[Philip Quinlan]

Sometimes the honeyed word (at the end) only serves to stick the knife in a bit further...

Ad-verse Criticism

Higgledy-piggledy
Circumlocutory
Telling its tale in a roundabout way

S1L6, out of 10, gets a nix
I am missing the meaning
You tried to convey

The poem’s debatable
Unpunctuatable
Prosody’s parlous by any parameter

Went for a sonnet
But fell over on it
With what I would christen “spasmodic pentameter”

Please be a formalist
Make your pomes normalest
Get on the “A” list, the playlist at Raintown

Work at the craft
Write vers-libre? Don’t be daft!
Do translation and crit, get a reading gig downtown

Show me, don’t tell
No “confessional”, hell
That’s so passé, and Sylvia did it to death

You may yet be a poet
But this doesn’t show it
The schema, you dreamer
Is in terza rima
And villanelles tell well of last dying breath

Triolets? Yes way!
Or write like Neruda did
Lemons have nipples, or so it would seem

I await your revision
With anticipation

There’s much here to like, though
That last line’s a dream…

[Janet Kenny]

Bankers Excoriated


The bankers are bonkers and possibly wankers,
they’re shonky, despicable thinkers and swankers.
They’re drinkers in blinkers who hanker for status
while swindling and balancing just to outrank us.
They skulk in grotesque edifices to catch us
with marble and echoes before they dispatch us
to penury purchased with pensions of wretches
and only a few of them serve proper stretches.


_____
I used "bonkers" in sense of being barmy but happily include the modern usage.

[FOsen]

Bedford Falls Again

I’m home at last, although the place feels funny;
Then Mary, crowds of friends and that old souse,
Sweet Uncle Billy, all crash in with money
And shouts of cheer, until our drafty house
Seems like a gently glowing, golden forge.
As Zuzu tends the till, I start to speak
And feel, at once, that I’m a different George:
Like you, I’m not yet sure what we’ve all come to,
But it’s just wonderful you’d help a lout
Discover he’s the richest one among you,
While you’re still forced to scrimp and do without.
I grab the brimming basket from my daughter.
Come on then, folks, let’s bail out Mr. Potter!

I put this up as "Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls" around the holidays, but it seemed appropriate.

Frank

[Jan D. Hodge]

[Jan D. Hodge]

Pulled. Sorry.