Swatter

Consider, if you will, the humble fly

Whose every effort is in seeming vain

Born to a world of never-ceasing pain

Born but to live a little time and die.

Consider asking, as it buzzes by,

What reason, or what hope of earthly gain,

It has for putting forth the slightest strain

And if still does so, consider why.

Life must exist to act; it cannot stay.

It cannot stand unmoved, though everything

Should shout out nothing that is done will matter.

The fly that lives a single day in May

Will still fly on, its hopes upon the wing,

Despite the knowledge it will merely spatter.

Nobility of Labor

The union always made us strong

So strong that we forgot it did;

We started thinking (thinking wrong)

It held us down. But, like a lid

Placed on a pot of water, heated,

Which makes the water boil faster

So will a union, once it's seated,

Save its members from disaster.

As individuals we suffer

Underneath the corporations;

A union is a vital buffer

Against their greater depredations

So vote the union for protection:

Watch who advocates rejection.

Ban-on

 In politics, there is one rule:

Don’t let them flood the zone with shit.

They’ll try to play you like a fool

To force responses as they flit

Between their claims, and benefit

From how you cannot stop them all.

Don’t let them play the hypocrite

And throw up arguments to stall

Pretending with unending gall

To care about each twist and turn;

They are not serious; they trawl

And hope, by that, to make you burn.

But if you keep your focus true

Someday they’ll have to answer you.

Castles In The Air

Let me be extremely clear:

The people have a right to vote.

Some may not vote at all, I fear,

And some will fill it out by rote,

Yet everyone must have the right

Although it lies unexercised

To join their patriotic might

With all of ours. When it's despised,

When tyrants and their subject courts

Obstruct the franchise we all own,

They take the government's supports

And crumble out that heavy stone

Leaving it standing on the air

Without a vote, there's no right there.

On Structure and Restriction

Writing a sonnet is (fundamentally, at least for me) about creation within structure. It is about allowing the constraints and requirements of the form to shape but not dictate the work that you are doing and the expression of your ideas. It is about finding the parts of an idea that can be constructed into the sonnet form. In a sense then, any poem can be or could be recast as a sonnet if the ideas and emotions contained within it can be reforged.

This is the reason that I hold so firmly to my belief in certain restrictions on the sonnet. I believe that sonnets should have 14 lines. I believe that sonnets must rhyme. I believe that sonnets must have meter. It is of course possible to think that some of these restrictions can be relaxed or that some of them could be tightened. The name of this blog of course suggests iambic pentameter or at the very least some 10 syllable line in a 14 line poem to make 140 syllables. And yet many of the sonnets on this blog use iambic tetrameter and I have not renamed the blog to 112syllables. similarly there are poems on this blog that use extremely unusual rhyme schemes, though I believe there are no unrhymed sonnets on the blog. 

The point for me is that there needs to be a certain level of restriction; and for me the quantity of lines, the consistency of meter, with (historically) the one exception of the final couplet, and the use of a consistent rhyme scheme where every line has a rhyme somewhere in the poem are those restrictions. I cannot and do not object to others viewing this differently, but I think it is relevant to considering the creative process of writing a sonnet to factor in the restrictions that should be placed on it. I find that this also permits certain types of analysis based on the choice of rhyme scheme and meter and their interaction with the 14 line structure. 

There are also of course sonnet traditions. Thus a poem that is or is adjacent to a Petrarchan sonnet has different restrictions and should be analyzed differently than one that approaches the Shakespearean sonnet tradition or the Spenserian or that creates its own rhyme structure entirely. The turn, for instance, is a common element in sonnets but it's placement, effect, and connection to the rest of the poem are elements that can be moved around depending on the tradition or the invention of the author. but operating within the general restriction of the sonnet or the more specific restriction of a son of tradition (for me) brings meaning both to the creation and the analysis of the sonnet.

Credo En Unum

I do believe in many simple things:

The joy my dog expresses in her leaps

The sight of butterflies stretching their wings

Or humpback whales emerging from the deeps.

I also trust in more complex examples:

The hard won pleasure of a book well written

A purchase made after a million samples

The self-restraint of not squooshing a kitten.

In all of these I have belief and trust

That they can represent a world renewed;

A world revived, as I insist it must

From where it stands unhappy and subdued.

If these things should not be, then I would grieve

But as they are, I revel and believe.

Notorious

I knew that she would pass and still I prayed

She would by miracle outlive us all;

A monument to justice, standing tall,

Despite her stature: unbowed, unafraid.

By her oppression's mighty hand was stayed

And at her going, I fear it will fall;

While other justices were playing ball

She understood the stakes of what they played.

The gap she leaves behind we cannot fill

(Though we may fear it will be filled ere long);

In years to come we'll wish she were here still

To judge the right, dissenting from the wrong.

She's earned her rest, so we must now fulfill

The legacy she left, and keep it strong.

Weather Gauge

The sun refuses to reveal its face

Pulling the angry clouds across the sky

To shield it with their covering embrace

Until the day itself begins to die.

The moon, adopting its more senior's ways,

Seizes the clouds and makes them hide it too;

Continuing the day's oppressive haze

Until the morning rises with the dew.

And as that water floats up towards the sun

The clouds release their tears in sympathy

Lashing the ground with rain which, once begun,

Offers no end to its eternity.

So day and night are unifiedly wet

Because the sun in shyness took a pet.

On Writing Bad Poetry (And Publishing It)

So the poems on this blog (I speak here only of my own poems, not the poems of others I sometimes, perhaps rarely, analyze for their triumphs and imperfections) are at their best the first draft of poetry. I write them as they come to me, indeed almost always at a single sitting. I rarely revise, at least after the lines have come to me; on occasion a rhyme or a meter will prove more difficult than I thought, or a thought itself harder to squeeze into form, and so I will rubbish a line or an ending or even a quatrain, but it is rare. If there is a spectrum from Ben Jonson's praise/dispraise of Shakespeare that he never blotted a line but "would that he had blotted out a thousand," I, while no Shakespeare by even anyone's most fevered dreamed imagining, am rather towards his end than Jonson's own. I write what comes and publish it, and not never but infrequently look back.

This is a longwinded way of saying what longtime readers and even shorttime readers have no doubt noticed: I write a lot of bad poems here.

And I think that's a good thing.

Admittedly, I do believe based on my acquaintance and reading that most if not all poets and indeed writers are better at and more comfortable with revision than I am. If so, in their cases, there may be virtue inherent in holding on to poems and tinkering, improving, and developing them. In my case, though, editing prose is something I can do; editing poetry (well) is a gift so far beyond my sphere.

As such, I am fundamentally faced with the question not of publishing a good poem or a bad, but of whether to publish or abandon work; whether to write or simply not; whether to put out into the world a poem that may be (or indeed, is) bad or no poem at all. And there are those, I do not doubt, to whom the latter answer is obviously preferable, especially given the frequency of late with which I have produced no poetry of either stripe. Why not simply expand that gap one further day? Why put poetry out that is not good?

My simplest answer to this assertion is that the good poetry relies on the bad. If I did not write the bad poems I would not write the good. I would not write any. And I much prefer a world in which I do write poems to one where I do not. And thus I write bad poems.

I have more to say on this topic, relating to how the bad poems produce the good, and why I publish it anyway in more detail, but for now I shall leave it there. Bad poetry is necessary as a means to good poetry; and publishing it is simply an acknowledgement of that.

Copeland

I do not now nor ever shall pretend

To know the mind of God past revelation;

The limits of my present inculcation

Lie well before the knowledge might transcend

My merely mortal being. They descend

From (I may say) a proper education

Stewed in the heat of ratiocination

But have no inspiration to extend

Past mere analysis. I cannot claim

Divine insight beyond the eye of man

Or prophecy pursued past point of sense

I cannot read the vowels in the Name

(Nor do I much believe that any can)

But as I am, I am, with no pretence.