I couldn’t find who wrote this poem
in the back of an old commonplace book
but I had a good look ,wondering who it might be
I couldn’t track down a copy anywhere
so perhaps it was me:
Futilty
I sweep, sweep, sweep the recalcitrant leaves
while the wild west wind robustly breathes.
I do tend to use the word ‘recalcitrant’ quite a lot so perhaps it was me.
I’d Go Anywhere with You.
I’d go anywhere with you, I said. Anywhere. So long as it’s not histrionic.
Histrionic?
Yes, like that place in the film last night, the one I saw on the ‘Classic Movie Channel’ called Wuthering Heights . Too shrill. Way over the top. Too stagey.
Oh dear, she said, you may not like my novel.
I’d like anything by you, I said. What’s it called?
‘Tom Lake’.
‘Great. I like lakes.
It’s the name of a theatre group, she said, but it’s set in the Great Lakes area of Michigan.
I’ll get it tomorrow, You sold me on that article in a recent New Yorker about you, your husband and ex Vietnam vet pilot ending up in a in the middle of a crater lake somewhere in Alaska. That was a real hoot.
This is a little different. Set in a lower register. I think you’ll like it. Enjoy.
A Short Story is Not a Car.
At the writers’ group, the first one I went to,
we were issued a list of things to check
when we’re critiquing each others’ stories,
the usual things like plot, character, setting, dialogue.
We’d put a tick or a cross depending whether the requirements were met.
All well and good.
Yet I couldn’t help thinking of the checklist that mechanics fill out
when they’re servicing your car.
So I said,
“A short story is not a car!”
This put a brake on proceedings.
They didn’t know what I was driving at.
but I felt I was onto something.
I pushed the pedal even further.
We were heading for a collision,
the tutor and me.
I didn’t know what the perfect metaphor was
nor did anyone else
but I was darn sure it wasn’t a car.
Everything Small and Modest
Robert looks happy here.
Eyes lit up like lamps
full of wonder..
He is on one of his long walks
from the asylum,
He has spotted something.
Perhaps it is a wood pigeon
clearing its throat.
Or a song thrush balancing on a twig,
beak open ready to burst into song.
Everything small and modest
is pleasant and beautiful. Robert declared.
He looks dapper here, and in good health
certainly better that he did when he was found
dead in the snow that Xmas day in’ 56,
the photograph that ghouls pore over.
He didn’t write much in those last years
at the asylum , letting himself off the hook,
declaring, I am here to be mad, not to write.
K’s fond of haiku,
Michael senryu, its jokey cousin;
Mia, ‘a struggling author’ writes tiny tales,
Richard American sentences,
put them together,
and what have you got?
a slim, selection
of shorts,
a breviary of brevities
a pocket book of poems
for the wee small hours
Raymond who ? she said .
Raymond Carver , I replied , the American
short story writer and poet .
Never heard of him , she said
and being a year eight standard I was inclined
to believe her .
And yet it was startling how Carveresque
her writing was .
Phrases like “ I will never know where — what
shall I call him — this man has gone “
spring particularly to mind .
And I thought of the nine year old boy who wrote
like the Dickens in Pickwick Papers , for instance ;
another who wrote florid full-on verse
like Chris Marlowe
and the highly strung girl who came for one term
and wrote like Emily Bronte
though none had ever read these writers
and the year nine autiste who at times
wrote like them all .
Sylvia who ?
the manic depressive from the back
of the class called
black hair slashed across her face
as I read the opening lines of her poem
to her father
fuelled with fury and neo-Nazi imagery .
Never mind , I said
as I wondered whether the ghosts
of dead writers
had come to inhabit the young
and whether over the next few years
I’d meet an embryonic
Will Shakespeare
an Oscar
or antipodean Dostoevsky .
Collect their juvenilia .
One day I’ll make a killing
*pic courtesy of pinterest
I was in writing school again.
The teacher, Mr. Wiles, was tall and totemic.
He was disparaging a writer that was currently in the ascendant.
‘His prose is loose and lumpen’, he said. ‘It clumps along the hallway of sentences like Lurch in The Adams Family’
*pic courtesy of Wikipedia
When I was a kid in High School we learnt things ‘off by heart’:
poems by Keats and Coleridge, extracts from ‘The Ancient Mariner’,
soliloquies from ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’, whole passages from Dickens;
chronologies of The Persian Wars, War of the Roses,
biographies of the Tudors; not neglecting the sciences, we memorized
physics and maths formulas,chemical equations, and slabs from The New Testament —
we were walking Wikipedias; now I’m a big kid, into my senior years,
I’ve grown rusty, which is why I’m in the backyard walking up and down —-
the bees must think I’m mad —- learning by heart my NEW mobile number
which everyone but me knows
The crow
in the crossbars of
the power pole
is saying, Hey John.
You don’t have to worry, man.
You are not one of those who bring so much courage
to the world that it has to kill you
So don’t ruffle your feathers.
Pardon? I say.
I can read you like a book, he says, speaking of which
‘But it will break you.
It breaks everyone.
But you are one of those strong in the broken places’,
as Hemingway would say.
You read Hemingway?
Of course, who do you think I’m quoting?
You are a most learned crow, I say.
But it will kill you, he says,
‘It kills everyone
the very brave and very gentle
but if you are neither of these it will still kill you
but there will be no special hurry’.
That is sort of comforting, I say. Thank you.
‘Farewell to Arms’, he adds. Due attribution.
You should read it sometime.
I think I have, but not with the diligence you accorded it.
And with a flick of his suave black wings, he flies away.
Reading an article by David Remnick,
editor of ‘The New Yorker’
since 1998
I discovered
he was born in Paterson, New Jersey
the same place as Philip Roth,
the novelist whose biography Remnick was profiling,
as was Ginsberg,
the man who wrote “Howl’
that poem that still echoes down the decades.
the same place too
as William Carlos Williams,
the man who wrote ‘the red wheelbarrow’
and wait for it,
Lou Costello,
the comedic partner of Bud Abbot
whose films split our sides
in the fun house of the fifties;
what do they have in the water of Paterson, New Jersey,
that so many famous people
grew up there;
it must be quite a place
John Malone 
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