The French repeating forms have never been my strong suit, so I'm pushing my luck with this curtal villanelle.


Villanelle-ish

To cut a villanelle a few lines short
Would be a literary felony
No poet in his right mind could support.

The world would greet with a derisive snort
Any such bobtailed pseudo-poetry.
Don’t cut your villanelles a few lines short.

To start a villanelle, then to abort
The mission, leaving off a line or three,
Is something no sane poet could support.

Just two rhymes, 19 lines – this form might thwart
Some versifiers’ ingenuity,
But that is no excuse to cut it short.

Lines 1 and 3 as they recur can sport
Small changes to avoid monotony,
But no bard who’s not bonkers could support

A change like this that cuts the whole poem short.

Okay, I give in. The temptation is too great. This thing was published in The Brazen Head (and I'm trying to assemble a MS. of funny stuff that it'll go in).

Upon the Problem of the Envoi in the Contemporary Ballade

“The envoi of a ballade is typically addressed to a prince.”
—LitCharts web page, “Ballade”

Though slant and half will often squeak you by,
it’s tricky to persuade the thing to rhyme.
With three bare possibilities, you fry
your brains and end up scrambled half the time.
And then you face the awkward pantomime,
the pose, the grand traditional to-do:
But now that tabloids roll them all in slime,
what prince out there’s worth dedicating to?

The little European kings? Just try
admiring rigid stick figures who mime
in medalled chests and pricey pageantry
what’s lost now to equality’s long climb.
The Saudis, credibly accused of crime
too horrible for thought, a lurid brew
of evils? The idea’s too icky. I’m
perplexed: Whom could one dedicate this to?

Maybe a different sort of royalty
would solve it (yes, we’re turning on a dime).
Some country king of braid and gold lamé
like Elvis, fat and sequinned, past his prime?
Some prelate seated on the cherubim?
Some Koch or Musk or Bezos? Sacré bleu.
Some laureled poet with a Guggenheim?
Where is a prince to dedicate this to?

Forget it, sovereigns all-too-unsublime—
anointed, crowned, and human through and through.
I think I’m done with working overtime
to find a prince to dedicate this to.

I really hate the triolet;
In Spring or not, I find them hell.
“O, tra-la-la, it’s cold and wet.”
I really hate the triolet,
A form I wish I could forget.
More, even, than the villanelle,
I really hate the triolet;
In Spring or not, I find them hell.

I kill a poem
and realise that some poets
have been watching me.

THESE WORDS

These words belong together.
Don't break these words apart.
It doesn't matter whether
they sound dumb or they sound smart.

They're just how I arranged them
and I'll mind it very much
if I hear that you have changed them.
You can read, but please don't touch.

A poem's
An inner
Weather
Breeder

Triolets are not that bad.
I like them quite a bit.
They're elegant, and I might add,
triolets are not as bad
as Brian claims (they drive him mad),
though this one may be shit.
Triolets are not that bad.
I like them quite a bit.

Do?

Do unread
Love poems
Love?

Do couplets
On divorce
Still rhyme?

Do sonnets
Have rooms
For loners?

Do triolets
Triple
Pleasure?

Do villanelles’
Repetends
Love to rappel?

Do quatrains
Square
Dance?

SMALL, WHIMSICAL RHYME

Sometimes you find
a chunk of time
in which there is nothing to do,

no WiFi, no cable,
no books, no phone,
no friends, no games. Just you.

It's happened to me,
so I figured I'd try
to write a small, whimsical rhyme.

No reason at all,
except that I find
it's a great way of passing the time.

A poet they like to call Pompous
signed up to The Sphere for a rumpus.
But the critics did hate
his forced rhymes, they did grate,
and his meter lacked metrical compass.

I am a metre-wanker and
my head is full of sums.
I work alone with what’s my own
and tweak it till it comes.

It seldom happens straight away
but I can give it time.
I lubricate and titillate
with assonance and rhyme.

I pander to my passion for
felicity of diction,
which I believe I can achieve
by gentle, rhythmic friction.

At first I feel it firming up,
then it will sigh and soften.
I know each stage from urge to page
because I do it often.

With optimistic tinkering
and educated guess
I take the thing and make it sing
a self-indulgent Yesssss!

.

To be sung, without much trouble, to the tune of The River Driver.

Wet Blanket

I’ve never liked the notion of a muse.
I guess I’ve got a thing about control.
Not for me, the wimpy, passive role:
“Strike me, inspiration! Leave a bruise!
Dominate me any way you choose!
My sheets await your pleasure! Singe my soul!
Excite me!” I won’t grovel to cajole
some dom to fill my fountain pen with ooze.

Why do so many poets seem to think
their creativity’s a femme fatale
whose fickle favor keeps them in her thrall?
How odd that this is such a common kink,
an ages-old creative fountainhead.
Myself, I never bring my work to bed.

Poetry is silly.
There, I have admitted it.
Yet somehow, willy nilly,
at times I have committed it.
Though Shakespeare's reputation
won't suffer by comparison,
my own versification
is weak, but not embarrassin'.

Verses vs. Verses

Every iamb, every trochee, every anapestic joke he
Tries to tell is more annoying than the last one.
With each spondee, with each dactyl, she seems flaky as a fractal.
Are they stoned or drunk or trying to pull a fast one?

When their measures wax erotic, they look weirdly un-exotic.
All those rhymes and rhythms they keep having fun with
May be just benignly strange, or may pose some grave moral danger,
So beware the foolish straw their gold is spun with.

Some are Beat and some Romantic. All their egos are gigantic.
Keep your distance when they try to draw you close.
Their metaphors are snares that will catch you unawares,
And their similes are like a fatal dose.

Some are living, some are dead, some are Sylvia and Ted,
And you wouldn’t want to drink with them or date them.
The way they play with words, like a chef with dead, plucked birds
Makes you wonder why God bothered to create them.

Still Still

Still thinking sounds

still in a poem
still are breaths
unseen or read

still latent breaths
said silently
when lips are still

said aloud
or voice recorded
still though sounded

still leaves me breathless!

To My Lover, After Our Discussion of Poetry

When you came in last night and said, "What's that
you're writing?" and I answered "Poetry",
you told me that I couldn't feed the cat,
much less indulge in truffles and Chablis,
on what I'd earn by that. So now I know:
You need a higher income in your bed,
a lawyer or a lady CEO
whose metaphors are businesslike as bread.
Tomorrow I'll have one last rhyming bout,
pack luggage, do the laundry and my hair.
When you come home you'll find that I've moved out,
taking my unproductive life elsewhere.
We're through, my love. But since you knew no better,
I've left this poem and not a Dear John letter.

Trimeter

If triple-footed rhyme
is droning to-and-fro,
well then, from time to time
arrange a change in flow -
like so.

And here are a couple of really awful ones - never submitted and never published, for obvious reasons - which were among my first attempts at metrical poetry.

From the Tomb of the Unknown Division Manager

When I set forth in industry each day
my thoughts were parsed in sharp execu-tese:
nouns turned to verbs the proper corporate way
by bulleting on focused strategies.
I dreamed in PowerPointed pros and cons:
strengths, weaknesses, advantages and threats -
replaced emotions with comparisons -
this gain, that loss, those assets and these debts.

But now I scribble lines bemusedly
as sonnet, haiku, tanka, dithyramb;
select with pentametric pedant’s glee
each shadowed word; and carefully enjamb
the diverse turns of life and poetry
in one last twist: I think, therefore, iamb!

Well Aged Whine

My name is Michael Cantor and I come
to poetry too late in life to bang
out unaffected verse – I bear the sum
of years in suits and neckties, dreams that sang
of balance sheets and factories and much less
crowd every line – old Yiddish curses,
half-remembered stories, thoughts that mess
and twist my words in visa verses.

My mind retains with seamless care
ten recipes for boneless leg of lamb;
a fourth round draft choice jostles Baudelaire;
all cram together in an anagram
of names, dates, faces, places; poems abound
in corners of my mental Lost and Found.


And I almost forgot this ghazal (I slip my name in on the penultimate line - not the last - not sure that's kosher.)

Puzzle

Forlorn, upset, inclined at times to ramble and romanticize? Recite a ghazal.
Awake and rubbing reddened eyes, temptations to soliloquize invite a ghazal.

Alone, at home, uncertain as to what you are, enraptured
by the kind of lies I think that I should realize, I fight a ghazal.

In internet cafes that hide from dawn, adrift and captured
by the dark, before the the sun begins to rise, the night’s a ghazal.

Bemused and then besieged in turn, bedazzled and befuddled;
unsure of what truth really lies behind an overdone disguise, I spite the ghazal

Aware it’s time to turn from you, resist your call, and start anew;
but backed up by the pact we’ve made, demoralized by compromise, my plight’s a ghazal.

Poor acrobat without a net, poor circus clown whose time is due;
in time, when time at last arrives to twist in air and rhapsodize, delight in ghazal.

I can’t or won’t refuse to fly; the ride defines the answer to my puzzle;
I’ll don a spangled pair of tights and take a breath and close my eyes, and write a ghazal.

Women Only Write About Themselves

Women only write about themselves.
     When they compose,
a therapeutic ooze engulfs and salves
     a woman’s woes.
That self-absorbed confession self-absolves,
     while readers doze.
Women only write about themselves.
     Enough of those.

When men say “I”, their “I” is universal.
     Their strong hearts bleed
for all the tribe. Applaud their verses’ muscle!
     Attend! Give heed!
The female “I” is narcissistic. Facile.
     A feeble reed.
When men say “I”, their “I” is universal.
     It’s all we need.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets

Although I never published in the Shit Creek Review, I was fond of its editor and wrote this poem after he said that he had already heard all the possible jokes about the journal's name. I thought I might have one that had not yet swum into his ken.


On First Looking into the Shit Creek Review

Much have I savored from the Muse’s bowel
Those droppings with their various perfumes
That nourish paean, dithyramb, and howl
As cowpats breed mind-altering mushrooms.
I oft the accolade “good shit” have heard,
Applied sometime to verse, sometime to weed,
Yet never got as high as sacred turd
Permits till I Shit Creek Review did read.
Then felt I as Sir William must have felt
When first into his ken Uranus swam
And his mind’s nostrils flared and glory smelt:
I reeled beneath the heavenly Shazam!
That makes great marvels of the merest stools
And brims each chamber pot with priceless jewels.

Walt to Emily

O Emily, anomaly, you sing There is no frigate like a book,
And, Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea!

Please climb aboard the good ship Whitman. . . .set sail
From home. . . . Song of Myself your chart and sextant.

Though recluse you have, methinks, imagined Wild nights!
In roiling seas. . . .When your life had stood a loaded gun?

Discharge! Load your lungs with earth and sun to yelp and yawp
Of cherished freedoms. . . . shoot truth straight, not slant!

You survey what I see, my macroscopic views. . . . beneath
Your microscopic lens! My ocean is your dusty pond. . . .
Is that gaze a squint?

Closer I approach you, Em. . . .breathing into, warming ears,
teasing, whispering, “With widened eyes, you’d see the oceanic
swells and surges. . . .feel Spirit pulsing, pummeling our senses.”

Ah, you note my eight and twenty bathers, men and women. Are you,
Sweet Emily-of-empathy, the twenty-ninth? Splashing, frolicking
Intermingling limbs with us. . . .but dry behind your cabin’s porthole?

Dive! Brave the floods of flesh. . . . waves of blood, currents of souls,
Submerge, merge, emerge. . . .See that my craft, like yours, is true.
Hear me. Dive in and play.

I will exult in you. . . .


from Amsterdam Quarterly and later in Ghost Trees

per his 1855, first edition, using ellipsis throughout

This Is a Poem

This is a poem,
as you can tell
because, you see,
it rhymes so well,

and if you count
the beats per line,
you'll see they all
come out just fine

(in this case "fine"
means each has two).
But there's an even
better clue

by which you won't
just think, but know,
this is a poem:
I told you so.

Silverback

There’s only one sun in the sky:
one star in our solar system.

There’s only one I in foci:
one centre of the circle.

The atoms have their nuclei
containing all our power.

The eagle glides across the sky
in solitary splendour.

The mighty lion isn’t shy,
Kings don’t hide; they roar with pride!

The Himalayas reach up high:
a point beyond the heavens.

Each storm can only have one eye:
the calm before destruction.

There is a truth, a reason why:
our world looks to its leaders,

so this, here verse, can testify:
Great Writers rule their readers!

Doesn't it take sense that the guy who raised the fuss about junky poems about poetry posts the most junky poems about poetry? What's worse, I'm beginning to like some of them and starting to convince myself that one or two in a book get lost, but string eight or ten together as a separate section and maybe they play off and help each other - and I need eight pages or so for another book...

Erato at Sarasota

Four rabbis board the charter fishing boat.
Full-bearded Hassids, extra-kosher guys
in somber suits, white shirts, black hats that float
across the Sarasota pier; surprise
the other passengers, who can’t disguise
their wonder at what’s trundled down the docks.
“They’ll set gefilte traps,” I warn - I’m wise
to all the tactics of the Orthodox -
“Put cream cheese on a three-pronged hook and troll for lox.”

“You putz,” she says, “Forget your fancy flights.
You see a beard, you think Maimonides.
The fact, my dear, is that they’re Mennonites -
good Amish farmers come for sun and breeze -
not props to populate your fantasies.
All you ever do is strew old Jews,
ex-lovers, Elliotese and Japanese
throughout a work and call it verse – abuse
a poet’s licensed right to choose whose life is whose.”

What does she know? I’m not bemused by nymphs
who nag at the conceits that I propose,
think they see truth with every sharp-eyed glimpse.
Yes dear. I just ignore her yawp and close -
unleash my rebbes till each stanza glows
with whiskered quartets singing, each to each;
mad sages dancing slow adagios,
their music droning, drowning out the screech
I swallow as I struggle; choking on a peach.


The Minimalist at Work

Mad Mary
Minimalist
Divelicates
... my whole
Masticates
Adjudicates
... and
Extricates
... its soul

“Show don’t tell.
Don’t need that.
You’ll do well
To lose some fat”

My epic poem
... has lost
... its heft
... arhythmically.
Like the Cheshire cat
... now all
... that’s left
... is a simile.

Puns in Poems

A punning word is one
of several senses spun

Or for deep esprit
there’s etymology

Exaggerating stages
piling up through ages

Perhaps extravagance
beyond the common sense

I learned this from Thoreau
whose puns were always thorough.

Dame Rhetoric

Synecdoche means when we name
A thing by a part of the same,
As folks with no class
Say "a fine piece of ass"
When referring to all of the dame.

Metonymy's almost the same.
It means when we give things the name
Of something related:
"A skirt that I dated"
Refers not to clothes but a dame.

The way I see it is the best way to teach people how to write poetry is to show them how not to write it. For my last trick OTT brash metaphor and now for a sibilance fest:

‘S’

S, noisy hiss, simple sound,
the effervescent letter,
a breathless whisper is the mist,
the sweetest kind of passion drips
like sips of sarsaparilla.

S, the sassy snake that slithers,
a slender nib slopes with its curves,
and flicks its tongue between the lines,
the satisfying strokes that signs
its soft satin like signature.

S, the language of the sea,
screams of pleasure locked in shells.
The wind fashions the ocean's silk
so s-shaped waves clasp one another
and send their secret message.

S, the sand between my toes,
a plural gently laps my feet.
With S the answer’s always yes,
assertive keystroke pressed,
as S races across my screen

Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssss,
the silence between songs-
seconds where no strings are strummed,
the wireless sighs that seize the air
to soothe the roots of senses.

S, the sensation skirting skin,
the stoke of flesh, a speechless sin,
the synthesis that sparks and skims
and slides its lips along the rim
of decency itself.

Designing Words

I.

Logos:

My living breath informs all things,
the moon and sun, the earth and sea,
the sweets and sours, salves and stings,
for I am One composed of three:

Adore the Son, and honour him as mee.

Man’s beginning was my Word,
and you will find that every line
now said or sung within your world
was made by men of my design:

In whom the fullness dwels of love divine.

II.

Satan:

He ended Eden with his words
and sentenced three of us who fell,
but I revise his fallen world
to sound and sense that speak my spell:

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

When I inspire your vatic men
to sing the world with fiery notes,
my power is Promethean—
its words flare from a thousand throats:
Of man’s First Disobedience. . . .

III.

Mankind:

Some verses of our Genesis
and Milton’s lines on primal treason
prove poetry can best express
the good-in-evil—logos, reason:

Happier, had it suffic’d him to have known
Good by it self, and Evil not at all.
For ever now to have their lot in pain.

We hear these bold immortal voices,
and may defer to I. or II.
when whispering prayers or shouting curses,
but poets sing that both are true.

For I behold them soft’nd and with tears.


Italic lines from Milton, Paradise Lost

From Ghost Trees

Stumbled across this one - about twenty years old, but it actually is an accurate if exaggerated description of why I stopped writing - and never finishing - short stories/novels - and switched to poetry.

Why I Write Poetry Instead of Novels

We were told to write about ourselves
so I went home and wrote a perfect sentence.
I polished it and I rephrased it,
and shined each word until it glistened on its own,
but also became an integral part
of a larger and extraordinarily complex entity.
My shining words were strung together in perfect
... order.

Soon I had another perfect sentence
and by the end of the year, a third and most of a fourth.
The perfect sentences developed an internal rhythm
... and cadence
they reflected and strengthened each other.
As the number of words increased,
I discovered that it was easier to develop hidden
... meanings,
and even to hint at puns in other languages.
Writing was beginning to come easily.

I was a natural.

My contribution to the new LUPO, a triolet about triolets. Midway down the page. (Check out the poems by others on the page, too.)

https://lightenup-online.co.uk/index...-eleven-eights

And here's mine: an attempt to trap the muse.

https://www.lightenup-online.co.uk/i...oets-complaint

.
This, scribble-squeezed out very very very quickly like a hot potato just out of the oven a few ephemeral moments ago:


Sea of Impossibility

As you can see
it’s nearly impossible
to turn thoughts
into good poetry.
It is close to being magical
working only with crude tools
and dense thoughts and words
like firewater to forge a diamond
made from clay—
as you can see.



.

A Quick Dash Off
 

Tuberville taken and now up at New Verse News

https://newversenews.com/



Verse of the Valiant

Hurrah for poetry
that soldiers say
to calm their day--

That “momentary stay
against confusion”*
for which they pray

as they protect the nation.

*As Robert Frost defined a poem

Seers and Sayers

Finding cosmos
in the chaos,

seeing, hearing
beauty’s being,

a poet gives
the gift of saying.

Forgive me, Lord, for I have written free verse:

THE MONKEY FILES

Every poem has already been written,
waiting to be discovered,
including this one. A monkey made them,

and most of what the monkey made
made little sense, but somehow
the monkey banged out this little gem,

which may not be great human poetry
but is still pretty impressive for a monkey
who was typing with one hand

and shoving a banana into his mouth
with the other. And since what he was typing
was entirely random, it's miraculous

these words are spelled correctly
and contribute to sentences that happen
to correspond with thoughts of the random human

who rescued them from the monkey slush pile
and gave them a life, however meager,
the monkey could not dream of.

Penance may be required, but it was worth it. This develops the old typing-monkey tale just enough to make it interesting. I suspect that monkey has a hand in all our writing, giving it a life that the finders may not dream of.

Thanks, Carl. Here's another hot off the press:

THE WISH

I wish I had not written this,
... and though it's not too late
to cross it out, to start again,
... I think I'd rather wait
and see if something comes of it
... if I just stay the course,
gently guiding words along
... without excessive force.
(Okay, I've seen what came of it.
... Admittedly, not great.
I wish I had not written this,
... but now it is too late.)

Yum!
 

RIPages

Poems written but not read
Are like people who are dead.

Makers

Making songs of birth and death,
of laughs and tears, our myriad makers
made stays against distress.

Crafters’ arts of speech and scripts
that harmonize the then and now
wove sacred with profane.

As troubadours remaking rites,
they made enchanting courtly lyrics,
made sex our making love.


“Maker” is the Greek word for “Poet.”