What do you think of my poem?

Some nice language and imagery twists. The couplets seem like the best parts, although I'd ditch the "is's" and that last "like" to make it more declarative. All and all, not bad for a man.

it's okay, although I'd remove the second 'r' in the third line and alter some of your language in accordance. this would also make it more declaratory.

Don't you mean defecatory?

not quite but I think it has a lot of pootential.

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. It's still a bit rough.
Best,
Greg

Standard disclaimer: Following comments may not prove of value, being informed by personal taste and idiosyncratic standards.

I found the image of "worthless coins of blackened gum" to be quite vivid and immediate. It did not demand an effort of decipherment, but struck me as clearly as the stroke of a bell. By way of contrast, the remainder of the language often has a quality of thickness and turbidity. This seems to be the effect you were seeking, and if that is the case, you have succeeded in your quest.

The difficulty with such an effect is that it retards the reader's desire to cooperate with the poem, by presenting him with the poetic equivalent of clayey mud. Ideally, this effect should be implied more than imposed, artfully suggested rather than exemplified. A more regular metre would be a help in this.

Of course, the ideal poem is damned tough to pull off, even if you are destined for Westminster Abbey.

Thank you, Aimless.

Any comments regarding meaning?

Best,
Greg

Things I didn't quite like:

1. Much of the vocabulary. "Vantage", "affords", "rendered", ugly and useless words. The small potential of "rendered" is spoiled by the 2nd stanza's fifth line, which shits on the whole piece.

2. Some of the imagery is cliche, or adapted cliche. Examples: "lords in their slate tuxedoes", "summer's yellow bath of light".

3. I'm not sure that the "anchor" part works, though it's attractive. And it has to work, to save the poem.

Things I did quite like:

1. Some of the images. Examples: "bloused in white", "coins of blackened gum" (don't like "foxed" though).

2. The transition in line 3 from god-view (although first two lines need work) to "You're peering down". Very strong.

Thing I am in two minds about:

1. The word "scumble".

Qn: does a poem have to be like a small miracle? Like 'God's in the next room, deigning to speak to you' except he can't speak to you (you'd EXPLODERATE!) so you have to interpret the mumbling and ruffling under the door. Therefore if a poem doesn't make you cry or scare the shit out of you... then... well...

And I'm not saying a poem has to be a bludgel, High Windows being a case in point: quietly tender poems that just blows you away.

Cf.

14:50 Rosekinghall

The next train on Platform 6 will be the 14:50

Rosekinghall - Gallowshill and Blindwell, calling at:
Fairygreen - Templelands - Stars of Forthneth - Silverwells - Honeyhole - Bee Cott - Pleasance - Butterglen - Heatheryhaugh - St. Bride's Ring - Diltie Moss - Silvie - Leyshade - Bourtreebush - Little Fithie - Dusty Drum - Spiral Wood - Wandershiell - Windyhills - RedRoofs - Ark Hill - Egypt - Formal - Letter - Laverockhall - Windyedge - Catchpenny - Framedrum - Drumtick - Little Fardle - Packhorse - Carrot - Clatterbrigs - Smyrna - Bucklerheads - Outfield - Jericho - Horn - Roughstones - Loak - Skitchen - Sturt - Oathlaw - Wolflaw - Farnought - Drunkendubs - Stronetic - Ironharrow Well - Goats - Tarbrax - Dameye - Durnmiesholes - Caldhame - Hagmuir - Slug of Auchrannie - Baldragon - Thorn - Wreaths - Spurn Hill - Drowndrubs - The Bloody Inches - Halfway - Groan, where the train will divide

by Don Paterson

And:

A Private Bottling

So I will go, then. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you. - Antonio Porchia

Back in the same room that an hour ago
we had led, lamp by lamp, into the darkness
I sit down and turn the radio on low
as the last girl on the planet still awake
reads a dedication to the ships
and puts on a recording of the ocean.
I carefully arrange a chain of nips
in a big fairy-ring; in each square glass
the tincture of a failed geography,
its dwindled burns and woodlands, whin-fires, heather,
the sklent of its wind and its salty rain,
the love-worn habits of its working-folk,
the waveform of their speech, and by extension
how they sing, make love, or take a joke.

So I have a good nose for this sort of thing.

Then I will suffer kiss after fierce kiss
letting their gold tongues slide along my tongue
as each gives up, in turn, its little song
of the patient years in glass and sherry-oak,
the shy negotiations with the sea,
air and earth, the trick of how the peat-smoke
was shut inside it, like a black thought.
Tonight I toast her with the extinct malts
of Ardlussa, Ladyburn and Dalintober
and an ancient pledge of passionate indifference:
Ochon o do dhoigh me mo chlairsach ar a shon,
wishing her health, as I might wish her weather.

When the circle is closed and I have drunk myself sober
I will tilt the blinds a few degrees, and watch
the dawn grow in a glass of liver-salts,
wait for the birds, the milk-float's sweet nothings,
then slip back to the bed where she lies curled,
replace the live egg of her burning ass
gently, in the cold nest of my lap,
as dead to her as she is to the world.

*

Here we are again; it is precisely
twelve, fifteen, thirty years down the road
and one turn higher up the spiral chamber
that separates the burnt ale and dark grains
of what I know, from what I can remember.
Now each glass holds its micro-episode
in permanent suspension, like a movie-frame
on acetate, until it plays again,
revivified by a suave connoisseurship
that deepens in the silence and the dark
to something like an infinite sensitivity.
This is no romantic fantasy: my father
used to know a man who'd taste the sea,
then leave his nets strung out along the bay
because there were no fish in it that day.
Everything is in everything else. It is a matter
of attunement, as once, through the hiss and backwash,
I steered the dial into the voice of God
slightly to the left of Hilversum,
half-drowned by some big, blurry waltz
the way some stars obscure their dwarf companions
for centuries, till someone thinks to look.
In the same way, I can isolate the feints
of feminine effluvia, carrion, shite,
those rogues and toxins only introduced
to give the composition a little weight
as rough harmonics do the violin-note
or Pluto, Cheiron and the lesser saints
might do to our lives, for all you know.
(By Christ, you would recognise their absence
as anyone would testify, having sunk
a glass of North British, run off a patent still
in some sleet-hammered satellite of Edinburgh:
a bleak spirit, no amount of caramel
could sweeten or disguise, its after-effect
somewhere between a blanket-bath and a sad wank.
There is, no doubt, a bar in Lothian
where it is sworn upon and swallowed neat
by furloughed riggers and the Special Police,
men who hate the company of women.)

O whiskies of Long Island and Provence!
This little number catches at the throat
but is all sweetness in the finish: my tongue trips
first through burning brake-fluid, then nicotine,
pastis, Diorissimo and wet grass;
another is silk sleeves and lip-service
with a kick like a smacked face in a train-station;
another, the light charge and the trace of zinc
tap-water picks up at the moon's eclipse.
You will know the time I mean by this.

Because your singular absence, in your absence,
has bred hard, tonight I take the waters
with the whole clan: our faceless ushers, bridesmaids,
our four Shelties, three now ghosts of ghosts;
our douce sons and our lovely loudmouthed daughters
who will, by this late hour, be fully grown,
perhaps with unborn children of their own.
So finally, let me propose a toast:
not to love, or life, or real feeling,
but to their sentimental residue;
to your sweet memory, but not to you.

The sun will close its circle in the sky
before I close my own, and drain the purely
offertory glass that tastes of nothing
but silence, burnt dust on the valves, and whisky.

David: bludgel?

Hey, meep and tweet, do you know how rude you're being? Why don't you start your own thread? I can't believe you two took all that time to type those pieces out. Did you think it was what I was looking for here?

Learn some manners!

Martin: bloody cudgel. The implication in that it must make you cry or shit yrself is that it has to thwomp you, has to be unsubtle. This is obviously, off the money. The point meep and tweet are making, however rudely (and it doesn't really make much impact on yr thread Greg... really), is that these poems are PHENOMENAL and make yr pants fall off. The second one is enough to make you quit. (Martin, if you didn't, please read the second one. My GOD, it's like he's overheard the songs of good angels, the songs of bad angels, the scrape of God's feet on the lino.)

You're right, it's absolutely magnificent, and I'm not much of a poetry reader. Is Antonio Porchia rated as a truly great poet of the highest order or what? And can I find more on this web thing anywhere?

The second poem is Don Paterson, he is a Scottish Poet. And I think he is the greatest living poet. Jerry The Nipra will back me up, slightly.

is that his real name?

Don Paterson? Yes.

okay, I thought it was a joke/contrivance. wish it was.

There are so many bits which could make me cry if I let them.

Cf. as dead to her as she is to the world.

WITH:

Nowhere in his plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years [his wife]... and that before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny...

- 'Revolutionary Road' (honest, Marcello, I'm not still reading it, I'm just not ready to let it go as a motif ;).

It can be if you want, rjg.

thanks.

Sorry, I misunderstood the crediting upthread. I shall remember Don Paterson.

What about this one (Greg, this is helping you believe it or not, it's helping keep the thread bobbing on the surface of the water, poetry threads normally sink, the longer this floats the more chance you have gettin' the feed back.) Anyway.

Shintaido by Derek Kerr

The smileless face of the plug
sent you to my death, held still
against my cadaveric spasm;

They’ll not teach you
about the child, or the poem
I wrote: “I retched
a student today, the corposant
guilt ringing my eyes, fingers,
transfixed on him. Told the coroner hadn’t
seen it ‘since the seventies’,
when, threatening a lolly with his tongue,
he’d walked in on his aunt
on his uncle, erect
in mortis coitus, the lolly sticking
hairy to the carpet, the uncle to his story.

Held still by my two dimensions:
novelty & tragedy. Unable to countenance
the sting of threading scorpion grass
through a child’s hairs, yesterday
stealing a feel of lividity, or,
the dynamo of her skin.”

- it doesn’t have a name -

“‘Maw!’ - said
like something you’d stick a fist into
if it said too much. ‘Maw,
don’t smoke it tae the paki’s ankles!’
And the mother, to her son:
‘Shut it, cunt.’
The butt’s glow discarded
like unexploded ordinance in the cowl
of the couch, reducing them
to their truest organic form: memory.

Or the shrivel of skin, presented
as a human, twilight cheeks
guarding her foam soaked filtrum:
She’d denied the space between
the foreshore and the farshore
and, leaving her future behind, had
more regard for punctuality than time:
the muscular force of the water
wresting her part by part from her
whole, trammelled, body.

Forget me not. Now.
My bath is ready.”

This poem blew me away. The only thing that may sit uncomfortably with some people is the racist line, but it's not his surely, it's double-quoted. So it's the 'characters'. Also the fact that a poem is a sort of invocation, so that the words don't belong to the author but are just like the misting of silence on glass: ie translations. This lets him an out as well. Not that he needs one. It's a wonderfully descriptive line though. Also, the running theme of the electricity threading through the poem ('corposant', 'dynamo', electrocution). The shock of 'held still by my two dimensions' ie we think he means the photograph and then introduces the denouement 'novelty and tragedy' for maximum ouch-factor. The 'held still' transferring the motionless from the dead to the viewer (it takes place in a forensic med lecture, it took me ages to twig this). Cadaveric spasm being a very rare medical symptom whereby dead people go straight from death into the rigor motisised state. The playful image of 'threatening' the lolly with extinction, rubbing it around and around with the tongue. Awww...

I love this poem.

The fact that the line 'truest organic form' should end in carbon, and them WOMPH, 'memory' slips in. This is what I mean by minor miracle, you shouldn't be able to see the 'work' put in, it should be like it's descended upon the page.

the first poem did not move me. at all. it was a fancy way of saying - I was looking from the roof - the foreshadowing or implications of being on the roof are completely unabsorbed. why was the person on the roof? etc.

instead it had nothing that caught my eye, no passion, nothing. just someone pointed on some garbage and some gum and some spit.

it would be better if it had a point. or passion.

dunno.

hope this helps.

Corposant guilt 'rings' the eyes, ie it frames them, defines him, the eyes are the window to the soul. The 'corposant' rings (St Elmo's fire) round his finger from where he touched the child, the dynamo spark of her youth, smiting him, labelling him, with guilt. The 'stealing a feel of lividity' ie he is poaching a feel of youth of life, but he is also precognosing his demise (lividity is the medical condition which happens on death whereby the blood pools in the veins and makes the skin appear in blotches of red, at the centers of gravity). It just fits into a whole.

'Forget me not.' Does anybody know what the common plant name for 'scorpion grass' is?

Also the rendering of the cliche of sticking yr fist in yr maw when you say something stupid, when yr socially undesirable - the rendering in new light by the use of a wicked (as in evil) pun.

I LOVE DEREK KERR!

I read A Private Bottling for the first time on Wednesday. It is truly great.

Greg: I liked the poem. But I was very distracted by some of the rhymes which seem contrived; and too many lines come down heavy on the rhyming end words.

And 'Shintaido'?!!!

Haha just read this advert for a correspondence course:

'The Art of Writing Poetry course consists of 17 home-study modules, beautifully presented in a slip case [!], and contains over 60,000 words [!].'

Thank god - a course with only 50,000 words would be useless. Oh wait...

My poem does have a point. A museum guide is commenting on a painting which shows what the poem (a verbal painting) describes. In the painting a tenant of a tenement ( a poor man) is trying to express himself through the detritus of his surroundings in an abstract way a la Pollock. There is a hierarchy described by the Godview, the lords (landlords, business owners, successful ones) the walking pedestrians and finally the sitting man. What I'm talking about in the poem is Chance and Will and expression. A phrase like "action-painted" I thought would be hint enough to lead to Pollock, along with "scumble". This a quick precis.

I very much enjoyed the other poems; I just felt daunted having my poem near those others: poems by people who are far more advanced than I am.

Best,
Greg

Etiquette question: how do we judge poems and demo tapes from hopeful unknowns put before us? On the level of hopeful unknowns (99% of demo tapes I have heard have been shite. In fact, 100%)? So, "I've heard worse" etc. Or on the level of people who make decent music and poems (100% of demo tapes are still shite, but criticism is harsher)?

When the author of a poem asks for criticism, the correct etiquette is to identify, in the most specific terms you can muster, where you think the poem succeeds and where it doesn't. Saying "it's shite" only gratifies your personal vanity. Or, in more direct terms, it makes you a tosser.

I didn't say the poem was shite, if that's how you're reading. Others did, though. I said nice things about it.

thanks for the kind words Greg.

Thank you all for your time and comments. I learned a lot through this experience.

Dwh: Do you have a link for Derek Kerr?

All the best,
Greg

Greg - yeah: here.

Ask for david - he's funny that way.

gla uni addresses are so crap.

meh!

do you SEE?

No website for Derek (dave?)?

What is a gla uni address?

You guys speak in a code I've yet to decipher.

Are you guys all in England or something?

I'm in Cali

Greg

It takes time to learn the shared language, memes and in-jokes here, Greg. Many in England, many in USA (and our all-time most frequent poster in California), and some elsewhere, including a strong New Zealand contingent.

Greg: the address was my University (Glasgow) e-mail address. There is no such person as Derek Kerr - I wrote the poem (I'm David), and fobbed it off as "Derek's" under fear of rejection/dissing. If you want a link to my website - here it is. No poetry there though; if you want any more info, just ask.

Hello David,

LOL. You *ucker.

That was an interesting experiment, David. To be honest, I was wondering how you were able to "twig" that poem, as you say. If that poem had been posted at a certain poetry site I frequent, I think, besides the members recognizing your skill, there would have been many questions as to the meaning of certain vagaries---or maybe I'm just dense.

I've always suspected that when people know a poem is by a famous author they assume it must be good and they don't dare question it as they do when they know it was written by an amateur. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of poems critiqued by very tough critics. I've always wanted to post some Pulitzer Prize winner's obscure poem just to see what they'd say. I know that if you would have said it was yours I would have tried to tear it apart a bit. Then again, I have seen hundreds of bad poems---yours is not one.

The only problem I have with it is that I don't fully understand all of it. But it's probably just me being dense as I've said, maybe too, some expressions I'm not familiar with (quirky brit slang stuff). I want to understand it though, because it's interesting: the subject matter is fresh. Whether I understand it fully or not, it's freshness is to me a plus.

Well, then, would you mind explaining your poem a bit more? Or you cold send me an e-mail if you'd prefer, or of course decline, in which case I'll hope you post a poem again soon.

Cheers,
Greg

amateurs?

maw - scottish for mum.

p*ki - horrible, disgusting, extremely racist term for person from pakistan usually use to denote people of indo-asian descent. (note double-quotes, please.)

I'm not real sure what the one word question is, but here goes: Yes, when the critiquers I deal with see a poem that is not by someone with a lot of publishing credits to their name they are much more inclined to see problems with it.

As for myself, I'm an amateur, i.e., I do real work for a living. I've only had three poems published. I've only been trying to write poetry for a couple of years. That's what I meant by "amateur".

Why are gla uni addresses so crap?

I went to your website. You should put a picture there.

What is the "smileless face of the plug"?

Who is the narrator of the poem?

what does a plug look like? a face, but it has no lips (awww), so it can't smile; there is a general unhappy ambivalence/unhappiness in all that leads him to his bath. the plug attaches to an appliance which electrifies the bath. the narrator is: in the first part the photograph, or the dead person in the photograph and in his own poem the narrator is the person who is about to die, pre-guessing the lecture that his photo will be in, hence the other pictures/vignettes.

sent you to my death = inversion of the normal cliche of "sent to his death" in that the person who is sent to the death is not the person who dies it is the person to view the death by way of photo etc...

rjg - referring to fact (?) that strathclyde uni address = the name of the person and not just a 'crap' number.

David,

Do you think your poem gives the reader enough of a chance to understand it?

Greg

I'm thinking of posting another poem and letting this thread go bye-bye. Would that be tres gauche? Or should I first comment on whether some person's ass, in my opinion, is big or no?

ass comments are always welcome gregory

I liked a lot of the rhymes. Maybe still more if the rhymes were more sloppy, like more half rhymes, more changes in the rhyme scheme? This would avoid any sensation that the poem is lapsing into a metrical rut. For example, in the first four lines, I liked god/height/tenement facade and didn't feel like it needed the rhyme with promenade to be strong - promenade made it obvious instead of tense. I like it when rhyme is extremely strong yet can't be anticipated with certainty in advance.

Maryann,

Thanks for the refreshingly specific response. I know just the kind of poem you're referring to; unfortunately, this one follows the New Formalist school, wherein slant rhyme mixed with perfect rhyme is seen as a flaw or weakness, unless the context makes it an act of finesse. For instance, in my poem, which is deals with Randomness (the crapping pigeons, the spit, the gum) and Order (the socio-economic hierarchy), a mixture of rhyme could be defended on a contextual level. In this poem I chose to meet the challenge of the stanza structure. I, too, like the kind the poetry you're talking about---then again, I like all forms of poetry. In this instance I'm using a variation on a Spenserian stanza. The unexpectedness of the rhyme happens here at line 7 where one would expect a rhyme with "ledge". People nowadays, or I should say the present vogue is (excepting those who follow the New Formalist school) for poetry that either doesn't rhyme or is as unobtrusively rhymed as possible. People want to recognize rhyme after the fact, so to say, rather than be made aware of it during the reading: meaning first, over shows of technical skill. I like it all, as I've said. I think any interest poetry culls for itself is a good thing.

Thanks for taking the time to respond,

all the best,
Greg

Josh,

Welcome, yes, but are they expedient?

greg did you get my email?