Tag Archives: nonce form

Nonce form: Gail White, ‘Cardinal Richelieu’s Cats’

4 Replies

The Cardinal works into the night
To realize his dream:
To keep the nobles in their place,
Make royalty supreme.
He knows it’s time for government
To grow and centralize,
And when the nobles sober up
They won’t believe their eyes.

And at his feet
The indiscreet
Delightful pet he calls Gazette
Provides his inspiration.

He spreads the map of Europe out
And studies its repair,
Especially in ways that might
Reduce the Hapsburg share,
With here a war and there a plot
And now and then a coup..
His opposition? Well, he might
Assassinate a few.

While on his knees
Soft Soumise,
The Cardinal’s best Eminence Grise,
Provides his inspiration.

*****

This poem by Gail White won The Lyric Magazine’s Roberts Memorial Prize for 2022. White, the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, writes: “I’d love to know the names of all 14 of his cats. I’m a believer!”

In a post entitled ‘The Cardinal liked cats – in 1642 he had fourteen!‘, the Eminence Rouge blog states: ‘Here are some of the names of the fourteen favourite felines: Racan (poet and Academician), Gazette (indiscrete), Rubis sur l’Ongle (scratchy), Pyrame & Thysbe (lovers who slept with paws entwined), Serpolet (loved sunning himself), Felimare (tiger-striped), Soumise (submissive, R’s favourite), Lucifer (jet black), Ludovic le Cruel (rat-killer), Ludoviska (rat-catcher’s Polish mistress), Mimi-Paillon (‘straw’ angora), Mounard le Fougueux (‘ardent’, quarellsome,capricious,worldy), Perruque (fell from Racan’s wig), and Gavroche (gastro-angora).’ (Note: this totals 14 if ‘Pyrame & Thysbe’ is the name of one cat that sleeps holding its own paws.)

However in the comments posted by readers of that blog there is scepticism about the story. One writes: ‘Elizabeth Wirth Marwick, The Young Richelieu (Chicago, 1983), says she has been unable to find contemporary documentation on cats, but that he had canaries and warblers, and also 12 small dogs were boarded at Rueil. She wonders if lap-dogs have been turned into cats in the telling. (p. 242, n. 124) But that would be a bizarre change to make.’

A further comment is: ‘I always did think this was true, but now it’s looking more and more likely to me that Richelieu never had cats. I can’t find a source anywhere for all this oft-repeated “information” on the web; people just seem to be copying one another. The earlier comment about the 1938 biographer who was unable to find contemporary documentation is significant. Katharine Macdonogh, in her 1999 book Reigning Cats and Dogs, A History of Pets at Court Since the Renaissance, states on page 124 that the story is a myth, and that it was invented by Paradis de Moncrief, a “toady” at the court of Louis XV.’

Gail White’s 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’.
https://www.amazon.com/Catechism-Gail-White/dp/0692696660

Painting: Charles Édouard Delort (1841-1895): La distraction de Richelieu (The cardinal’s leisure), in the public domain.

Using form: nonce form; John Beaton, ‘Wolves’

Leave a reply

I’m wakened, drawn towards the ice-thin window,
to witness scenes as faint and still as death.
How bleak the moon; how bare the trees and meadows;
sky’s pale maw overhangs
Earth bleached beneath star fangs.
Night’s curled lip sneers on shadows
of mountains set like teeth.

Two bow waves shear the median of the valley,
iced hayfield yields as feral muscles glide–
hoarfrost disturbed by wakes of live torpedoes.
Grey shoulders breach and lope,
implode and telescope,
impelled by ruthless credos
of chilled and vicious pride.

The wolves tear savage furrows down the nightscape;
their eyes are shined with blood, their mission clear.
Grass springs back shocked to green behind their passage–
twin tracks traverse the vales,
cold comets trailing tails
leave scarred in frost their message:
the wolves, the wolves passed here.

*****

John Beaton writes: “This describes a real incident on our acreage when I woke in the middle of a frosty night for no apparent reason and looked out the window. I was struck by the grace, power, and sense of danger the wolves evoked.
“The first three lines are pentameter and the endings alternate—feminine, masculine, feminine. The next four lines contract to trimeter to give a sense of speed and acceleration. Lines two and seven have a masculine rhyme that closes the stanza and ties its parts together. The overall rhyme-scheme is xabccba. My intent was to convey the power and motion of the wolves running and I built in alliteration and internal rhyme to help with this.”

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. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
https://www.john-beaton.com/

Photo: “Wolves With Northern Lights (Color Corrected)” by edenpictures is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Poem: ‘Homage From British Expats’

2 Replies

Thou noble, purest British race!
Thy children we,
Inheriting thy every trace;
From thy straight back, unmoving face,
We learn the truest social grace,
Pomposity.

To thee the new is never good,
’Tis duty shirked.
Thou’dst never think, and much less brood;
Thou duty-bound eatst wooden food;
Thou ever ramrod-straight hast stood,
And never worked.

Britain! Served on a silver tray
Thine Empire’s tea –
Respectfully we beg to say
We praise thee, but we cannot stay,
We have our duty far away,
Escaping thee.

*****

This is the third of the poems recently published by Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and I’m pleased at how different the three of them are. ‘Ultimate Control’ is a Science Fiction sonnet, ‘Ticking Away’ is a meditation on time, life and death, and this one was written almost 50 years ago in reaction against (some aspects of) being sent to boarding school in England.

A little personal context: I was raised as an expat in the Bahamas by my Danish father and English mother. After five years of Church of England primary boarding school in Jamaica (when at least I came home three times a year) I went to England for five more years of boarding school, and came home rarely. The countryside setting of Stowe was delightful, and I got a good education with a lot of poetry, and I learned sarcasm. It all uprooted me from being fully Bahamian, but failed to make me fully English. In the 1970s the Bahamas didn’t want me and I didn’t want England. So… Denmark, then Canada, then the US, and finally the Bahamas again as a foreign resident. I have been an expat all my life – and frequently sarcastic about it.

The poem is a nonce form – I used to produce them easily in my 20s, I wish I still did. It’s in iambics rhyming ABAAAB, with four feet to the A lines and only two to the B lines – the last line of each verse being a punch line and the shortness of the line helping strengthen that effect.

“Image” by spock-ola is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Poem: ‘Ticking Away’

3 Replies

You have hopes. You don’t expect
that they’ll ever come to pass
but you drink, think and reflect
as you look into the glass…
And you wonder what will happen
while your life just ticks away:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… end of play.

Science’s prognostications,
things you’d pick up in a flash:
soon they’ll start rejuvenations
if you only had the cash…
Cash cuts those who’d live forever
from the rest as with a knife:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… end of life.

But you don’t like thoughts of dying
so you hope you’ve got a soul;
and though preachers are caught lying
Heaven seems attainable…
But there’s got to be a Heaven
or prayer’s just a waste of breath:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… towards death.

Though you think that you’re so clever,
you’ve got goals but not the How.
Play the lottery for ever
it must pay off – why not now?
But you never do the homework
so at question time you’re stuck:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… out of luck.

That affair you never had
with the person down the street
for you’re really not that bad
and besides, you rarely meet…
But it sits there like a present
that’s unopened on a shelf:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… end of self.

So there’s all the other options
for the things you’d like to do:
travel, study, home, adoptions,
building family anew,
but you’re aging while you’re thinking
and the chances go on by:
Tick, tick, tick, tick… till you die.

*****

On this funereal day I take happy morbid pleasure in remembering that we are all mortal. Let’s keep on ticking as long as we can! ‘Ticking Away’ was published in the most recent edition of David Stephenson’s ‘Pulsebeat Poetry Journal‘, a recent and welcome addition to the growing cadre of formal-friendly magazines. It’s a nonce form, shaped in the writing of it; the lines rhyming ABABCDD, and the metre being a rapid patter broken by the ticking in the last line of the stanza.

You could say it’s mostly written in incomplete trochaic tetrameter, the form of Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,

But I prefer to read it with the rapid beat of W.S. Gilbert’s

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral

which, technically, you could read as iambic octosyllable

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral

but not all of those stressed syllables have equal weight. Gilbert’s lyrics are patter, built on highly stressed, semi-stressed and unstressed syllables. English poetry is flexible and chaotic, and its analysis can be contradictory, because the poetry is a fusion of casual Anglo-Saxon verse which counts stresses but not syllables, and formal French verse which counts syllables but not stresses. This mirrors the creation of English itself which is a fusion of various Germanic and Romance languages… with a dash of Celtic grammar thrown in. (Where do you think the pointless auxiliary verb “do” comes from in the phrase “Where do you think”, rather than a more straightforward “Whence think you”? Answer: Celtic.) But the educated literati of the past few hundred years learned all their analysis of grammar and poetry from the French who in turn were drawing on the Greeks and Romans. And some of that thinking is irrelevant to Germanic and Celtic structures.

TLDR: Write what feels natural, enjoyable and memorable. Personally, I’m always glad to remember I don’t have to write everything in iambic pentameter…

Photo: “Self portrait – Ticking away” by MattysFlicks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Poem: ‘Leadership Transition’

Leave a reply

Julius Caesar, Antony, King Lear,
Hamlet, Macbeth – corrupted, vain, impure,
Irrational, bombastic, insecure –
He’s no more clarity or veritas
Than the deceptions of a covert war,
All morals blurred.

That tyrant rant, Tyrannosaurus roar,
Forecasts he’ll suffer a dictator’s fate:
His proud obsessed confusion first seems great,
Then grates, unravels at the seams, slips gear,
Loses its moral metaphors, grows crass;
He dies absurd.

Octavius, Malcolm, Edgar, Fortinbras,
Comes from the wings and strides to centre stage –
Competent, measured, reasonable, sane –
To rule the wreckage of the tragic reign;
Restores some structure, closes out the age,
Speaks the last word.

This archetypal character’s strong thump
Will get his nation out of the morass;
The raucous self-styled hero being dead,
A truer leader takes the throne instead.
(How Shakespeare’d end the Tragedy of Trump
Can be inferred.)

The common fate of Shakespeare’s flawed protagonists–death, and replacement by a more worthy ruler–is a story that humans enjoy and wish applied in their own times and countries… although they may naturally disagree on which ruler is disgraceful and which would be more worthy. Speaking for myself, I don’t need to see a death–I’d be happy for Putin and Trump to avoid assassination or jail by going into comfortable exile at a golf hotel in southern Russia. (You read it first here.) But Shakespeare would deal with them more definitively.

This poem is the third of the five poems published this month in The Brazen Head. Its four stanzas are in iambic pentameter with a short 6th line. The rhymes largely carry over between stanzas–the 6th lines only rhyme with each other. The rhymes and the stanza structure are designed to create a sense of satisfactory achievement–exactly what I feel with Biden taking over from Trump. (Similarly I would love to see Navalny take over from Putin, and almost anyone replace Boris Johnson.)

“York Minster – June 2013 – Emperor Constantine – One Cool Dude” by Gareth1953 All Right Now is marked with CC BY 2.0.

Experimental Poem: ‘Pointillist’

2 Replies

(Note: this poem is so named because if you look at it closely you may not find as much meaning as if you step back, let it flow past you, and see an outline of a story.)

Awake
Anew
Awhile
Askew;
Afoot
Among
Amass
Along;
Abet
Aback
Ado
Alack;
Alas!

Abroad
Again
Astride
Amain;
Atop
Alight
Aglow
Afright;
Afar
Ahead
Aloft
Abed;
Alone!

Aware
Amused
Affair
Accused;
Away
Aboard
Affray
Abhorred;
Aground
Alive
Abound
Arrive;
Ahoy!

Array
Await
Assay
Abate;
Appraise
Accord
Amaze
Adored;
Apprise
Appoint
Arise
Anoint;
Adieu!

This poem started (if I remember correctly) as four or five of the early words coming into my head with a sense of rhyme and rhythm when I was on the point of falling asleep. I roused myself enough to write the words down, doing what I consider an essential part of the communication I long for with my unconscious, my Muse–acknowledge the Muse by writing whatever is offered to you, whether or not it is complete or makes sense.

The next day I wrote more, keeping to iambic monometer and words of Anglo-Saxon derivation beginning with A. As a hint of a story took shape, I kept writing. After the first two stanzas I moved over into words of Latin derivation and went for more intense rhyme. Long lists of words were involved. After four days I had the whole poem.

As for the story itself… I see a hero setting out, failing, trying again, under threat, escaping by boat, shipwrecked, and finally rewarded. Are they male or female, and of what age? Did they have a love affair? Did they end up at home or in foreign lands? If you look at the poem sideways you may find an answer that suits you. Or (of course) not.

‘Pointillist’ was the second of five poems recently published in the Poetry section of The Brazen Head.

“Pointillistically abstracted” by readerwalker is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Poem: ‘His Mad Skull’s Like’

Leave a reply

His mad skull’s like
a motorcycle cage of death,
the engines roaring over and beneath:
conflicting paths, crashless machinery –
the crowd roars, hoping for catastrophe.

an alchemist’s laboratory,
he strives through Universal symmetry
alone to conquer nature, friendlessly,
transmuting hopeless to hope endlessly.

a planet with its atmosphere,
blossoming gaudy after starting drear;
from grand extinctions and tectonic faults
life reaches out to loot galactic vaults.

a plant with taproot down the spine
side-nerve extractors reaching out to mine
the Universe’s minerals of sense,
make sense, and raise to Mind the mind’s pretense.

This poem along with four others of mine has just been published in The Brazen Head in the UK. I came across the magazine through Marcus Bales who published three sonnets in it in October 2021. The magazine is an idiosyncratic quarterly blog with a diversified structure and a wealth of unexpected ideas in poetry and prose. My poem felt quite at home. I will post the other poems in the next little while–a couple of them have even more unusual forms; the five make a nice set.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Max Gutmann, ‘Kindling’

Leave a reply

The day his girlfriend’s father let him cut
The kindling was the cracking of a crust,
A heavy volume falling open at
A pleasant page. He felt the guard relax
At last: it takes some trust
To hand a man an ax.

They foraged for straight grain, which wouldn’t knot
The blade, but give hospitably, a quick
Clean breach, if he could hit the angle right.
The older man first watched, and then went in.
Alone, he chopped each stick
To almost pencil-thin,

Absorbed in seeking out that magic split,
Delicious every time that it occurred,
A touch of luck rewarding skill and sweat,
Though earned, still only half-anticipated,
Like just the sought-for word,
Or love reciprocated.

Max Gutmann writes: “I like the pattern—unique without being complex, rhyming throughout but ringingly only at the stanza ends. I hope the last simile feels both surprising and, like an ax biting a block, inevitable.”

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.

‘Kindling’ was first published in The Formalist.

maxgutmann.com

“Chopping kindling” by *Tom* is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

‘Old Sailors’ – one poem, two forms

Leave a reply

Two tars talked of sealing and sailing; one said with a sigh
“Remember gulls wheeling and wailing, we wondering why,
“And noting bells pealing, sun paling — it vanished like pie!
“And then the boat heeling, sky hailing, the wind getting high,
“And that drunken Yank reeling to railing and retching his rye,
“John missing his Darjeeling jailing, and calling for chai?
“While we battened, all kneeling and nailing, the hurricane nigh,
“And me longing for Ealing, and ailing?”
His mate said “Aye-aye;
“I could stand the odd stealing, food staling, not fit for a sty,
“And forget any feeling of failing, too vast to defy –
“Home-leaving your peeling-paint paling too far to espy –
“All because of the healing friend-hailing, the hello! and hi!
“And, with the gulls squealing, quick-scaling the mast to the sky.”

That was the original version, published in Snakeskin. Two sailors talking, each with a long, rambling reminiscence. When I submitted the poem to Beth Houston for consideration for the ‘Extreme Formal Poems: Contemporary Poets‘ anthology she was assembling, she suggested reformatting it to break each line between the two talkers, leading to a rapidfire (and constantly interrupted) flow of memories.

Two tars talked of sealing and sailing,
One said with a sigh:
“Remember gulls wheeling and wailing—”
“We wondering why—”
“And noting bells pealing, sun paling—”
“It vanished like pie!”
“And then the boat heeling, sky hailing—”
“The wind getting high…”
“And that drunken Yank reeling to railing—”
“And retching his rye!”
“John missing his Darjeeling jailing—”
“And calling for chai—”
“Us battening, kneeling and nailing—”
“The hurricane nigh!”
“Me longing for Ealing, and ailing—”
“This mate said ‘Aye-aye’—”
“I’d stand the odd stealing, food staling—”
“Not fit for a sty!”
“Forget any feeling of failing—”
“Too vast to defy!”
“Home-leaving your peeling-paint paling—”
“Too far to espy—”
“Because of the healing friend-hailing—”
“The hello! The hi!”
“And, with the gulls squealing, quick-scaling—”
“The mast to the sky.”

Here the two sailors alternate every half-line. (I’m having difficulty insetting the second half in WordPress, the way it shows up in the printed book.) Beth Houston made a couple of other editorial changes, in part to create better sense within this alternation (for example, the original break of ‘His mate said “Aye-aye” is modified to “This mate said ‘Aye-aye’—”) and in part because her Extreme Formalism manifests in rigourous syllable-counting, and she ruthlessly eliminates the occasional excess syllable at the beginning of a line which I allow for conversational flow.

But I find it interesting to see essentially the same poem structured in two different ways. Does it make a difference? Does the new variant lose the “good nautical rhythm” and “finely composed wordy-whirlwind of images” that others have commented on, or does it enhance them? Is version preferable to the other? Does one read more easily, or is one more vivid, or is one easier to memorise? I’m stuck on this, and need outside opinions. I would truly appreciate a comment below from anyone reading this.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Max Gutmann, ‘Old Growth’

Leave a reply

So rooted
seem couples to a child! Firm-trunked and tall.
Some scrawny: sparsely leaved or badly fruited,
but fixed and solid, works of nature all.
It challenges imagination
that choice was part of the creation.

That they,
these halves, weren’t mingled always, childhood fails
to comprehend. The stories of the way
one’s parents met are magic, fairy tales.
To know the seed becomes the tree
does not dispel the mystery.

Divorce,
unless it strikes our parents, flashes where
it cannot burst our faith. A sudden force
that leaves the broken trunks deformed but there,
disaster-stricken, strangely ill,
but giving partial shelter still.

We feel
this all collapse as childhood’s shed. The trees
we thought so firm and fixed were never real.
To navigate by them can only tease.
Whatever fantasies persist,
unmoving couples don’t exist.

To find
one’s half and gather height and leaves are less
like acts of nature than like hiking blind.
Soil shifts and landmarks vanish. We must guess,
our one-time orchard morphing to
a wood no map can guide us through.

Max Gutmann writes: “It took me a long time to make a poem I liked of this thought/experience. The form supports emphasis where it’s helpful, and that it varies from the iambic pentameter some readers expect mirrors the sense. I rarely feel my verse quotable, but I feel that about ‘To know the seed becomes the tree/does not dispel the mystery’.”

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.

‘Old Growth’ was first published in Able Muse. Some of his ‘Travels with Alice’ limericks appear in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Travels and Travails‘. You can find more of his work at maxgutmann.com