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Villanelle: Nothing So Upturns Creative Cauldrons As Retching Up Art

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Villanelle: Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art As the craft not art of constructing poetry for expediency Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart Isn’t each word a brick a stone a rock in the poet’s craft That simple folk through the ages filed sans hypocrisy Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art What representation of experience can by craft be wrought To distill meanings imbricated in sensuous mosaic artistry Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart Do English words sound the same in a loud Indlish mart Or evoke the connotations of a Shakespearean century Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art A South Asian voice reading Pope must sound like fart* To a Dryden stunned by a Malawian’s Jacobean poesy Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart The sense of sound divides Indlish poems from English craft As galactic spaces loom in between Indlish pen and literacy Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart * A reference to Eric Mottram’s comment on hearing Dom Moraes reading his poems on the BBC’s Third Programme in the fifties, characterised as an imitation of an Oxford don farting…. Cf. Alive in Parts of this Century: Eric Mottram at 70. Twickenham & Wakefield: North and South, 1994, p. 17. © T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014

Copyright © | Year Posted 2014




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