Tag Archives: ottava rima

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.

Review: A.E. Stallings, ‘Like’

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‘Like’ is the fourth volume of poetry from A.E. Stallings, the best poet that I know of who is writing in English today. The themes in ‘Like’ are the same as in her earlier collections: American childhood, Greek adulthood, children, memory, local wildlife, Greek mythology… and concern for the abused, whether women in the patriarchy or refugees in the Mediterranean. There is a difference of organization, though: instead of four or five different sections, ‘Like’ lumps all the poems together and arranges them alphabetically by title; the result is a smooth, wide-ranging read.

Stallings has a superb mastery of form, and plays endless tricks with it. Start on ‘Battle of Plataea: Aftermath’ and the apparent prose in 11 lines when read alertly turns out to be a rhymed sonnet in iambic pentameter. Or take the eponymous ‘Like, the Sestina’ which uses the word “like” as the rhyme for every one of the requisite 39 lines plus 3 mid-line rhymes (with such variations as “unlike”, “dislike”, “look-alike”). See how the most substantial poem, ‘Lost and Found’, carries its rambling dream-and-memory dissertation on for 36 stanzas of ottava rima in iambic pentameter, whereas the shorter and more time-sensitive ‘Swallows’ uses 6 stanzas in iambic tetrameter. Her ‘Refugee Fugue’ attacks the unmanageable and unimaginable horrors of the desperate and drowned through a blues poem, a host of epigrams, a found poem – an appropriately confused assemblage of forms for a situation not amenable to coherent resolution.

But forget the technicalities! The beauty is in the easy music of her verse, the casual wordplay as with the doorbell that
Portended importunity from Porlock,
the throwaway etymological observations as of nighttime thoughts:
To consider means to contemplate the stars,
the poem on a ‘Pencil’ that ends
And Time the other implement
That sharpens and grows shorter,
the playfulness of ‘Night Thoughts’ that begins
Night thoughts are not like bats
and then goes on to describe the flight of bats in extended lyrical detail, before finally ending with how night thoughts are different…
And always the underlying awareness of thousands of years of history, showing through in the description of sky, contemporary but ancient, as
the contrailed palimpsest of blue.

And that leads me to my only regrets about Stallings’ verse: too much Greek literature with which I’m barely familiar. I’m not saying it’s a failing on her part, it’s merely a regret on my part that I can’t keep up. Although I would love to come across work by her with Norse themes…

But I will settle for what she offers: a very wide range. She can be very succinct as with ‘Paradox’:
Of the ones that happened to die, the little ones and the old,
Of hypothermia, or drowning, all died of cold.

Equally, she can be extensive and thorough in her exploration of a theme as with ‘Lost and Found’, where she is wandering through a dream of mountainous moonscapes, landfill landscapes, of things lost – toys, gloves, loves, baby teeth, time, opportunities, keys, coins – led by Mnemosyne, Memory herself, the mother of all the muses. The smooth formal stanzas of ottava rima, maintained steadily for 288 lines, provide the same meditative state as the 250 lines of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ or Edward FitzGerald’s even longer ‘Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam’.

My personal favorite in ‘Like‘ is her semi-formal ‘Crow, Gentleman’ (whose title I am guessing was changed from the original ‘Gentleman Crow’ to prevent it from coming between two poems in ‘Like’ addressed to her daughter). It begins:
Pacing to and fro
Along the autumn shore
Among the wrack and reek

With your arms clasped behind your back
And sporting your grey frock coat
Trimmed in black

And your black hat and your lean long-legged stride,
Up and down the strand perusing
The headlines of the tide:

and ends:
Life is a joke you crack,
Wry and amusing,
And death a dainty snack.

I find Stallings’ work altogether delightful: by turns sardonic, detached, passionate, compassionate, always observing carefully, always expressing wittily, always in masterful control of rhythm and rhyme. I repeat: I don’t know of a better poet writing in English today.