses are from the people I’m trying to outrage and offend. But this blindsided me. The entire Jimmy Buffett phenomenon was built on the fantasy of sun and sand and sea, which is only tangentially alcohol-fueled. No doubt alcohol plays a role in lubricating the enchantment, but it’s the enchantment people go for, not alcoholism.

And that enchantment is powerful. It makes people wear loud clothes and play loud music. But the central lure is that we can think of ourselves as all multi-talented and tanned, slim and young and horny. It’s not the lure of tales of drunkenness and cruelty on a summer afternoon, but rather the opposite: tales of slightly disreputable fun, but tales of the lure of the freedoms from regimentation for the freedoms of a more relaxed like-minded culture where everyone is youthfully attractive and eagerly lascivious.

And what a lure! Even those of us whose only encounter with youthfully attractive and eagerly lascivious were our own dreams had those dreams. And with Jimmy Buffett the price of admission was a seducing tune and a clever lyric. You didn’t need a white sportcoat, much less a pink crustacean. All you needed was a sense of lockstepness of the modern bourgeoisie and a desire to escape it. The whole thing is all in your mind. You create your own sensitive young poet self in a lubricious setting among the young and eager to love you. It’s thrilling, it’s fulfilling, it’s art.”

*****

(Editor’s note: From the title, to the ottava rima form, to the themes, ‘Sailing to Margaritaville’ pays homage to Jimmy Buffett by riffing on W.B. Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium‘. Beginning with Yeats’ opening words, “That is no country for old men” and all the way through, Bales echoes and plays with Yeats’ words, bringing everything to Buffett’s Margaritaville.)

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: “Wasting away again in Margaritaville……..” by efleming is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Using form: Ottava Rima: Max Gutmann, ‘Life, That Hack!’ (from Don Juan Finish’d)

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If we could but instill in Life–that hack!–
The element’ry rules of composition,
Prevent the crude and sloppy maniac
From spoiling every scene with his tradition
Of shouting in our faces like a pack
Of drunken sailors wailing their rendition
Of “Captown Races” or “My Drawlin’ Clementime,”
Their rhythmic belching almost keeping them in time.

For Life to utilize the art of Art
Could help in many ways that we could mention.
Some structure and suspense would be a start.
To get us upright in our seats, fists clenchin’,
A little rising action would be smart
(Or something that would help us pay attention,
Instead of simply zoning out a lot
And missing half the details of the plot).

But Life, I fear, shall never learn to craft
A decent tale. (It hasn’t that ambition.)
It uses characters extremely daft,
And wastes far too much time in exposition.
It never bothers to revise a draft,
Too taken with its own first thoughts. Perdition!
Each aspect of the story is a shame–
And worst, the ending’s always just the same.

Max Gutmann writes: “Don Juan Finish’d fancifully completes Lord Byron’s unfinished comic epic. Excerpts have been contributed to Light, Lighten Up Online, Orbis, Slant, Think, the website of the Byron Society, and Pulsebeat, where ‘Life, That Hack!’ is among the excerpts to have appeared. The complete poem is still unpublished, though I privately printed some copies to share with friends and colleagues.
Like Byron’s poem, Don Juan Finish’d is often philosophical, at times facetiously, as here.”

Editor’s note: As with Byron’s original, Gutmann’s Don Juan Finish’d is written in ottava rima: eight-line stanzas in iambic pentameter rhyming ABABABCC, with the final line or two typically used to humorously deflate whatever more high-sounding statements were made earlier in the stanza.

Max Gutmann has worked as, among other things, a stage manager, a journalist, a teacher, an editor, a clerk, a factory worker, a community service officer, the business manager of an improv troupe, and a performer in a Daffy Duck costume. Occasionally, he has even earned money writing plays and poems.

Photo: “comedy/tragedy masks, waterfall” by milagroswaid is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: ‘Parking Lot’

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Although not of their class, I went to church
with Bryce and Nicky in the congregation.
In a shop’s parking lot and in the lurch
I asked Bryce for a job, loan, or donation.
Then Nicky’s car came up and Bryce got in,
the bastards swerved to hit me, ran me down;
when I got up, they ran me down again,
hit the wall with their car, left with a frown.
They don’t apologise, don’t feel the need –
“You caused it all ill-manneredly,” they say.
“Our car was damaged too.” (But did they bleed?)
I bothered them; they wanted me away.
The congregation says “Forgive, forget.”
Decades have passed. Forget? Forgive? Not yet.

*****

This Shakespearean sonnet (iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) has just been published in this month’s Snakeskin. Editor George Simmers expressed concern that it might be a true story… let me reassure everyone, I neither attend church nor get hit by cars. The poem is at most a parable, a parabolic approach to events.

Photo: from Snakeskin.

Susan McLean, ‘Dead Giveaway’

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Who’ll take my dead? I’ve carried them so long
my mind is swaybacked from their aching weight.
I can’t just cast them off. It would be wrong
to leave them in some shed, like unclaimed freight.
How could I walk away as Cathy’s smile
collapsed, as Brian gently said “Take care,”
and Grammy begged “Please take me home now” while
I shut them in the dark and left them there?

I’ve jettisoned so much I took to heart—
the afterlife, belief in justice, prayer.
I’ll have to lay my dead down too, I know.
After a party, when my friends depart,
I wash up, stow away what’s left, yet they’re
still here. The dead are always last to go.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I love the way a cliché can take on new life if the words are interpreted in a nontraditional way. The title of this poem seemed painfully poignant to me when I imagined it applying to the dead we all carry around with us. It would be nice to be able to walk away from that sadness, but of course who among us could bring ourselves to do it? Though I try to keep the voice of the poem sounding natural, I pay attention to the play of sounds in the words, as in the echoes of consonant and vowel sounds in the first two lines: “take,” “swaybacked,” “aching,” and “weight.” In the sestet of the sonnet, the imagined action of the speaker’s leaving her dead behind in the octave is reversed when she is herself left behind by her departing friends, with only her dead to keep her company.
This poem first appeared in the online journal 14 by 14, and later was published in my
second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

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

Photo: “Ghosts of the old house” by Tree Leaf Clover is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Quincy R. Lehr, ‘As if by chance’

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When I looked at her, and when her lips
Pulled back to show her teeth, and when her voice
Broke into laughter, I could only think
Of moments that I’d pissed away, each choice
I’d left to others, and the careless slips
That landed me beside an empty drink.
That afternoon, I could have sworn I saw
A thinner, hopeful version of my face
Staring from behind her retinas–
Familiar, yes, the eyes, the skin, the jaw,
But in that instant somehow out of place.
It cast a knowing frown. The gravitas
Was overbearing. Nonetheless, we filled
The void with gossip, anecdotes and smut,
Comparing chatty journals–note by note.
Like poets, we dissembled in the rut
That each of us was in, our chances killed
By loss of nerve or failure to emote.
But still, a sneer could not have hurt me more
Than her clear laugh that sang of expectations
So long forgotten from a distant day
When youth still spread before me, and the poor
And pitiful attempts at explanations
Still lay in ambush, only years away.

*****

Quincy R. Lehr writes: “This poem was literally about running into a high school friend of mine by chance on the day I defended my doctoral dissertation (though that’s not in the poem). It’s funny how old I thought I was at twenty-nine.”

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

Photo: “Young woman laughing” by Snapshooter46 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Susan McLean, ‘The Mirror’s Desolation’

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Once you adored me. I would bask
in looks you saved for me alone,
giving no hint—if any ask—
of secrets only I have known.
But now you find me hard to face.
I care for you too much to lie,
copying lines you would erase.
You hurry past, head down, and I,
sensing your pained indignity,
return your look of mute distress.
Though you no longer cherish me,
I do not love you any less.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I took the idea of a talking mirror from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mirror,’ but whereas she presents the mirror as being totally dispassionate, my mirror reflects the emotions as well as the faces of those who look into it. Sometimes, if you see someone beautiful, you may think “the mirror loves her (or him).” But it occurred to me that mirrors love everyone. They just as gladly reflect the old and ugly as the young and beautiful. In this poem, I imagine the mirror’s sorrow that its love is not returned. In French, “I’m sorry” is “je suis désolé” (“I’m desolated”), which always seemed charmingly over-the-top to me. It occurred to me that the phrase “the mirror’s desolation” could refer both to the sorrow the mirror feels and to the devastation it causes. This poem first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, and then in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.

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

Illustration: DALL-E

Edmund Conti, ‘Two’s Company’

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Sweet are the uses of divinity
And sweeter yet in keeping us engrossed
Is the simple complex concept of the trinity
The Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Is making sense of Them too much a bother?
Is there any way to master Three-in-One?
The son, the Holy Ghost and Father,
The Holy Ghost, the Father and the Son.

I use this ancient form, the cranky sonnet
To crank out my aberrant Dunciad
And what evolves from overthinking on it:
The Spook, the Kid and–dare I say it?–Dad.

It’s true that poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make himself a three.

*****

Edmund Conti writes: “I wasn’t going to get into any interpretations of the Trinity. Just noting that scholars writing about it don’t shed much light. So I decided to shed my own. Somewhere along the line I may have gone a little overboard. (Pray for me.) I think my cranky sonnet has its own rhyme scheme, not one from the books. Meanwhile I’ve forgotten what ”Dunciad” means except that it was a good rhyme word. Forgetting all that, I guess this whole thing was inspired by Joyce Kilmer’s memorable last line.”

Edmund Conti has recent poems published in Light, Lighten-Up Online, The Lyric, The Asses of Parnassus, newversenews, Verse-Virtual and Open Arts Forum. His book of poems, Just So You Know, released by Kelsay Books
https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/
was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-ragHis poems have appeared in several Potcake Chapbooks: Tourists and Cannibals
Rogues and Roses
Families and Other Fiascoes
Wordplayful
all available from Sampson Low Publishers

Photo: “Father, Son & Holy Ghost” by elston is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Review: ‘Burial Grounds’ by Brian Gavin

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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.

*****

Brian Gavin is a retired Distribution Manager who started writing poetry 10 years ago. His poems have appeared in The Journal of Formal Poetry, Peninsula Poets and Snakeskin Magazine, and in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Careers and Other Catastrophes’. He lives in Lakeport, Michigan, USA, with his wife Karen. ‘Burial Grounds’ is available from Kelsay Books.

Melissa Balmain, ‘Shopper’s Life List’

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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

*****

From Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

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.

“Missing Plaque” by QuesterMark is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

John Beaton, ‘A Many-Splendoured Thing?’

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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/

“What do you see through love?” by TW Chang is licensed under CC BY 2.0.