The Bean Counters
By Agony Cramp


“Has anybody acted?” said the poet
Beating out a plot in verse;
But the academics chewed upon their nosebags
and some let fall a curse.
And a novelist ran out of the cloister,
behind the poet’s back.
And he beat upon the door again a second time;
Is anybody in this shack?
But none condescended to the poet,
no eye to the lock was pressed
to peer through the chink at his red nose
nor offer a rag to blow it.
But only the metronomes answered
from deep in the catacombs
from out of their wood and metal boxes
in voices grey and rancid;
cloned rhythms in syllabics without meaning
were heard in the theatre’s boom,
echoing like a vast cathedral
to the poet's sense of doom.
And his feet were worn out with thumping,
his bunions torturing his soul.
While his play, failed, plotless and unending,
fell down a deep black hole;
So he bitterly beat on the door, shouting
“Bastards” and lifted his fists:--
“Tell them I know, where their books are
and I know how this plot twists.”
Never an acknowledgement they gave him.
Though they heard every word.
Their ivory towers impregnable and inward
held tenure long preferred.
Ay, they heard his feet upon the meter
and the beat of crutches on stone,
And how the pages fell upon the pavement
when the poet left, alone.



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 21, 2005).]

Scott, thank you for your contribution. I like your idea of the peak within a phrase. There is a difficulty with the descriptive language we use to describe these things, and I am searching for new tools like this to help understand how it works.

But perhaps I will never understand it.

I do agree that "The Listeners" is rather messy in places, giving too much scope for ambiguity in meter.

Janet!

I just saw your poem. It is very good!

Now, tell us - from the horse's mouth - what is your scansion?

------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited August 21, 2005).]

34--23--34

Not bad eh?;)

Janet

Excellent figures!

A sexy poem!

------------------
Mark Allinson

Mark and Henry!!!!!

I have Carol's sound file for The Listeners. I don't want to post it until I have yours also.

Where are they?!

Sound file? What sound file?

I'm disappointed that Hope's vast hieratic utterance has been so slighted here-- and that no one has visited the Beowulf in a discussion of accentual verse.

'The Listeners' is tricky business, but it's ballad stanza as far as I'm concerned. That or chaos, and I don't buy chaos for this poem.

Alan

The ballad stanza, to my knowledge, is A4 B3 C4 B3, which would disqualify The Listeners, both in terms of rhyme and meter, though its meter certainly has echoes of the 3/4 contrast. But the first lines, to my ear, read A3 B3 C4 B3.

The subject matter, on the other hand, is perfectly suitable, though the atmosphere is more Gothic than a traditional ballad (in my experience anyway).

But I fail to see why metrical irregularities in The Listeners should mean it is in any way chaotic. On the contrary, I would suggest such unevenness is deliberate, part of the mysterious texture of the poem, part of the spell of its unique, dreamy atmosphere. The strangely archaic or odd words (champed, smote, 'neath etc.) also contribute to this.

Incidentally, there's a lovely bit of rhyming magic/mimesis in the final word, where the vowel-sound shifts/gallops from long (stone) to short (gone).


[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited August 25, 2005).]

I mis-spoke. Ballad measure. 4-3 alternation. Many readers here seem to have difficulty discerning between secondary and primary stress. That poem is maddeningly ambiguous in some of its 4 stress lines, but the overall pattern is unmistakable.

I challenged people, specificly Mark Allison, Carol and Henry to send me sound files of them reciting The Listeners, to hear the differences. I wondered if their labels affected the way they read the poem.

I'll post the files online.

Anyone can send a file, if they wish.

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