Scratch my back, I'm full of fleas;
Don't forget my gonads, please.
Wind me up with consummate ease
Before I sputter, cough, and wheeze.
Come here, Love, you're mine forever.
You're my one true blue endeavour.
My umbilical cord, sever.
Call me Lucy, call me Trevor.
I'm leaking lime juice out stuffed ears.
Picking poetry as my career
Causes readers to laugh and jeer.
I‘ll never see the dais as seer.
I've written for 'Broken Hearts Daily',
For 'Daffodils And Tulips Gaily'.
If your heart droops, I'll never fail ye.
For a life perverted, they jail me.
I'm a test case, the bearded lady
Or elephant man of vast Hades.
One squirt of oyster juice, baby,
And I'm cavorting with weird Sadie
Under pier as I peer up her skirt.
In all the vast meadows, I'm Fra Flirt.
Women flock to me with their hurt.
Lick my nipples under my hairshirt.
Repair my ego, I'll write an ode,
Love, in sappy mysterious code.
Come into my squalid abode.
(Jesus into town on his ass rode
And, I hear, shook his head when
He saw the gaping idiot men
Hanging on his every word, then
Penned paeans demented, without end.)
Monday, November 3, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Ethereal Beauty #2
Crossstitched, my eyelids, to a hospital pillow.
The clothes outside are faint eggshell blue. They billow
While the humid matron pumps horse-meds down my throat
With a two-by-four back-up, and a rubber goat.
Help me, dreamLove! Defrost my poems and bite my lips.
Float here; sing a lullabye while I let one rip.
Flip cartwheels. Install butter in my dressing gown.
I think one of the nurses saw my backside and frowned.
Ahoy! I'll abet the rumours with furious glee--
See the straightjacket wall strings covered with cat pee?
That's my work, I composed it for you, matchless Love,
Though your eyes cross, twitch when espying my wet glove.
Ahh! Another old fart, the minister of the ward
Has come creeping 'round my sickroom with a pen sword.
He's trying to convert me to the other side
Where poems are big and my head voices don‘t chide.
The clothes outside are faint eggshell blue. They billow
While the humid matron pumps horse-meds down my throat
With a two-by-four back-up, and a rubber goat.
Help me, dreamLove! Defrost my poems and bite my lips.
Float here; sing a lullabye while I let one rip.
Flip cartwheels. Install butter in my dressing gown.
I think one of the nurses saw my backside and frowned.
Ahoy! I'll abet the rumours with furious glee--
See the straightjacket wall strings covered with cat pee?
That's my work, I composed it for you, matchless Love,
Though your eyes cross, twitch when espying my wet glove.
Ahh! Another old fart, the minister of the ward
Has come creeping 'round my sickroom with a pen sword.
He's trying to convert me to the other side
Where poems are big and my head voices don‘t chide.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Ethereal Beauty #1
Ethereal beauty, as if an amour
Could reap and sow, like a basilisk
In God-giving banquets for the poor
Who love in beseeching tears. Tsk!
O, Love, blind me with your love,
A love that wraps and smothers
My aortae, blood unshoved.
From unrequited love, we're all brothers.
Ah! The men in snowy coats
Come for me
With butterfly nets. Who dotes
On you, Love? It's me on my knees.
Cleavage! Turnips! Westward fools!
My Love lies unrelating
In a fervent sea which cools
In epileptic flecks mating
Periwinkles with discarded twinkies. Sadness
And sameness, Dear, I follow your coattails
With tongue-lolling gladness.
Verse number six-one-two-nine. Quail
Litter the foyer while I dine
On sheepsbrains, vicious
Their remonstrance, I've had wine,
A bellyful. Are you suspicious?
Erk! Cover me in potato sperm!
Lick my dangling parts.
I know, I know. I'm but a germ
Who prays and bites and weeps and farts.
Sing me a song, ethereal beauty,
Afore I collapse in hysteria.
You're such a coy, steaming cutie
With, no doubt, not a touch of malaria.
A tepid round of tea, barmaid,
I’m juiced on skull-and-bones pills.
The orderlies left, I‘m not afraid.
In seventeen books I‘ll relate my ills.
No? You‘ve refused overtime?
God’s plan a cataract of song,
A splooge of rental dental rinse, a dime
Halo expurgated from my dong.
My ethereal beauty should be smiling
So I can sail, absolute, softly in peace,
My reputation as poet-putz piling
Up like mercury in a piston-obelisk with grease.
Ha! Ho! Where is my amour, my one true Love?
My cooing pigeon, my mustard seed,
My aching, tear-stained turtle dove?
I give up my pale abominable screeds.
Could reap and sow, like a basilisk
In God-giving banquets for the poor
Who love in beseeching tears. Tsk!
O, Love, blind me with your love,
A love that wraps and smothers
My aortae, blood unshoved.
From unrequited love, we're all brothers.
Ah! The men in snowy coats
Come for me
With butterfly nets. Who dotes
On you, Love? It's me on my knees.
Cleavage! Turnips! Westward fools!
My Love lies unrelating
In a fervent sea which cools
In epileptic flecks mating
Periwinkles with discarded twinkies. Sadness
And sameness, Dear, I follow your coattails
With tongue-lolling gladness.
Verse number six-one-two-nine. Quail
Litter the foyer while I dine
On sheepsbrains, vicious
Their remonstrance, I've had wine,
A bellyful. Are you suspicious?
Erk! Cover me in potato sperm!
Lick my dangling parts.
I know, I know. I'm but a germ
Who prays and bites and weeps and farts.
Sing me a song, ethereal beauty,
Afore I collapse in hysteria.
You're such a coy, steaming cutie
With, no doubt, not a touch of malaria.
A tepid round of tea, barmaid,
I’m juiced on skull-and-bones pills.
The orderlies left, I‘m not afraid.
In seventeen books I‘ll relate my ills.
No? You‘ve refused overtime?
God’s plan a cataract of song,
A splooge of rental dental rinse, a dime
Halo expurgated from my dong.
My ethereal beauty should be smiling
So I can sail, absolute, softly in peace,
My reputation as poet-putz piling
Up like mercury in a piston-obelisk with grease.
Ha! Ho! Where is my amour, my one true Love?
My cooing pigeon, my mustard seed,
My aching, tear-stained turtle dove?
I give up my pale abominable screeds.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Ken Babstock's "Airstream Land Yacht"
Ken Babstock's third collection of poetry, Airstream Land Yacht, (2006), opens the scope of his concerns while also plumbing those obsessions for more depth. Whereas Mean was a wonderful, visceral first volume, Days Into Flatspin heralded a stark change at the halfway mark towards a self-aware, objective commentary on what would have remained experiential, rapid present-moment takes. I don't think that second half works (for reasons I've tersely touched on in an earlier blog post), but it promises to be the start of what may continue to be an important development in Babstock's procedure, the intermarrying of stark, powerful observation with a considered intellectual grappling with "what it means" (to use --sometimes unavoidable, as here-- a precious and facile phrase).
Airstream Land Yacht succeeds wildly on both counts, sacrificing little of the immediacy of his observations and emotional states when unsentimentally circling their flowering mental irresolutions, and sacrificing little of philosophical depth when outlining: "Paint cans with gummed lids,/ buckled, and shut like bad clams" from the poem "The Largest Island Off the Largest Island".
I love this book on so many levels. Babstock's musical joy, always apt to his subjects, hasn't diminished, and in fact is more impressive since he's upped the ante with the taking on of layered meaning and stylistic breadth. It's obvious that his is an active and curious mind, poetically searching, experimental in the best sense of that word, and I'm excited to see what he does next.
Airstream Land Yacht succeeds wildly on both counts, sacrificing little of the immediacy of his observations and emotional states when unsentimentally circling their flowering mental irresolutions, and sacrificing little of philosophical depth when outlining: "Paint cans with gummed lids,/ buckled, and shut like bad clams" from the poem "The Largest Island Off the Largest Island".
I love this book on so many levels. Babstock's musical joy, always apt to his subjects, hasn't diminished, and in fact is more impressive since he's upped the ante with the taking on of layered meaning and stylistic breadth. It's obvious that his is an active and curious mind, poetically searching, experimental in the best sense of that word, and I'm excited to see what he does next.
Friday, October 17, 2008
John Steffler's "Helix"
It took me quite a while to warm up to John Steffler's poems in his selected Helix (2002). The pruned remains of Wreckage Of Play I found unremarkable musically, and often too cutesy in tone ("Us Plumbers"; "My Latest Invention"; "The Glass House").
The middle section, the prose segments from The Grey Islands certainly lived up to its moniker: I found this particularly hard slogging, the hermetic diaristic somber distancing making me incurious about the stories of its inhabitants.
Things picked up spectacularly with the selections from Steffler's later volume, That Night We Were Ravenous. "The Sea Gangs In --" has some lovely sonorities: "buttered with morning light, throwing its lace hem at your bachelor's boots", among others, a delight to read -- and a bold adventure -- with the inevitable comparisons to a poetic imagistic subject already rife with canonical high points.
The closing selections from New Poems are likewise accomplished, showing a maturity, a confidence of tone as exemplified by "Sour Fire" with its closing surprising irony: "This man squatting alone by a sour fire,/ bitten by flies,/ telling himself he's getting close to the truth, / is not me."
The middle section, the prose segments from The Grey Islands certainly lived up to its moniker: I found this particularly hard slogging, the hermetic diaristic somber distancing making me incurious about the stories of its inhabitants.
Things picked up spectacularly with the selections from Steffler's later volume, That Night We Were Ravenous. "The Sea Gangs In --" has some lovely sonorities: "buttered with morning light, throwing its lace hem at your bachelor's boots", among others, a delight to read -- and a bold adventure -- with the inevitable comparisons to a poetic imagistic subject already rife with canonical high points.
The closing selections from New Poems are likewise accomplished, showing a maturity, a confidence of tone as exemplified by "Sour Fire" with its closing surprising irony: "This man squatting alone by a sour fire,/ bitten by flies,/ telling himself he's getting close to the truth, / is not me."
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Fraser Sutherland's "The Matuschka Case"
After reading Fraser Sutherland's preface to these selected poems ("The Matuschka Case") wherein "the poems represent the core of my poetic preoccupations over several decades", I was more than a little disappointed to enter the first and eponymous entry. It is very prosy, a news tidbit actually, with a bizarre other-life-manifesto as the last-line payoff (unless I'm completely off-base, and that last line is ironic). Even as prose, it's clumsy in segments, particularly: "it seems to me,/is not the sexual satisfaction part of it".
Imagine my surprise, then, when I continued and found delight after delight. Sutherland is a man after my own heart, someone who not only eschews the single theme, but who is more or less equally adept at the difficult achievement regarding various emotional and intellectual content.
There are too many poems to illustrate these differences in a short review, but a few are worth mentioning:
It's a bold choice to write a poem about the great German lyricist Georg Trakl ("Georg Trakl Visits Chaffey's Locks, Ontario, One Day In Fall"), with its inevitable attraction of comparison and contrast, but Sutherland's own effort is a delightful tribute ("in the goldrip maples sundered angels,/ their leaves bleeding bread./ Stripped trunks were purifying agony,/agonizing purity.")
Another bold poem is styled as a repugnant first-person sadist, ("Phoning"), a particularly welcome addition in contemporary poetry, where many authors (first-person or not) beseechingly attempt to convince us of their spiritual attunement. And the tone of conversational ease is perfect in affecting the contrasting horror.
Too dark? Sutherland can shift gears delightfully. "Whitefaces" is a hilarious portrait of the crushing boredom and "purity" of the Scots/Calvinist lineage. -- ("They add bleach to their wash") -- again, another wonderful antidote to too-often humourless contemporary musings.
The collection has a seductive interplay between lyricism and plain statement, hard-headed world-weary wisdom and emotional reaching out. I'm not privy to the internal machinations of CanLit careers, with their attendant communal support or neglect, but what strikes me as the reason for Sutherland's underrating may have to do with his refusal to toe a particular thematic and/or stylistic line. Pity. He should be more well known.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I continued and found delight after delight. Sutherland is a man after my own heart, someone who not only eschews the single theme, but who is more or less equally adept at the difficult achievement regarding various emotional and intellectual content.
There are too many poems to illustrate these differences in a short review, but a few are worth mentioning:
It's a bold choice to write a poem about the great German lyricist Georg Trakl ("Georg Trakl Visits Chaffey's Locks, Ontario, One Day In Fall"), with its inevitable attraction of comparison and contrast, but Sutherland's own effort is a delightful tribute ("in the goldrip maples sundered angels,/ their leaves bleeding bread./ Stripped trunks were purifying agony,/agonizing purity.")
Another bold poem is styled as a repugnant first-person sadist, ("Phoning"), a particularly welcome addition in contemporary poetry, where many authors (first-person or not) beseechingly attempt to convince us of their spiritual attunement. And the tone of conversational ease is perfect in affecting the contrasting horror.
Too dark? Sutherland can shift gears delightfully. "Whitefaces" is a hilarious portrait of the crushing boredom and "purity" of the Scots/Calvinist lineage. -- ("They add bleach to their wash") -- again, another wonderful antidote to too-often humourless contemporary musings.
The collection has a seductive interplay between lyricism and plain statement, hard-headed world-weary wisdom and emotional reaching out. I'm not privy to the internal machinations of CanLit careers, with their attendant communal support or neglect, but what strikes me as the reason for Sutherland's underrating may have to do with his refusal to toe a particular thematic and/or stylistic line. Pity. He should be more well known.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
New Financial Plan
The passionate financial critic Jim Willie writes:
"If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Airlines stock one year ago, you would have $49 today. If you had purchased $1000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have $33 today. If you had purchased $1000 of Lehman Brothers stock one year ago, you will have $0 today. However, if you had purchased $1000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the aluminum cans for recycling, you would have received $214 today at redemptions. Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle. It is called the 401-KEG Plan."
"If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Airlines stock one year ago, you would have $49 today. If you had purchased $1000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have $33 today. If you had purchased $1000 of Lehman Brothers stock one year ago, you will have $0 today. However, if you had purchased $1000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the aluminum cans for recycling, you would have received $214 today at redemptions. Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle. It is called the 401-KEG Plan."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
