Speccie: Housekeeping
 

Bill and Bazza led the field in this very English competition. Our football cliches are all our own and has ever a sportsman been a delightfully boneheaded as David Beckham? Yes one. Frank Bruno, and he too is home grown. I wrote a poem for Bill and here, with no excuse at all, it is. Congratulations of your fiver. The opening line, you will observe, is one of yours.

Tony Blair reminds me of a budgie,
And Tony Blair has got his mirror too.
Tony Blair reminds me of a kludgie,
A word that Scotchmen use when they mean loo.

Meanwhile, here is the new competition. I predict a lot of Larkin and Frost. And why not?

No. 2655: Housekeeping
You are invited to submit a poem (16 lines maximum) about a mundane household task such as boiling an egg or changing a light bulb in the style of a poet of your choice (please specify). Entries should be submitted by email, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 7 July.

Old Dunbar’s Sage Advice about Light Bulbs

Friend, do not count my counsels vain:
Switch off the current at the main
Lest excess voltage should thee slay;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

And if thou would’st employ a chair,
Take care the chair legs stand foursquare,
Neither to topple nor to sway;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Say thou unscrew’st with twist too free;
Bulb breaks and bursts an artery.
Thy life blood then will gush and spray;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Follow the wiser course. Perhaps
‘Tis meet to hire a pair of chaps
To come a week on Saturday;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

As I said to John, rigor mortis congelat me. Years ago I wrote one about cleaning the cooker in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins (very popular at readings) and it keeps getting in the way. I wish I could recycle it.

I am struggling to get G K Chesterton to clean out the gunge in his gardening boots but may not kick it into shape in time. Is anyone else having trouble with this comp?

A hurried first draft from John Betjeman -- whose original Mfanwy was certainly not the sort of girl to wear lisle stockings!


Smiling Mfanwy, beguiling Mfanwy,
changing the bulb in my high-hanging light,
nanny and chum to me, all but a mum to me;
sixty years on I still cherish the sight

of you standing tip-toe there, high on my nursery chair,
wobbling and laughing and stretching up while
your skirt rises high to show some of what’s hid below --
calf-contoured stockings of flesh-coloured lisle.

Hands held aloft up there, bulb fitted in with care,
sleeves falling back up your arms bare and bold,
bright in your new-won light, there to this boy’s delight
the glow of their suntan and down of soft gold.

Neatest Mfanwy, my sweetest Mfanwy,
smiling and flushed as you kiss me goodnight,
leaving a boy to learn how a first love can burn
sixty watt bulbs with a hundred watt light.

here goes nothing
 

Plug-Wiring Blues (W. H. Auden)

Into the neutral the blue wire goes.
Once it was black; things change I suppose.

The live one is brown. It used to be red,
Bringing to mind a decade long dead.

My wife is impatient. She wants the tv.
She likes Antiques Roadshow, doesn't like me.

A trivial task, but it's making me sweat.
I daren't pop out for a quick cigarette.

My neighbour gave up. He put on three stone.
Now the women leave him alone.

Earth is bi-coloured, yellow and green.
I'd rather be reading a men's magazine.

I'm missing a screw, but it's always the case.
First you lose love, then you lose face.

When I've done this I'll get out the car
And go for a drive, but not very far.

Ah Vacuum Cleaner, weary of grime,
Who sweepest the steps and the floor,
Seeking after that sweet golden time
When the filth of the house is no more,

Where the crumbs on the carpet have vanished,
And the dustballs that constantly grow
Upon every surface are banished
Where my Dyson decides they must go!

Heavens, these are good. All winners. Which means, alas, that the bar is set very high. I'd be surprised if Bazza doesn't make it though.

The Raving

Once inside my scullery, musty,
Buried dishes, green, and crusty,
In the sudsy sepulcher,
Before the kitchen maid, Lenore;
In the middle of her washing,
Suddenly there came a smashing,
As if some maid insanely crashing,
Crashing through my chamber door -
Quothing, raving, "Nevermore!"

The Auden one is very good. I'm trying to turn Eliot's "A Cooking Egg" into "A Boiling Egg" but it's not going very well.

On p84 of my brilliant book 'Writing Poetry' I have a liitle poem 'Hiawatha Makes a Cup of Tea' and I also put forward cleaning your teeth as an exercise. I give you these suggestions for nothing. And what about walking the dog?

(Andrew Marvell)

Had I but soap enough and time,
This dirty laundry were no crime.
I would sit down and think which way
To make my white shirts not look grey.
Two hundred years should go to soak
My underwear or weekday cloak;
For truly I deserve this state,
Nor would I wash at faster rate.
But at my back I always hear
The bus I ride to work draw near,
And certainly I cannot take it
If I try to board it naked;
So let me roll my shirts and all
My dirty laundry in one ball.
Though I can't make my washing fun,
I still can make my washer run.

.

When to confessions of the tasks I ought
to seize upon the breaking of the morn
but shirk because I shiver at the thought
of those vile smells my willful nose doth scorn –
I hasten to confide I love my tots
but loathe the emptying of chamber pots!

.

Making a Cuppa for Wendy Cope

We've been given a household task to do
in the style of someone who’s famous,
and I knew you'd be gracious and thought you were due,
since you did it for old Kingsley Amis.

Frank

****************

Frank, that is small and gracious.

Upon Julia's Clothes

And when she washes Julia goes
And takes some acid and pegs her nose.
The liquefaction of her clothes.

Is what I always wait to see
Leaving her flagrantly free ;
O how her nakedness takes me.

Blake
 

Table, table shining bright
I hope I got the polish right
I am so easy to confuse
perhaps I got the one for shoes.

Poop is the thing with tethers
That sits upon the street
And begs for bags – without the words,
From every soul it meets.

But when I stop to bend and scoop
I pity the poor swarm –
How can I bash the little poop
That keeps the flies so warm?

.

hilarious!
 

Petra, I almost choked on my Bombay Sapphire. The exact perfect tone of Emily's verse style & feeling married to an incongruous subject. She's a great poet & here has drawn a superb parody.

Thanks, Bazza! Unfortunately it's not a "household" task -- I realized that too late.
Your Auden is still the absolute cream of the crop here, but I like a lot of the others, too. Bob's Marvell has a very clever ending, and Don's "Porcelain God" is a marvel even if it's not a Marvell.

I can't find it anywhere now (there are many others, incidentally) but I once saw an excellent, really funny parody of Henry Reed's 'Naming of Parts', changed to doing laundry. I guess that one is just too obvious to use.

Don't forget that Lucy says 'please specify' which poet's style you're using - I have to admit that not all of the ones here are instantly familiar to me. Lucy is no doubt better informed... but she did ask!

By me, if it involves a household pet it's a household task. Don't be shamefaced. Send it in anyway. Lucy can be quite elastic where quality is concerned.

I agree with Bazza, shovelling kittenshit is CERTAINLY one of my household tasks. And Jayne, I think Don's poem is a G.M. Hopkins, but I agree he needs to say so.

Household waste needn't stop at kittens. Potty humour is here taken to extremes. Sorry if you're eating...

I couldn't get Chesterton to work for me after all, but someone else stepped in - so to speak:

Robert Frost Tackles the Blockage

I have been one acquainted with the shite
That gathers in the gloom of septic tanks
And shoulders-up the lid with foetid might.

I was the one selected from the ranks
To face the faeces, armed with only hope
And rubber gloves, a pair of scaffold planks,

A good stout stick, a bucket on a rope
And a technique passed down the family.
Human shadoof, I bent to dip and grope;

A thrusting-under and a hauling-free
Dropping the dollops from a dizzy height
Until I won my Pyrrhic victory.

No-one will stand downwind of me tonight.
I have been one acquainted with the shite.

***************

More household pets.
My younger daughter is Nina, and she used to have hamsters - otherwise, not much difference here.

From Hilaire Belloc's Tarantella (I know you know already!)

Why must I do it again, Miranda?
Why must I do it again?
All that shredding of bedding,
And the bite that I'm dreading:
The "Ouch!" when they crouch with an over-stuffed pouch,
And the sawdust all over the floor.
And it makes me go, "Ugh!", the blur of their fur,
When they spin on that wheel, while you're a by-stander.
Why must I clean out your gerbils, Miranda?
Why must I do it again?

Turning and turning in a widening gyre,
My clothes will soon be ready for the dryer.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Cycle is at hand.
But what rough stain, the final cycle spun,
Slouches towards my laundry to be born?
.
.

Confessing my ignorance once more.
Where's that one from, Bob? See post #21 - you can't just assume we're all literary giants; even Lucy has asked for a clue!

Sorry, Jayne. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

Not at all, Don. I like it. And of courseI know it's Hopkins for the reason you state. Did you suppose I was doing BRITISH IRONY? Absolutely not. If I thought it stank I woud use BRITISH RESERVE and say nothing. You know what that old Brit Thumper says. 'if you can't say nothing nice, don't say nothing at all.'

To do Hopkins right you have to make him say something he wouldn't have said. You have done that.

Domestic Patter

I am the very essence of a post-Mod bourgeois bachelor
Without a mate to help me do the laundry in particular.
I quote domestic treatises and matters metro-sexual
From Martha Stewart’s latest book to shopping recreational.

My pains to make risotto has some say I’m homosexual
And what about the time they saw me folding napkins triangle?
I use the latest products and I save each junk-mail catalogue
For Teflon apparati to the latest cleaning analogue.

For Teflon apparati to the latest cleaning analogue.
For Teflon apparati to the latest cleaning analogue.
For Teflon apparati to the latest cleaning analogue.

**********************

Love the gerbils, Jayn.

Another one:

GOLDSMITH ON LIGHT BULBS

When lovely woman notes with sorrow
The highest light bulb in the room
Is blown and can't be reached, what morrow
Will cast new light upon her gloom?

The only art to make her gladder
Is woman's all-too-easy one.
She'll con some guy to fetch a ladder,
And in a wink, the job is done.

Mom's Ravin'

Once upon a summer morning as I woke up, stretching, yawning,
gazing at the bright day dawning, heedless of what fears might loom,
while I dug through piles of crap for T-shirt, shorts and baseball cap,
suddenly I heard a rap come thundering like the clap of doom.
"'Tis some friend," I muttered, though it chilled me like the clap of doom.
Quoth my mother: "Clean your room."

"Mom!" said I, "no need to holler or get hot beneath the collar;
if I choose to live in squalor, that's my privilege, I presume."
Vainly seeking then to borrow time I cried in tones of sorrow:
"Mom I promise on the morrow, I'll take up the mop and broom!
Yea, I promise on the morrow, I shall ply both mop and broom!"
Quoth my mother: "Clean your room."

Edgar Allan Poe at age 11

Don,
You asked about a contest for intentionally bad poetry. John once started a thread about a contest like that. You'll find the name of the contest here -- I think it's an annual one, but you'll have to google to find out more:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=6991

Marion,
That's brilliant. I do know this one, but can't for the life of me remember what it's called or who it's by. No wonder Lucy asked us to specify the original! There are SO many poems and SO many poets - my poor brain is nearly full and I can't store all this info without deleting some. Now... where the hell did I put my cup of coffee?

Jayne,
It's Poe's "The Raven". One of the greatest poems in the English language, IMO, but just begging to be parodied!

(My father moved through dooms of love, by E. E. Cummings --http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15405)


my mother moved through dooms of dust
through grimes of gag through fogs of ash,
scrubbing the damage off linen or wool
my mother moved through shines of dull

this vaguely unforgotten there
turned at her toil to spotless here;
that if (so torrid suds are warm)
under her eyes dust lost its form

newly as from indelible which
motes would burst beneath her touch
drove the mold from dinner plates
woke brutish germs to ghostly roots

and nothing quite so least as cloth
-- I say though dirt were why men breathe--
because my mother lived her brush
love was the whole but not enough

Marion,
Doh! Of course. Thanks for assisting my overloaded brain.

Lucy is going to have one helluva hard job judging this one, IMO. Will the lucky winners be the ones who hit on her personal favourite poems to parody? Or will she be blown away by the skill of some of the entries even if she's not overly familiar with the original? A difficult call, either way.

I think the ultimate bad poetry contest is the Wergle Flomp (just google it).

On the subject of cleaning up after pets, here's another:

(Coleridge)

It is an Ancient Mariner
lives on the beach alone,
and those who pass his hut by night
may hear his doleful moan.

“Since my last voyage I've settled here
amid the sand and rocks.
I keep three cats, and every night
I change their litter box.

“The litter's here, the litter's there,
it lies on every hand.
And soon my feet will tread, I fear,
more cat litter than sand.

“I thought I'd find new peace of mind,
far from the haunts of men.
But I'd rather floss an albatross
than keep three cats again.”