Refuse to be refuse.
Cogs, refuse to turn.
Allowed no other luxuries,
you allow yourself these,
patience and forgiveness.
Lighten your burden,
throw away your illusions,
and if acceptance
must be accepted
accept, but don't forgive.
Everything
they had was tasteful,
made to last,
except their bodies -
so distasteful, ruined so fast.
All
day long
they long
to belong,
they long
for belongings.
Last
'Let's ... !'
List ...
Lost
Lust.
Poems: a Large Page Design
This page, which
gives a selection of my poems, can be easily used without any further
explanation but
page
travel
gives a very short introduction to aspects
of Large Page Design.
A monitor is needed to view the page,
not a device with a small screen.
The poems are
in different regions of the page, with the poems of a region linked by form
or subject
or tone.
Please click on a link in the
region-list on
the right to go to a region.
To travel back to this home-region, perhaps to use the region-list again, click anywhere in a poem.
Underneath the poems are commentaries for some of the poems. There are also links to commentary on other pages of the site.
The zoom facilities of
Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and other browsers can be
used to give an aerial-view of the page rather than
ground-view. There are
various zoom levels which are suitable. I'd suggest 25%.
Click on text or an image to go to top of page
This page is wide as well as long. It can't be viewed adequately on the small screen of a mobile device
Concrete poetry
War, the Holocaust and the Troubles
Child labour
Troubled
relationships
Difficult poetry
Nature poetry
Snow
Humour and sarcasm
Miscellaneous
Commentaries
Death and
a salesman
Published in 'Route 57,' the literary magazine of Sheffield
University
Sure, gas has its advantages,
but it reeks.
Have you ever thought about the danger of leaks?
Basically, gas and injections are just chemicals,
and we should cut down on chemicals,
you agree? Pollution has to be Public Enemy #1
- after gun control, lefties, liberals and the Theory of Evolution.
Electricity’s no better - anything but clean.
Like using electric shocks in loony bins. I mean!
It may seem modern but it’s too much hassle.
No, true sophistication is to use the best of the past.
Have you considered a method based on renewable resources,
cost-effective, with, worldwide, thousands of satisfied customers?
That’s why the penitentiary should use hanging, Warden.
The rope-makers of America say, ‘Go, Go, Go Hempen!’
A missed
opportunity
Commentary
by Craig Raine,
The
Inquisition
On
the rack they are highered.
At the stake they are fired.
And all because of
simple, clerical errors.
The
worst restaurant in the world
Published in 'Krax,' the magazine of humorous poetry
In
this restaurant we serve them right.
Yesterday, someone asked for wholemeal bread.
I gave him stale, sliced white
and shouted in his ear, 'Did you hear what I said?
Stuff it up your stupid arse.
Now drink that lard-and-leftover soup.'
Whatever will they want next? I ask.
An immensely dignified head waiter with a slight, servile stoop?
That newspaper not acceptable to the lady?
First you demand a knife and fork and now you want a napkin!
You're not enjoying the chef's speciality,
'Limaces étuvées
à la margarine.'
You ARE a fussy eater! What's in a name?
Fried slugs taste like snails - exactly the same.
A Learning
Zonepagehome
Your ears are assaulted by the noise,
as if from hundreds - thousands - not thirty girls and boys,
a seething, shouting, shoving, guffawing mass
boiling over with resentment, hostile and crass.
Some of them do have a purposive look
but they're writing on the walls, not in an exercise book.
A helpful youth tries to wash away their crap
using a Bunsen burner connected to a water tap.
Today, the teacher has to assess them on this:
Skill 187, 'Learning strategies in formulating a scientific hypothesis.'
He pleads for their attention,
mumbling 'extra work' and 'possibly a detention,'
but the only response is the throwing of a dart -
the heavier kind, not the paper-folding art.
This features, though, in one of their games:
a paper aeroplane is lit, launched and crashes in flames.
Then, yet again, yet again, someone farts.
Gales of laughter, bless their little hearts.
The teacher loses all self-control and shouts, 'Who did that?'
The teacher's pet owns up: 'Me, you twat!'
In the end,
the 187th test
of plagiarism skills is
actually assessed.
The Headteacher writes for Dr. Horatio's references
(after 'His Philosophy of Eduction is pupil-centred. Pupil preference's,
aims and objectives are parammount always...')
'His exam result's are good. some grade A's.'
The bell rings. Dr. Horatio hopes a note of quiet authority
will impress the Inspector lying there, hit by a missile, unable to see
but still recording Learning Performance Indicators!
Truly, one of the Learning Inspection Partnership's Classroom
heroes.
'Please try to email Laptop Learning Outcomes by tomorrow.
Laptop learners, you may go.'
A
high-pressure salesman, les mains sales,
a poor beggar who
beggars description,
un-suited for his calling,
dandruffed, constipated, taking laxatives on prescription,
has been talking for over an hour now,
or rather listening, more and more forlorn.
His client's a walking encyclopedia
of consumer law and consumer lore
who shows complete contempt for all his pathetic reasoning,
says he has no cash, the miserable git,
and is completely un-pre-possessing -
'I never buy anything on credit.'
An awkward customer.
Who's so pleased (this may come as some surprise)
he's got the better of this bumbling salesman
that he relaxes, and in the end, he buys.
Bats
blinking in the dark wings.
Moths, the butterflies of the past,
flutter to their flitting,
playing in the light,
a lamp swung across the pond,
a moon known to our world,
their world unknown to us.
What bats do, so we,
shrieking unheard.
Commentary
They
are gone
and at one
with the earth,
beneath turf
or corn or
an airport.
The
cathedral aspired.
The
castle towered.
The people cowered.
Not
even, evening:
below, a glow,
red, redder, reddest,
above, sky-blue
contracts, expands,
soaring above the lives
in the houses in the forest,
shuttered, almost invisible,
beneath blue-fingered night.
Published
in Poetry Nottingham International.
Since revised.
The
most intense joy,
the joy that springs from nothing,
the joy of Christians,
of the deeply disappointed,
leaping up sometimes
as suddenly as a sniper's skill,
wounding with confusion,
whispered this:
the richness of lives rich in disappointments,
the richness of lives standing still.
The
ambiguity of a rope,
which can save life and end it
His
sudden fall
transfixed them all,
as if they had fallen too,
or might fall next
into the darkness near at hand,
pierced by his single call.
Into the darkness
led the rope that broke his fall
and held.
The rope,
falling's double check,
tied around either waist or neck.
The sea waved
and parted
and hurried along
the long platform.
So long!
He leaped over the rails
and by the track,
as the platform steamed on,
deeper and deeper
he sank,
the sleeper.
The calm, blue sea of sky
still saturated with light
unites the drifting island
of the sun, the particles of sand.
Glittering shoals of stars swim in the
mechanical sky, constantly
replenished and netted and landed,
brought to the land precisely when demanded.
The mass beyond below
is where you may land, outlandish, and so
like landed fish you'll gasp
at what you can't hope or fail to grasp.
A reasoned response to Luke Wright, poet, who attacked IDS (the Conservative politician Iain Duncan Smith) using only the vowel 'i'
Commentary
This rising Lit-Hit,
this nit-picking Lit-Big,
this Mill-Wright
grinding
his lit-bits,
grinning, grinning, grinning,
is insipid in print
[IDS
'ripping ribs in glitz grills'].
His filmic fighting is
filling in,
his
illicit flings
filling in
[IDS: I wish him limp dicks']
idling, tiring, slipping, sliding,
whittling his
whims,
signing his
sighs.
'If I ... '
'I might ... '
(might is plight).
This
Lit-Grit
is grim, grim, grim in print
[IDS 'twisting victims till victims stink ... ']
Other commentaries are on other pages.
'Bats blinking in the dark wings...'
Obviously, the image in the opening lines of the poem is theatrical. The 'dark wings' are the wings of a theatre, the moths are players, that is, actors, playing in the theatrical lighting. 'Playing' also has overtones of heedless enjoyment - but the moths are threatened by the bats.
The moon is 'swung' as it passes in its apparent orbit in the night sky. It's 'a' moon which, like all the other moons in the solar system, is known to us, but there must be moons too which are not known to us outside our solar system.
The inner life of the moths that flutter and the bats that flitter isn't known in the same way. They are 'others,' whose inner life we can only imagine. As for the consciousness of bats, I had in mind the essay of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, 'What is it like to be a bat?' The essay, though, is not about the mysterious otherness of bats but an anti-reductionist viewpoint in the philosophy of mind according to which consciousness, subjective experience, can't be reduced to neurophysiology. I share this viewpoint.
Bats, of course, emit sounds which can't be heard by us. The 'unheard shrieking' of people gives a linkage with the opening of Rilke's First Duino Elegy, 'Who if I cried out , would hear me among the angels'/hierarchies?'
'Shrieking' suggests something unpleasant. I oppose views of human life which reduce it to something completely unpleasant, without denying that there are unpleasant aspects and that 'shrieking' or similar responses are part of life. I give some other responses: 'shouting,' that is, the shouting of defiance as well as the shouting of anger and argument, 'saying,' expressing states which are not intense, such as normal human conversation, and 'singing,' the creation of beauty. The viewpoint of the poem is anti-reductionist in a wider sense.
The bats and moths are the first two players on the world's stage in this particular drama. Humanity is the third player, but 'third' refers also to the musical interval.
Each of the short lines has 3 syllables.This kind of syllabic verse I call 'syllabic unit poetry.' In concrete unit poetry. (See the examples in the region 'Concrete poetry') there's complete control of the letters, punctuation marks and spaces so as to shape the poem. In syllabic unit poetry there's complete control over the number of unit-syllables. The lines are iambic monometers to begin with but the monometers are varied.
Inscape. Collins English Dictionary has 'the essential inner nature of a person, object etc.' as expressed in literary or artistic works.' The word was introduced by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He makes significant use of it in his Journal, eg.1871: 'End of March and beginning of April - This is the time to study inscape in the spraying of trees, for the swelling buds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather - for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing nothing: in these sprays at all events there is a new world of inscape.'
A poem isn't the place for a systematic and exhaustive discussion of anything, the poem 'she licks it into shape...' included. A few remarks about the place of sexuality in human nature (obviously a very big and important topic. Not only is it impossible to do justice to it here, it's impossible to do justice to it anywhere.)
D H Lawrence would surely have accepted Nietzsche's claim 'The degree and kind of a person's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.' (Beyond Good and Evil 75, translated by R J Hollingdale. I don't accept this claim. I'm sure that Nietzsche liked the sound of this claim but it's isolated in his writings, the rest of his writings do nothing to support it or reinforce it and there's no evidence that Nietzsche was anything other than sexually ignorant, far more so than D H Lawrence - who, in the interesting account by Martin Seymour Lawrence was 'a would-be sex-mage whose practical grasp of his subject was notably imperfect.'
The Jaws of Borrowdale, Derwentwater
The poem may be straightforward but the linked poem and image show dissonance. The poem makes the claim that the scene is so compelling, it presents itself with such directness, that it is reality, without the difficulties we face whenever we concentrate upon appearances, the deceptiveness of appearances, the unreliability of our senses. The image which is linked with the poem is, though, very much a distortion of reality. The mound in the centre represents Castle Crag without undue distortion. The fells on the left and right are very much distorted. Our senses impose {adjustment} and so do our memories. For a photograph, showing the Jaws of Borrowdale and Derwentwater from Friar's Crag (the scene that John Ruskin valued so highly):
http://flickr.com/photos/22557397@N03/2175747263/
Lincolnshire, asleep, Turin, wide awake
This poem was suggested by a passage in Jack Currie's 'Lancaster Target:' 'At Modane, the railway ran from Grenoble to Turin, deep under the Graian Alps...Our task...was to block the tunnel...We arrived early in the target area, and circled high among the Alpine peaks, gazing at magnificent Mont Blanc, towering massive in the moonlight, with our target to the south and Lake Geneva to the north.' However, there was no collision in Jack Currie's account and the poem is fictional.
'felt a bump.' Collins English Dictionary for 'bumping race:' '(esp.at Oxford and Cambridge) a race in which rowing eights start an equal distance one behind the other and each tries to bump the boat in front.' Collins English Dictionary for 'bump ball,' 'Cricket. a ball that bounces into the air after being hit directly into the ground by the batsman.'
The poem reflects, of course, the social background, including the sports they played, of a significant proportion of the English who lost their lives in the Second World War, as in other wars. King's College is the Cambridge College and Wadham is the Oxford College.
In this poem, I imagine two conscience-stricken machine gunners from two opposing armies. The reality is that the vast majority of machine-gunners have never been as sensitive as in the poem. The harsh reality is that they could not have allowed any sensitivity to influence their actions. Failure to fire on the advancing troops would have most likely led within a short time to their being shot or bayoneted.
Since writing the poem, though, I've been very impressed to find in 'The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915 - 1918' by Mark Thompson - a magnificent book - descriptions of the action of very sensitive machine-gunners. These were gunners of the Austro-Hungarian army confronting troops of the Italian army, trained, led and equipped to a catastrophically bad standard. On something like half a dozen occasions, occasions probably unique in the First World War or any other mechanized war, the machine-gunners refused to fire on the advancing Italians. "Stop, go back!" one of them shouted on one of these occasions, "We won't shoot any more. Do you want everyone to die?"
Very often, a poem can give only one aspect, not a balanced or comprehensive view. I'd emphasize the obvious fact that not all 95 year olds have this degree of impairment and that whether they do or not, their lives may well make admiration the overwhelmingly important response.
By the waters of Doo Lough we lay down and slept,
and all our prayers were answered at once,
Mary, Mother of God, be
thanked -
for an end to the sleet,
the unendurable sleet,
an end to the hunger
that gnawed our bones,
the unendurable
hunger,
an end to our lives,
their unendurable lives.
