Come in then and mind the floor. Such a mucky mess. Yes, it is a good evening to be inside, listen to some poetry. The others are in fine form, spitting nails.
Someone shouted, “rhyme is dead” and another yelled back, “It is not. It’s just gotten a pacemaker! And it’s bloody well about time it did, too.” And then they were off. I’ve had to ask them to keep it down twice so far. They help keep me afloat, these rogue poets, but they can get so rowdy.
the fryer’s down. So no chips. But cook’s made a Lancashire Hotpot and we’ve plenty of pies
If you don’t mind a bit of liveliness, you can sit down with the others. Else, there is this quiet spot in the front and I’d be happy to serve you there.
Excuse me for a minute.
Cyril! You may not pummel Corky with breadsticks! Some restraint, please!
Seat yourself and I’ll soon check back with you.
Cyril, I mean it! Argue politely or I’ll escort you to the door. Put. Down. Both. Darts.
I may need to rethink the menu. And happy hour.
(Note the following poems are shared specifically for review and study purposes only and will be removed from this blog at a future date.)
Sine Qua Non
By A.E. Stalling
Your absence, father, is nothing. It is naught—
The factor by which nothing will multiply,
The gap of a dropped stitch, the needle’s eye
Weeping its black thread. It is the spot
Blindly spreading behind the looking glass.
It is the startled silences that come
When the refrigerator stops its hum,
And crickets pause to let the winter pass.
Your absence, father, is nothing—for it is
Omega’s long last O, memory’s elision,
The fraction of impossible division,
The element I move through, emptiness,
The void stars hang in, the interstice of lace,
The zero that still holds the sum in place.
Love and Vanity
By Lee Slonimsky
The word I choose to illustrate a beat
is “window,” “accent on first syllable”;
my class works sonnets till iambs complete,
while dusk falls slowly, then darkness is full.
Class ended, I stroll due east toward the Arch
to meet you for our dinner date at Cher’s;
yet lit up hosts of windows spark alarm,
as if the city’s too complex to bear.
These gold and orange squares of evening light,
geometries of secrecy, intrigue,
seem private veils for lives beyond my sight
in numbers that evoke some wild unease,
as if sheer city size undoes my name...
but then you come to view, my sun, my fame.
Contemporary Rhyme Vol. 5 No. 1 2008
The Dark
by Molly Peacock
Agitated, rolling in her barred bed,
the kind of prison-crib they have in hospitals,
one hand on the bar rattling, I’m not dead,
one leg thrashing, unpinioned from the walls
of bedsheets, the other amputated,
cataracts over both eyes: now those cataract,
could they have been removed? Could she
at least have seen her tentative, belated
young visitor? My mother said it wouldn’t be
safe to have her operated on. The acts
children perpetrate on parents: here she kept
grandmother in the dark the way, I suppose,
grandmother kept her. I was young and had just left
my husband to live my life alone in a pose
of independence. Yet I felt crushed by the few
years I had lived and there she lay, writhing
out from under the rock of death as I felt crushed
by it—and responsible: what could I do
for her? I held her hand and felt the gene string
that held us, then helped my mother rush to
the nurse’s station and back again,
agitated, trying to tie Gram’s bib
as she rolled, thrashing in our prison crib
of choice denied? the possible untried.
Lenten Song
By Phillis Levin
That the dead are real to us
Cannot be denied,
That the living are more real
When they are dead
Terrifies, that the dead can rise
As the living do is possible
Is possible to surmise,
But all the stars cannot come near
All we meet in an eye.
Flee from me, fear, as soot
Flies in a breeze, do not burn
Or settle in my sight,
I’ve tasted you long enough,
Let me savor
Something otherwise.
Who wakes beside me now
Suits my soul, so I turn to words
Only to say he changes
Into his robe, rustles a page,
He raises the lid of the piano
To release what’s born in its cage.
If ??words come back
To say they compromise
Or swear again they have died,
There’s no news in that, I reply,
But a music without notes
These notes comprise, still
As spring beneath us lies,
Already something otherwise.
From a Rooftop
By Timothy Steele
At dawn, down in the streets, from pavement grills,
Steam rises like the spent breath of the night.
At open windows, curtains stir on sills;
There’s caging drawn across a market’s face;
An empty crane, at its construction site,
Suspends a cable into chasmed space.
The roof shows other rooftops, their plateaus
Marked with antennas from which lines are tied
And strung with water beads or hung with clothes.
And here and there a pigeon comes to peck
At opaque puddles, its stiff walk supplied
By herky-jerky motions of its neck.
Downtown, tall buildings surmount a thinning haze.
The newest, the world center of a bank,
Has sides swept upward from a block-broad base,
Obsidian glass, fifty stories tall;
Against it hangs a window-washer’s plank,
An aerie on a frozen waterfall.
Nearer and eastward, past still-sleeping blocks,
Crews on the waterfront are changing shifts.
Trucks load at warehouses at the foot of docks;
A tug out in the bay, gathering speed,
With a short hollow blast of puffed smoke, lifts
Gulls to a cawing and air-borne stampede.
It is as if dawn pliantly compels
The city to relax to sounds and shapes,
To its diagonals and parallels:
Long streets with traffic signals blinking red,
Small squares of parks, alleys with fire escapes,
Rooftops above which cloudless day is spread.
And it’s as if the roofs’ breeze-freshened shelves,
Their level surfaces of gravelled tar
Where glassy fragments glitter, are themselves
A measure of the intermediate worth
Of all the stories to the morning star
And all the stories to the morning earth.
_____________
It is much harder to get a rhyme poem published in most journals (though there are journals that ONLY take rhyme or traditonal forms. I jest not!) That being said, YES, I've read several poems that contain rhyme even in uber-modern poetry magazines. Even,, Vallum (known for its advant gard content has published rhyme.)
What do yo see above?
What poetics have been used?
Like anything? What do you notice?
What technique or tool have you used yourself?
What spoke to you?
Feel free to discuss what you do not like, so long as you explain WHY you don't like it.
You are free to chat, veer off course, but all weapons are too be left outside and if I sense someone is about to lose an eye, I'll go full out "MOM-MAD" on you. THERE BE DRAGONS.
Happy weekend to all.