“The Jester’s Magma”

At last month’s poetry practice, Coach Lehman encouraged everyone to write a poem using the title of a book, play, or movie already in existence. I said that the poem didn’t need to have anything to do with the work whose title you have appropriated. Among my suggestions were War and Peace, The Immoralist, Persuasion, Light in August, or All About Eve. No other instructions except to “incorporate one formal requirement device, be it a rhyme scheme, a metrical line, an acrostic, or even a repeated word or phrase.”

Diana Ferraro chose Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” as her title:

It could be this way or that other way,
taunts the jester and everyone laughs,
deep in the knowledge of successful
comings and goings, tricks and nonsense.

Erupting joy, the lava of blessings to the country
and some of the people, not all are deft at farce
or smile when the elephant in the room assails
the scattered china on the floor, treading hard.

These walls have seen everything, but never
such a glorious, whirling mood, all mirth,
headlines and footnotes, scraps of meaning
and hilarious distortions, live and on print.

Over the jester’s magma, walks the shadow
of a silent clown, displaced and out of job.

I join others in applauding “the lava of blessing,” and note with pleasure that Diana improved her final two lines (which had been “On the side lurks the shadow of a silent, / disguised clown, displaced and out of job”) thanks to a helpful comment from Jane Keats, who was hoping for “a volcanic jest prior to the appearance of the clown.” The “jester’s magma” does the job. 

Resident cento master Paul Michelsen contrived “Pulp Fiction” out of sources ranging from hard-boiled detective writers Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler to sci-fi all-stars Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison:

The words hit me hard.

The speaker closed the door and bolted it.

I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all.

He put his hands in his trousers-pockets and teetered on his heels.

The faint smile pulled at the shadowed corners of his mouth.

a man whose homburg is tilted at an angle parallel to that of the picture on the wall behind him

What is happening? he asked himself. What day is this?

Something I cannot and must not recall.

To view the world as a genre-fiction narrative is difficult to resist, especially if, like Michelsen himself, you live among the frequenters of casinos in Las Vegas. 

It pleases me to think that what we do here is a species of collaboration. I admire Christine Rhein’s “True Grit” as revised after Greg Chaimov suggested that she insert the stanza she wrote as an afterthought:

The gravel I curse—painful path I must walk
to reach the soft, wooded trails, hike my way
through fallen leaves, a bit of mud—if I’m lucky,
forgetting all about the hellish road of stone;

the dirt on my hands, under my nails—
fingers free of gloves—as I dig and plant
petunias, zinnias, place roots into the fragrant
earth, feel spring’s promise, let it cling

the sand children seek at the beach,
warm to the touch, and wet—but dry enough
to shovel—pailfuls they stack into castles,
little kingdoms they rush and rush to moat;

the dust that turns a midday sky brownish-red,
storms into cars, into lungs, and, afterward,
the scientists who measure, chart the damage,
dare to speak of rising threats on camera.

Christine credits Greg: “I’m posting a revision, per Greg Chaimov’s fine suggestion to open the poem with the ‘gravel stanza’ that I was unsure about. The poem’s new length of four stanzas is growing on me. In addition to the grit turning finer with each stanza, it seems the poem now includes the four seasons (that epic dust storm in Dallas happened in March).”

There are knockout lines in Michael C. Rush’s “Deliverance”:

“Poetry emerges not so much from culture as from consciousness.”

—Adam Walker

 

It is good. I am dreaming.

We can still speak of the provisional, the contingent.

We substitute anger for sadness all the time

because sadness is less satisfying.

Hunted by a pack of cynocephalics, “time wolfs my soul.”

From beneath the Tree of Unequivocal Blessings

Verus Mendax, Patron Saint of the Fleecing of the Gullible,

preaches that even rituals of understanding are rituals of confusion.

He is right. I am dreaming.

Seemingly meaningful is my name for the world.

Vibrato with bravado, I subject myself to imagery

of cave diving and cage fighting.

Suffering from banaladies and other misappropriations of the tropes

I work to drain the mundane from my domain.

Contentedness is what we manufacture in response to a fear of loss.

Dreaming of convalescence, of deliverance.

Of the least advantage and the last hope

to tweeze the irritants from the day.

Who has patience for the long game? Or time?

Everyone wants me to throw the documents out into the rain.

For my birthday, I want an inconvenient point of view;

for Christmas, an unexpected realization.

I’m trying to understand the limits of what I can understand!

Screams are like song to the silence.

This ambitious poem occasioned many compliments (“so many wonderful lines,” praised Carey James) and a lively exchange between the author and Paul Michelsen. I like “Deliverance” a lot but think I would like it even more if it lost a block of nine lines. It would read like this, following the epigraph:

It is good. I am dreaming.

We can still speak of the provisional, the contingent.

We substitute anger for sadness all the time

because sadness is less satisfying.

I work to drain the mundane from my domain.

Contentedness is what we manufacture in response to a fear of loss.

Dreaming of convalescence, of deliverance.

Of the least advantage and the last hope

to tweeze the irritants from the day.

Who has patience for the long game? Or time?

Everyone wants me to throw the documents out into the rain.

For my birthday, I want an inconvenient point of view;

for Christmas, an unexpected realization.

I’m trying to understand the limits of what I can understand!

Screams are like song to the silence.

What do you think, Michael? And others?

Linda Marie’s Hilton’s poem, she tells us, “is based veeringly on Magritte’s painting The Human Condition.”  “Veering” is le mot juste, and the poem reminds me that Magritte, a painter of surreal ideas, is a reliable source of inspiration:

The picture has flown through the window
Not wanting being draped widow’s weeds
It veered to the mountains’ high meadows
Highness fulfilled its every need:
Panoramic pareidolia
Sated picture’s quest for the image
In whose form it was painstakingly
Painted, dotted, limned, plotted, planned
So as it had reached rebelliously
That not quite adult pre-twenty age
It rested in a tree, no critics
There to publish how they harshly
Mercilessly, and thoroughly panned
Perspective delicately wrought, now
Picture has the reverse perspective
And may snub the art world’s conditions.

I always do the prompts myself. This week I came up with two short poems:

Light in August

 

On a slow day in August 

love will last with the lust of summer.

The light of the day is as bright as April,

but the trees that fell in the teapot-dome tempest 

gave proof to the night that fall will come.

 

It will come as a surprise nevertheless,

like the death that will receive me someday, 

the way the Catholic church received 

the new men of Oxford, who studied with Newman,

later a cardinal, later a saint.

 

The Mag 7

 

The EU isn’t happy with Meta (formerly Facebook).

Yul Brynner says Microsoft’s worth a look.

Steve McQueen reports next week. Despite attacks

on Alphabet, the stock holds steady at 26.

Brad Dexter, Sir Isaac Newton, the Beatles, and Steve 

Jobs own shares of Apple, as do Adam and Eve.

The Doge of Venice (as played by Robert Vaughan) has hurt 

Tesla’s brand, but the public is a fickle flirt.

A bet on Amazon is a bet on James Coburn, who wins

when he brings a knife to a gunfight, and grins.

Charles Bronson toasts the tattooed lady, Lydia.

It’s best to ignore invidious invocations of Nvidia.

Errors, mistakes, and slips of the tongue and pen are, as Freud taught us, neither innocent nor devoid of meaning. Misunderstandings are inevitable, and in a sense—as Emily Winakur and Paul Michelsen suggested in a “Next Line, Please” entry back in 2017—it could be argued that metaphor itself is a sort of beautiful mistake that, for example, gives “rosy fingers” to the dawn. Sometimes one can get the momentum going for a poem just by changing a couple of words in a well-known phrase. Aping Polonius, one day, I found myself changing a few letters and transforming his classic line into “Neither a follower nor a leader be.” And how often have I typed “sue” when I mean to say “use”? You could even write “Ode to the West Wing,” leaving it unclear whether you mean Shelley’s magnificent ode or the TV show with Martin Sheen.

Thus, our prompt is to write a poem based on a mistake, a typo, a misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue (about which Freud has so much to say), or an error that results in something better than what was originally intended. To honor compression as a virtue, let’s have a 12-line limit. The lines can be a solid block, or you can divide them into stanzas, rhymed or unrhymed. Deadline: Ten days after this column is posted. Note: We hope soon to publish our NLP posts on a bi-weekly basis. Stay tuned!

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