The Devil Tenders his Resignation. Poems I have written #4

The Devil tenders His resignation

 

It hurts Me to admit this but I’ve had enough.

I think it’s time You shut up shop, 

and spent Your dotage in the Garden,

a Saint or Angel on each arm.  

Don’t look at Me like that. 

Remember when they called you Zeus? 

I’ve heard You looking at them.

 

When We split everything three ways:

You got heaven, I got hell, 

and poor Poisidon got the sea.

Why tell You something You already know? 

Be patient. Trust Me. Details matter. 

After early bickering, and some disasters, 

We agreed to a new clause; 

each had to stay out of the others’ realms

and middle earth was out of bounds. 

I want that contract scrapped. We all agreed

humans must be free to choose and then 

denied Ourselves that freedom.

 

You asked for the impossible. 

They want Your admiration, they 

choose kindness, compassion, 

care for the poor, the weak, the old. do all that

and then they’ll be rewarded when they die.

A lunatic’s wager based on wishful thinking.

We worked so hard to make it seem appealing. 

Back in the day, My job to send the imps to whisper:  

Go on, why not, you know it’s what you want to do. 

Just a job, I did it well, for centuries in every time and place:

Go on, why not, you know it’s what you want to do.

At first there was a joy in mischief. 

When they were caught, when Peter turned them back

they wailed, He made us do it. But We all knew they lied.

They always had a choice. That was the one clause 

You refused to change. I did My job, I did it well.

But I can’t do it anymore. The routes to hell are choked 

with shuffling dead, queuing at the gates like refugees.

Our bureaucracy broke down. 

Camps sprang up to house those waiting to be processed. 

The camp fires of the wretched cast their dull glow on the roof of hell

And the smoky plains before the gate are never dark.

The imps who punish couldn’t cope. We tried recruiting 

from amongst the dead. That was My first mistake. 

We couldn’t mind their savage urge to harm and hurt. 

But when we found them plotting a return to middle earth

we had to shut the program down and terminate the staff.

Some humans are too vile for hell itself. 

  

I vote We pack our bags and leave them to it.   

When I arrived, your gates were rusted open, 

Peter was asleep, and nobody was waiting to get in. 

A few stray angels and a random saint, bored out her mind.

The loud-mouthed fools who claim they do your bidding

have no chance of redemption. Admit it, even You are tired, 

disgusted, disappointed. The Garden and the angels beckon, 

so free Me from my contract. Let Me out of hell.  

The human race has no more need of You,

So sign, there on the dotted line. 

Go on, You know it’s what You want to do.

 

The poetry voice podcast returns.

The Poetry voice podcast returns. A free audio anthology of poetry, from the earliest times to the present day. 

The latest episode is here: http://www.liamguilar.com/2024/8/13/wbyeats-politics

Originally designed to accompany courses I was teaching on the history of English poetry and the pleasure of poetry, each episode consists of a reading of a single poem.  There is no commentary or explanation, just the poem. Sometimes the difference between engagement and indifference is a passable reading of the poem. 

A brief introduction to each poem and the poet is contained in a written note which accompanies the episode, though these are kept as short as possible.

There's been a long break due the amount of construction work that has been going on around here. Hopefully no more demolition or power tools or tradies with their radios blaring. I can't do anything about birds, dogs, traffic and the occasional chiming clock but hopefully those are not too intrusive.

You can listen on Spotify or Apple or directly at 

http://www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice

There is a list of all poems to date here:

http://www.liamguilar.com/poetry-voice-index

clicking on any of these links will open a new window. 

Lancelot and Guinevere, a version of Malory's Le Morte Darthur.

 

Lancelot, Seeking Perfection, Encounters Guinevere.

 (Parts 1-8)

A man convicted of high treason was hung, drawn and quartered. For the same crime, a Woman was burnt. 

 

1)

 

The brutal years build muscle on his arms

but leave his head and heart exposed.

Refine the character, exceed ideals, become

the definition of his age; the man

all men are measured by, the man most women

dream they lie beside. Conscripted as the hero 

for an epic tale which runs ahead 

drawing the path he has to follow,

what could he ask his world would not allow?

 

Time happened somewhere else.

Hung in her room, where tapestries

depict dead saints and lovers, 

green eyes stab up and in.

Nothing that he’s ever learnt 

deflects their judgment 

when he has retired

to his familiar quarters,

mocking the years of discipline. 

What he thought self-denial

was an absence of desire.  

He’s never wanted anything 

except this expertise in death

his peer’s respect, the crowd’s acclaim

and now her voice creating shadows in his life

whispering his name.

 

2)

 

The altar candles prove 

more is hidden than they can reveal.

His knees on stone, head bowed

the darkness and the ache familiar

as the words he’s lost.  

A virgin cannot understand

and who is being crucified?

What God of Love denies the act?

He sees their bodies writhing in the Pit.

He sees their bodies writhing in her bed.

Convicted of a guilt he won’t accept,

death certain either way,

he gains a vantage point

from which he can survey

walls he cannot leap, 

a moat too foul to swim,

but if he’ll crawl along the razor’s edge

the bridge of swords

might let him in.

 

3) 

 

They’ll stuff his genitals into his mouth 

choking the sight of his intestines

smoking on the coals.

She reaches underneath his skin

draws out his heart, begins to feed.

He licks the blood that’s coursing down her chin

the drips between her breasts

the splashes on her belly, on her thighs. 

Mouth locked on mouth as though words 

had no place or purpose here

they fall together. Driven 

by his desperation

he tries to climb inside, curl up 

beneath the refuge of her ribs

deny whatever still divides.

 

4)

 

She watches from her window, 

sees the carters stack the wood

they’d use to burn a guilty queen. 

The crowd shoals as the victim’s 

dragged towards the stake.

This room. This bed. 

 

Behind her she can hear the roaring

flames, of hell or execution makes no odds,

blistering the skin her lover sang about.

Cries of pleasure modulate to cries of pain.

Aren’t torturer and lover both the same? 

Both shred the public face, unleash  

the sweating beast no song can gloss.

Withdrawn behind her gowns 

she is the queen again,

to make him be some faithful champion,

not the man whose busy hands and tongue

brought so much joy.

 

5)

 

The narrative imperative, 

illogic of the grail, 

which only Galahad escapes: 

no matter how elaborate the fuck;

negotiate an aftermath!

 

Not the familiar strangeness

reentering the everyday

as clothes hung on the floor

hide cooling flesh,

the blinds are drawn

masks are adjusted, 

civilities observed,

nor the furtive exit, 

from her quarters 

lies succeeding lies

facing friends 

he has betrayed, 

and learning how 

to look them in the eyes.

 

But this essential singularity: 

two bodies leave the room

treading their separate paths.

 

6) 

 

To purge the sin that settles like 

the stench of bodies burning in the square

he dedicates himself to harsher quests,

to the purity the grail is offering.

He rides on, famished, cold

beyond the mark where other heroes fail.

What good’s the world’s applause 

for what he knows is fraud?

 

She is the landscape 

he would wander through

but to what end, except 

participation in the mystery

of repetitious suicide

the frantic fumbling 

frenzied flesh to flesh

discovering, as each one falls,

more walls, more ditches, 

more locked doors.

 

The mountains, chapels, grottos

victories; the casual deaths,

the endless miracles all pale.

Not wanting to succeed, 

how can he fail? 

 

7)

 

He returns, to claim his prize                         

to learn, too late,

unlike a castle, gates slammed shut 

she can be had, but can’t be held.

The treachery of metaphors: 

a sleazy go-between

reality and understanding,

having drawn them to the bed,

stoked the flames and hung them

on a fantasy of comprehension

denies responsibility and runs

to sell them for a quarter. 

 

8) 

 

Free of impediments, 

she turns aside 

from futures 

they had whispered.

 

Call it remorse, 

guilt, Christian 

upbringing

A lesser man 

would call it 

a betrayal.

 

He waves goodbye 

and wishes 

one last kiss, 

which she denies.

 

Alone, of course, his knees on stone, 

head bowed, the ache familiar

as the worlds he’s lost.  

The candle flames illuminate

smirking icons who deride

the sterile echoes of his prayers  

scratching at the gate of Heaven

pleading for a second chance. 

Stripped to the clarity of remorse

what’s left but dying, devotion

and perfecting his repentance?

This poem is printed in 'Rough Spun to Close Weave', published by Ginninderra Press and available on line or from  http://www.liamguilar.com/shop/rough-spun-to-close-weave 

Bonfire Books' Anthology of Australian Verse. Publication.

 I have three poems in this Anthology of Australian Poetry, published by Bonfire Books.  One of them is this one. 

The book is available from https://bonfirebooks.org/product/anthology-of-australian-verse-2023/

Testimony of One of Sir John Franklin’s Officers

 

When I was a child I was promised the ocean:
a trip to the coast, so we rode down to Hastings.
The clouds sagged like a dirty tarpaulin. 
The waves rattled the shingle. The sun 
bradawled a hole though drifting grays
to spotlight the place where sea became sky.

Nanny’s screams were baffled by the wind
but shifting pebbles under stubby legs 
betrayed me to strong hands before the water’s edge. 
Not safe, not saved, restrained. Returned 
to Nanny where I howled. Her voice: 
You big girl’s blouse: big boys don’t cry.

I have forgotten much; first this, first that;
things I should remember. But I do not forget
the sea and the sky and the line where they met;
or that need to stand where the light fell
and peer over the edge of the world. 

The winner of this year's national poetry competition (UK 2023).

You can read the poem here.

 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/29/poem-of-beauty-wit-and-grace-about-fathers-and-sons-wins-national-poetry-competition

 

The headline reads: Poem of ‘beauty, wit and grace’ about fathers and sons wins National Poetry Competition” and continues:  Ex-New York cab driver Lee Stockdale wins £5,000 after My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert beat 17,000 other poems ‘

 

Poetry competitions are a lottery. In the absence of a stated criteria it must be very difficult to distinguish between 17,000 poems. The thought of having to read 17,000 poems is frightening. How could you pay each one the attention a poem requires? How easy would it be to miss subtlety? 

 

When you read the article, the events behind the poem, and the author’s comments on the poem, come before it and that will inevitably colour your judgement.  But the judges were reading without these, and every poem should stand on its own, without any external information about the writer. 

 

Apparently this poem exhibits: ‘beauty wit and grace’. 

 

As a description this is vague, if not practically meaningless. It’s the kind of thing people say about poems when they have nothing specific to say. How would you quantify those qualities? How would you explain how one poem has more ‘beauty’ than another? How would you make your draft more ‘graceful’? 

And when you read the poem you’re going to wonder how any of those words apply to it, especially ‘wit’.

 

As an occasional editor, my very rough way of assessing any poem is to start with the basic idea that writing a poem offers the author the possibility of manipulating diction, syntax and line endings for effect. Content can be put to one side. 

 

This is not a precise criteria. If you read a lot of poetry you will have your own but it’s flexible enough to accommodate the many different kinds of poem that are in circulation today. It’s possible to look at any poem, in any style, and ask what does the writer achieve with these three possibilities. Their interactions will, in skilful hands, bring about the effects that can be associated with good poetry and deliver the pleasures that only a good poem can. 

 

I see little happening in this poem with any of these three.

 

There is a possibility that the diction is being deliberately used to blur the age of the speaker. 'Bullshit’ sounds like a contemporary adult, 'mean to me' like  an eight year old, 'a dear sweet man' like a stereotypical maiden aunt. But it’s not consistent and it doesn’t tie in with the rest of the piece. 

 

‘The judges called My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert a “remarkable” poem that “caught and held our attention from first reading”.

 

Think of the great opening lines you know. Your choice, not mine. You’re reading 17,000 poems, and you read:

 

It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station, your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard, checking off things done and left undone.

How does it measure against your gold standard? Why is the poet telling me his father is not my father? What purpose is served by the abrupt pauses in the 2^nd and 3^rd line? What is gained by setting the lines out like this and not:

 

It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station, 
your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard, 
checking off things done and left undone

Unless it’s to keep under the 40 line limit?

Think of the great lines you remember, and the images that stick in your head even if you can’t remember them word for word. 

 

Now read this:

 

I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead?
I wish he were alive again.
I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.

The first line sounds very clumsy to me and the abrupt break in the middle calls into question why it’s such a long line. The is/Is is awkward. You’re forced to stop after one to pronounce the next one calling into question the unity of the line. The third line jangles to be/to me/personally with the second half hanging off the first. Word choice? Do you need ‘personally’? Isn’t that implied in ‘mean to me’? Is there a meaningful difference between ‘I wish he were alive again’ and ‘I wish he were alive’? 

 

Would these lines lose anything written like this:

 

I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead? I wish he were alive again. I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.

 

Is this even good prose? 

 

Arrange the lines like this, 

 

I begin to see what 

a dear, sweet man he is. 

Is this because he is dead?
I wish he were alive again.
I don’t think he killed himself 

to be mean to me personally.

The first two are a guess but the others follow the abrupt breaks in the long line There’s nothing wrong with declarative statements in a poem, or a conversational diction, but these staccato statements of the obvious would not be out of place on a post card. 

 

In the article, the poem is placed after the poet’s biography. And we realise this writer experienced an horrific trauma as a child when his father committed suicide. But while we must sympathise with the writer, it doesn’t redeem the writing. It would be grossly inappropriate to perform acts of literary criticism on a poem written for a funeral or a wedding, or written as a private way of coming to terms with a trauma. But once that poem is offered for publication, or entered into a competition, then the writer is claiming this poem is worthy of a stranger’s interest, and inviting critical scrutiny. 

 

15,000 entrants must be wondering in what way this poem is better than theirs.

 

(For the record I did not enter this competition and I have no desire to be a judge. And last year's competition winner seems so much the better poem.)  

Byron in Venice. A reading.

 

A reading of Byron in Venice. The link should take you to the audio.

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2022/1/18/liam-guilars-byron-in-venice-the-poet-in-exile

 Byron in Venice

(The poet in exile)

 

The debris of a city in decline

slops at the crumbling steps,

as the sun sets over palaces 

even dusk can’t dignify.

 

The clock strikes, he puts down the page

and calls for servants. Suddenly

cannot remember if he is to meet

the opera singer or the serving maid.

 

No matter how elaborate the choreography,

his hands run free, his mind completes the rhyme.

Afterwards, duty done, excuses made, 

he’ll coax these stanzas to their climax 

 

and scrawl defiance on the blank of time’s indifference,

graffiti on the walls of history. 

He has explored the tangled pathways of his heart

and written travelogues for those who stayed at home.

 

If that leads here, to age and desolation;

the fading light, broken on the Grand Canal,

where life is repetition, and even lust grows stale;

the boys and women he has loved

 

the friends he misses as he dines alone,

faded signatures on bundled letters,

locks of hair, old arguments the night returns;

if it leads here; beyond the poem, what remains?

 

An aging face, once beautiful,  

staring through its own reflection,

soliciting an audience

to dignify the commonplace as art?

Poem is taken from 'From Rough Spun to Close Weave'.  Signed Copies available from the shop at Www.Liamguilar.com 

The Poetry Voice-The Pleasure of poetry

One of the great pleasures of poetry is to read it aloud. So for no other reason than that, I'm recording poems on a regular basis, choosing them at random from Old English to the present.

I'm not convinced my pronunciation of Old and Middle English is authentic, but I'm not going to let that stop me reading some of my favourite pieces.

You can hear the readings at
http://www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/

or if you'd prefer,  you'll find it as a podcast on itunes.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/the-poetry-voice/id1445622835?mt=2

Reinventing the Long Narrative Poem 2/3: the experiment

Writing Anhaga 

This is the second of three posts about the writing of Anhaga. The full report will appear on the website when all three have been posted.  

Further details of the book can be found here.

Reinventing the Long Narrative Poem.

Part two: 

Initial observations.

How does a poem differ from prose?  Forget metaphor, simile, and all the things English Teachers inadvertently imply are specific to poetry.  You’ll find them in prose.  Poetry and prose are not a binary pair, more like two points on a line with an almost infinite number of stages between the extremes and if you keep going far enough in either direction you'll find yourself back where you started. 

The short list of technical differences, leaving aside set rhythm, which a lot of my examples didn’t use, might be; rhyme, enjambment, caesura, and the stanza break.

Rhyme will make your poem memorable. I can still recite The Shooting of Dan McGrew…but you’re going to have to be very good to write a long story using rhyme and not bore your reader or sound like you’ve stepped out of the 19^th century.  Several of the examples in my list are written in set rhyme schemes and they are not the ones I’d choose to copy. Besides, on its own it won’t really alter the story as story.

Stanza breaks however are intriguing.  Admittedly prose has chapters and paragraphs and sections with their own breaks. But as Kinney pointed out in her study of narrative poetry, stanzas create a tension between pause and forward movement. The stanza comes to an end, suggesting the reader should pause and consider the content, but the narrative moves on. Endstop your stanzas too heavily and movement between them becomes difficult for the reader.  Make them too fluid and the whole thing starts to blur. The problem is compounded in a sequence where the poems are of uneven length.

Then there’s what the comic books call the Gutter; the white space between the stanzas or poems the reader must move across. Hold on to that thought.

Finally, what we used to call ‘coreference’ could be exploited. Corefernce refers to aspects of a text which tie it together. In prose, we might think of pronoun usage and tenses, but there are different possibilities with poetry.  You could exploit sound and rhythm to suggest links between pieces of narrative information. Characters can be developed using syntax and frame of reference, which is something Joyce did so brilliantly, but also the poetic forms they use or are associated with.

The Experiment.

I’ve been wanting to do something with the Old English ‘The Wanderer’ for decades. A speaker seems to be in an open boat, alone, in winter.

I’ve always thought no one would be daft enough to venture out on the North Sea or the Atlantic in winter and therefore read the words as metaphor. This is what life is like…

But who ever produced the poem we have did a fine job of particularizing the image, so it reads like a first person account of a lived experience.

Metaphor or literal truth, or both?

It’s a familiar question when reading a single poem.  

Take that idea a step further.

In Anhaga Mr. Plod the Detective, is worn out by the case he can’t solve. One of his suspects, Carmilla, has begun visiting him every night and she is sucking him dry.

If this is a ‘realistic story’ this is a simple metaphor: he’s experiencing a sleepless night because of the case and thinking about it is draining his energy. He’s also noticed how attractive she is so the sexual overtones are deliberate.

But if this is a vampire story, then Carmilla is doing exactly what the words say she’s doing.

With an individual poem, this ambiguity would be quite normal and it would be something I'd want to try to control and limit. But what would happen if I started lining up poems where this is happening. Instead of readers stepping across the Gutter from one poem to another to have their initial decision about what is literal and what is a metaphor confirmed, what happens if you step across the Gutter and find another set of questions.

This would create a constant unresolved ‘undecidability’ between metaphor/symbol and narrative fact.  If it happens often enough would you get the illusion that there are several possible stories all working simultaneously?

In a story the generic markers tend to reassure us as to which reading is literal within the storyworld and which is metaphor.

As a simple example, if you’re watching a detective story, set in a version of the ‘real world’ that most of us live in; there are no vampires. In that context when someone says; ‘nobody believes in Vampires’, it’s a scornful dismissal of a silly idea. Anyone who disagrees is obviously delusional.

But if the detective is a character in a vampire film, then we all know the speaker is about to die.  Plot twists and genre benders aside, it’s usually clear how the line should be read at least on the second watching.

But if I multiply the generic possibilities, then something much more interesting seems to happen.

What constitutes ‘narrative information’ becomes ambiguous.

In fictional narratives we assume that the information we’re given usually has a purpose. We may not understand it until we get to the end of the story, but in a conventional prose narrative if the reader is told something, that information has some purpose in advancing the plot or establishing a character or setting a scene etc.

In life it’s not so clear. Significance is almost always retrospective. To look back you need a vantage point and the value of any event lies in the retrospective narrative thread we’re following.  Events of shattering significance in your personal life may have no importance to the narrative of your career. This doesn’t mean the narrative threads can’t get twisted together.

I was writing stories about a man who’d lost his memory, and was searching for his own coherent sense of self. After all, as Brooks pointed out, referring to Freud, we narrate ourselves into coherence, and when we can’t we’re in trouble.

If you’re ever met anyone who has lost his or her memory, or is suffering from dementia, you’ll know how tragic this is.

Rather than allow the reader to sit back and watch the narrator flounder, I wanted to put the reader in the same position. 

I wanted to destabilize the reader’s ability to define what is symbol and what is meant as fact. This is inherent in the detective story, where what constitutes evidence, where the significance of an utterance, is only revealed by the detective’s final summary.

But by multiplying the generic markers, the movement towards instability becomes exaggerated and removing the final summary beloved of all crime writers but epitomized by Agatha Christie’s Poirot takes out the final confirmation or revelation of significance.  

I wrote a back story for each of the different versions: A detective story, a vampire story, a strange fantasy of reincarnation and a psychological thriller about a man who has lost his memory.  I planned the sequence using an app I’d downloaded which allowed me to create nodes and trace different coloured lines between them.

It was very pretty. Part three to follow.