[John Whitworth]

THE NEWS COMES EVERY MORNING

Another day in waiting rooms. The doctor eyes the suture,
then bills you for a thousand bucks—says, "Think about the future."
The nurses smell of Calvin Klein, the waiting room of whiskey.
We stagger into taxicabs, our faces green and frisky.

I gave my love a cherry, and it floated in the cocktail.
We chatted till the bars were closed and broke it off by e-mail.
I gave my love a dining set. I gave my love a chicken.
She smothered it in flour and eggs, and so our waistlines thicken.

The news comes every morning, and the news is always bad.
The men on television smirk while slowly going mad.

A rumor spreads by radio, infecting like a virus
till counter-rumors put it down. It rises like Osiris,
twice as strong and tough as hell in its present incarnation.
I listened in a groggy haze, and then I switched the station.

We gave up dreams of second cars, of porches and cyclone fences,
of farting out the aftermath of coffee and cheese blintzes,
of jobs downtown and mortgages on houses in the valley—
all for a lurid fantasy of blowjobs in an alley.

The news comes every morning, but the morning's history
like pyramids, trench warfare, and the ‘new economy’.

William Montgomery went to work, then blew his monthly paycheck
on a Nudie Cohen outfit made of sequins and white spandex.
Katie saw him and laughed so hard she gurgled through the bourbon
she sipped while she was driving home in her new grey Suburban.

Bill Clinton sucked—but didn’t inhale—the tail end of a reefer,
served his time, serviced the girls, then floated into ether,
Hillary looked at the latest polls and threw away the paper.
"I might be sagging around the eyes, but at least I’m not Ralph Nader.’="

The news comes every morning, and the news is always brisk,
a ticker on the TV screen, a download saved to disk.

Someone’s won a TV set; someone’s won the Booker;
someone’s won a million bucks on Are You a Pirate Hooker?
Someone’s scared of rabid dogs; someone’s scared of Satan;
someone’s in his dad’s garage, rocking to Van Halen.

You can crack equations; you can calculate the function
and end up scanning horoscopes for a distant star’s conjunction.
You can buy insurance; you can keep away from matches;
but still, one day the lightning strikes and burns the place to ashes.

[John Whitworth]

This is a parody in the same sense that the Betjeman poem is one. It is using another poem, in this case Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ to write something which isn’t I itself, as far as I can see, any sort of comment on the MacNeice. Is this legitimate? I say of course it is. In the realm of Light Verse people do it all the time. Kipling is a poet who turns up again and again. And then there are popular songs.

One thing to note is that MacNeice’s poem doesn’t rhyme. It very firmly off-rhymes. Should a poem using MacNeice allow itself to rhyme ‘properly’ as it were? Or sometimes properly and sometimes not, as here. I used to think it ought not to but I think I’ve changed my mind and part of the reason is the poem we have here. Most parodies of MacNeice are much weaker than the original, they lack its verve and attack. But this one doesn’t. It has plenty of v and a, in common with other poems I have seen from this poet.

Being Brit, I find some of the referencs lost on me. Who is William Montgomery? Why is Ralph Nader to the point, though even I can see it would be a plus point not to be that man. Van Halen must be a musicianI’m too old to have heard of, but then I’m too old to have heard of Van Morrison.

Has he spelled Porsche right or have I. Well, I’d hazard that neither of us have got one. And if I had that sort of money and could bear to waste it on a car I would buy a Maserati. Such a beautiful name.

[Janet Kenny]

My God, if this is by who I think, the world is going crackers.
I'll give him six quid to buy a drink, and shake my gold maracas.

Another depressingly good poem, thank heavens!
Janet

[Susan McLean]

I like the rhymes and the handling of meter on this one, but I don't find it particularly funny. A lot of the time the rhymes seem to be driving the content.

Susan

[Shaun J. Russell]

I'm quite taken with this one, and find myself reading it over and over. There's sort of a "Danse Macabre" feel to it...sort of a sparkly-eyed cynicism to its lines. If Orwell wrote better poetry, this is what it would read like. I almost hesitate to call this "light verse", since it has a lot of weight to it. It's downright deep, in my opinion, and not the superficial depth you see out of many poets in this day and age. I look forward to finding out who wrote this one.

There are some metrical hitches throughout, and even a few iffy rhymes, but on the whole I think this works -- and well -- from a content standpoint, which allows me to forgive some of the technical slips.

If this wasn't a "light verse" bakeoff, I'd probably say this one would be my favorite of the bunch. But since the bakeoff is light, and this poem is more of a poundcake...it's second best, in my view.

[Mary Meriam]

Not really to my taste, though I can see it has plenty of v and a.

E. Shaun - I see light verse in your future.

[Petra Norr]

This has a really good voice. The first stanza didn't do a lot for me, but when I hit the second I sat right up, thinking this is a poem that's going to take fun leaps. I like that stanza, the snappy way it runs, and of course the words echo the old folksong, which is nice. What happened after that were two rather dull lines that compose the third stanza. And the rest, well, it never did take the fun leaps I was hoping for. I did like this bit, even though I have no idea what it is or what the story behind it is: ...blew his monthly paycheck on a Nudie Cohen outfit made of sequins and white spandex. The worst thing in the poem was bringing in Clinton, because it's such old hat and we all know the story ten times over. The Nader joke was kind of fun though. One more thing: I'm not a rhymer and end-rhymes don't turn me on like they do others, BUT I did notice the virus/Osiris rhyme and thought it was great, and that's saying a lot because normally I don't even pronounce it O-sigh-ris but rather O-seer-is. It worked anyway and was cool.

[Michael Cantor]

The first stanza showed promise, but it never seemed to go anywhere after that. Disjointed.

[Janet Kenny]

Actually the point of the poem is that whatever you do it ends up as ashes,
I love the saucy way it dances through all the ridiculous attempts to prolong, aggrandize and preserve.

[Martin Elster]

I'm wondering if Nudie Cohen is supposed to be a parody of Nudie Cohn.