Here's a sonnet I love for its jauntiness. If the Cat were still alive, this would be his submission, and I'll be pleased to have anyone figure out which of our distinguished members wrote it.

Singing Bird

Christ's sake, poor Septimus, stop all this praise.
You make me seem a vase in some museum.
Goodbye the living poet, hello the mausoleum!
I haven¹t written an unselfconscious phrase
since you phoned in the small hours, raving
about my last sent verses, lyrical
sparrows daftly denying the empirical
hawk and its usual method of behaving.

I cannot write a word now but I visualise
myself as object, in your aesthetic gallery
of plinth-set poets, caretaken for a salary,
whose golden dung brings tears to aesthetes' eyes.
I'm out into the day to let the rain
batter me back to dailiness again.

I'm thinking of pinning this poem up right over my word processor, as a kind of memento mori, a warning--not of mortality--but of "literary-hood." I recognize the poem it suggests in the second quatrain, having almost perpetrated it several times before having the sense to tear it up. The deflating language is wonderful, culminating in that perfect "golden dung" we need to be so careful of.

The irony, of course, is that this poet clearly deserves everything "poor Septimus" has been spouting. Anybody who doubts that should just look at the rhymes, and the way the tone ranges smoothly from impatience through self-awareness to alert, hard-nosed humility.

Tim:
I haven't a clue who wrote it, but anyone who can plausibly rhyme "lyrical" with "empirical / hawk" gets my whole hearted vote.
RPW

Love this one - language and attitude, and the carefree way it swings back and forth between pentameter and hex and totally gets away with it because it is so...unselfconscious. What I particularly admire here is the way that a classical reference and a traditional form are married to completely contemporary sentiment and expression. And the closing couplet bangs it all shut! It's not only well done, but it's an intelligent poem.

Whodunnit? Sassy attitude toward life and meter, hawks and sparrows, uncomfortable with praise. I'd say Deborah Warren (if I guess Deborah on every sonnet, sooner or later I'll be correct).

Michael Cantor

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited March 18, 2003).]

Dear Michael, keep guessing. Only way I'd have guessed this one is by the last couplet, uttered by a voice unlike that of anyone now speaking.

That golden dung line alone is worth the price of admission. Sends me on a vengeful reverie of certain poems written by certain highly rewarded poets who have been praised by certain highly pretentious Harvard critics.

Tim tells us that this sonnet was uttered "by a voice unlike that of anyone now speaking." That's too bad. I would love to see lines 7-8 revised, but I take it the author is no longer around to do any revising. Well, even as is, this one gets my vote.

Sorry to mislead, Alfred. The last couplet is typical of this poet's voice, and the rest of the sonnet much less so. I think the genius of this poem is that he writes a chatty, Catullus-like affair, then makes it entirely his own. And he's alive and well.

Alfred, what do you want done to lines 7 & 8? I think they're priceless!

Rhina,

Yes, what those lines SAY is priceless, but those two lines sound like written lines, where every other line in the poem sounds as if it might be spoken aloud, without first having been memorized.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my poem.
This sonnet which, as Tim kindly pointed out, has just appeared in my new book, Madame Fi Fi’s Farewell, was written about eight years ago.
I got a phone call at 5a.m. from an American friend who had been drinking red wine and was full of lavish praise for some poems I had sent him. He was -- we have lost touch -- then a young man in love with the Romantics and could declaim reams of French poetry in the original, and Dylan Thomas at his orotund worst, at the drop of a syllable. He wrote letters in a wonderful copperplate hand, using dip pens, in an eighteenth century tone and affected a disdain for contemporaneity. He still seemed to cherish a romantic view of a Scotland full of kilts, shortbread, bonnie lassies and stout-hearted twinkling Burnsian fellows, though a few visits had partly disabused him of that notion.
He picked out for special praise -- at around 5.30a.m -- his phone call lasted two and a half hours -- a poem of mine called ‘Morning Song’ , a lyrical chirrup to a woman which took as its donnée two lines in translation by the Gaelic poet Anthony Raftery, “If a hundred clerks were gathered together/They could not write down a third of her ways.” They are lines I still enjoy for their wholesome straightforwardness.
My own considerably lesser poem, written around 15 years ago, in the throes of new love, contained lines of dubious merit such as “drawers opened in the silence of morning” -- what kind of “drawers” in context was not entirely clear -- not to mention a phrase such as “her salt-sweet gates”. This inflaming coinage was a phrase my friend quoted with especial relish -- he was, I recall, serious -- and which now makes me shudder and laugh in equal measure. I’m distant enough from the poem to be quite affectionate about its awfulness.
For a while, in the mid-nineties, before self-preservation overtook daring, I thought of including a feature in The Dark Horse called something like “Notable lines from recent Scottish poetry” for which my own examples above, as evidence of my impartiality, would have been prime candidates. Others were lines by fellow Scottish poets -- these examples are genuine -- in some of which a man writing about the “history” of his wife’s breasts said of them that, in her adolescence, they “exploded/to the size of grapefruits”; by the end of the poem, post-natally, they have become empty milk pails banging on her chest; or there are these immortal lines, “The summer night is big as a cucumber;/It levitates over Thurso Street.” What finally prevented me was that both these examples had first been published in what was then Scotland’s most senior poetry magazine; the editor would have felt I was getting at her.
‘Singing Bird’ came out of a kind of affectionate exasperation at my friend’s wrong-headed, if well-meaning, praise of what Geoffrey Hill would call my “atrocities of the tongue”, coupled with my distrust of the notion of the specialness of the artist, as distinct from others. Without denying the serendipities of art and ‘inspiration’ and the possibility of greatness, I like the idea my old friend George Mackay Brown had of the poet as a sort of verbal carpenter, and the practice of poetry as a daily thing no more exalted, nor unimportant, than brushing one’s teeth or baking a loaf.
I believe it is problematic artistically for a poet to be too self-aware when writing. Sometimes, as Philip Hobsbaum has pointed out, poets write better than they know, and one often only discovers this after coming back to a poem which one thought only average at the time of composition -- average, that is, for one’s own output -- only to find it better than one remembered. The danger of self-awareness, in part, too, is the subject of my poem. As Joe Kennedy has written, imagining the poet as a sort of golden goose, if you want to lay well, “don’t look.”
‘Singing Bird’ was first published in the British magazine The Spectator; its poetry editor was then P.J. Kavanagh.

Bravo, Gerry! What a smart and entertaining essay this is! Although, now that I know how you react to high praise, maybe I'd better be circumspect and praise it cautiously, as follows: Thoroughly worthwhile, on the whole.