Here's a beloved chestnut from the nineteenth century:

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in.
Time, you thief! who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad;
Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I'm growing old, but add-
Jenny kissed me!

--Leigh Hunt

Here's Kerrigan's hilarious send-up:

Elvis Kissed Me

"Elvis kissed me once," she swears,
Sitting in a neon dive,
Ordering her drinks in pairs.

Two stools down you nurse a beer,
Sensing easy pickings here.

"Back in sixty-eight," she sighs,
Smoothing back her yellow hair.
Black mascara smears her eyes.

Drawing near, you claim you've met,
Offer her a cigarette.

"Call me cheap," she sobs, "or bad,
Say that decent men dismissed me,
Say I've lost my looks, but add,
Elvis kissed me."

My mother loves it, and Tom hates it, in the way that Yeats came to hate The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, and Cope, Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis. Truly a signature poem, and significantly better than the original for Kerrigan's wit in putting the action into the mouth of an old floozy at the bar rather than standing as N himself!

Here's a new poem of Tom's that I just love. Tom writes a tremendous amount of poems in aba cdc tetrameter quatrains. Indeed it is his signature measure. This is too new to be in My Dark People.

LACUNAE

I’ve had the sense these latter years
I missed some stops along the way,
Waylaid by empty doubts or fears,

Those propylaeae unexplored,
The vestiges of colonnades,
That “frozen art” too long ignored.

The peaks I never undertook,
Their distant summits unattained,
Would fill the pages of a book,

And there’s some Greek or Gaelic text
I’ll be forever looking for
In either this world or the next.

At times, by chance, I hear your name,
And think, What made me hesitate?
Once slighted, love is not the same.

What’s left to say when all is done
I might have opened untried doors,
Beheld a second Parthenon

Or megaliths upon the moors.

It's actually the only Kerrigan poem I've contributed to. I wanted Tom to have more cloture than an ABA tercet would yield, and I proposed the final, stranded B line. Yeats lied. Kerrigan is the Last Romantic.

I just learned that Amazon won't have the book for a couple weeks, but My Dark People can be ordered from Kerry Records in LA. www.kerryrecords.com. Just scroll down to Events on the home page and click away.







[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited May 30, 2008).]

Something I find interesting about his "signature" measure is that for every twelve lines, you get four rhyme-pairs instead of the three you would get if you did three of the usual abac's or abcb's. So in addition to providing the reader with more bang for the same buck, it also provides the poet with more opportunities/challenges to be taken advantage of/met.

[This message has been edited by Cal Reinhardt (edited May 30, 2008).]

Right, Cal. The odds of screwing up or scoring are 50 percent higher than abcb. Here's another favorite of mine in a loping anapestic tetrameter:

Secretly Reading My Mother's Magazines in Childhood

We had very few books and no library near
that old tumbledown house at the end of the street,
in that neighborhood stinking of cabbage and beer.

So I savored the love lives of Allison, Dawn,
all those Merediths, Ericas, Tiffanys, Belles,
in my bedroom upstairs or the chaise on the lawn,

though on greater reflection those names seemed as queer
as souffle de poisson or escalopes de veau
in a neighborhood stinking of cabbage and beer.

And I thought to myself as I read more and more,
I might find that oasis of beauty and grace
and encounter those women I’d grown to adore.

But a moment of truth proved my hour of despair.
I’d been lied to, defrauded, seduced and betrayed,
like some pitiful character out of Flaubert.

With that paradise lost, my dilemma was clear:
I was trapped in a world full of Marys and Anns,
in a neighborhood stinking of cabbage and beer.



[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited May 30, 2008).]

Tim -

Comparison of that poem's construction with the construction of your off-the-shelf villanelle is instructive. Perhaps if more folks knew of this "form", there would be less villanelles.

Also, I'm curious if TSK would admit to any conscious or unconscious influence from Kipling (in general, not in the making of this particular poem.) The way in which the repetend is used here reminds me very much of the way in which Kipling used "but I learned about women from her" ...



[This message has been edited by Cal Reinhardt (edited May 30, 2008).]

These are fine poems, Tim, the Elvis one particularly. I've always thought 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' was a kind of ghastly caricature of Yeats, and he was quite right to hate it. Robert Graves didn't think much of it either. Wasn't it recited in unison by a thousand boy scouts? Yeah right.

I've read and enjoyed the Elvis poem before, though I had forgotten the poet's name. Wasn't the poem in Keillor's "Good Poems" anthology? (I've always said Keillor did a good job filling the book with poems that justified the book's title).

Thanks, Tim. The Elvis poem is most assuredly superior to the Hunt poem that spawned it, and now it has me considering the measure of ABA CDC's.

I especially love the parody of Jenny Kissed Me. It's dangerous ground but all the pitfalls were avoided. Touching as well as funny.
Janet

I particularly like Mother's Magazines. Only nit I'd pick (if I were critiquing that poem) is the undeveloped phrase "a moment of truth proved my hour of despair." Tut, tut...

Carol

"Elvis Kissed Me": well some cheap shots there (in more ways than one), and for that reason I don't blame Tom for "hating" it (that's harsh though). The devil-may-care quality, otoh, is grand.

Souffle de poisson?! I didn't know there was such a creature. I once tried chocolate souffle--repulsive!

"Lacunae" is easily the best of these, Tom, except for "fill the pages of a book": much too worn a phrase there. You should sharpen that line--it wouldn't be difficult, and would take the poem a long way.

[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited June 18, 2008).]