INTERACTION

He's a bit flip about Owen MC. But an interesting sdelection of poems.

Agreed - and personally I would have selected 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' over 'Dulce et Decorum est' - but maybe that's just me. Still, this guy seems to be a Don Marquis fan, so he can't be all bad.

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Agreed, Mike. These lines always make me shiver:
'Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. '

It's been so nice to have some visitors this week.
Nobody going to post a favourite? Or one of their own efforts?Mike - your fave DonMarquis...?

Ok, just to lower the tone a little here's one of mine I put on The Guardian blog and was surprised they didn't censor it, yeah Guardian!

MY NEIGHBOUR SHAVES HER PUSSY

My neighbour shaves her pussy,
She does it every week.
This information she disclosed,
Then said, "Come take a peek..."

Now I'm a happily married guy
And I thought... 'A man of the world'
But I must admit she made me blush,
As through the door she twirled.

'Oh do come in!' She giggled.
'You can't see it from over there!'
I swallowed rather noisily,
And said a silent prayer.

I stepped shyly over her threshold,
And crossed another (in my mind).
And wondered what my wife would say
If ever she should find...

...that I had gone to visit
My neighbour, all alone.
To view her shaven pussy,
In the privacy of her home.

'You're so shy. Do come closer,'
'It's hygienic. It's here, on the mat'
Can you imagine my astonishment,
When I looked down and saw her cat?

She'd shaved the poor creature,
Right down to its very skin,
I breathed a grateful relieving sigh,
And gave a sickly grin.

Now there's a lesson to be learned here,
On how easy a fertile mind,
Can get you into trouble,

Phew...close encounters...of the feline kind.


They wanted poetry about animals...

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They wanted poetry about animals...

I see...

A Bedouin's Tale - John Fowles

searching we came to a place
and found ourselves alone
utterly lost in wilderness
in meaningless blank stone

and the words had gone like water
under a desert sun
our mouths had lacked all discipline
and let the goatskins run

no hope in the wordless waste
no camel-pools to aid
no poems thoughts or apophthegms
to give a little shade

no faith could be stated
no certain worth assigned
too many tricks often played
had calcified the mind

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Lesbos- Lawrence Durrell

The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint,
And earth's huge camber follows out,
Turning in sleep, the oceanic curve.

Defined in concave like a human eye
Or cheek pressed warm on the dark's cheek,
Like dancers to a music they deserve.

This balcony, a moon-anointed shelf
Above a silent garden holds my bed.
I slept. But the dispiriting autumn moon,

In her slow expurgation of the sky
Needs company: is brooding on the dead,
And so am I now, so am I.

The sleeping outside among the dead might be a reference to the Villa Cleobolus, which was sited in a Muslim graveyard. Durrell briefly lived there - as described in Reflections on a Marine Venus - A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes.

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Two very different poems, there. Loved the way Fowles conflated the water imagery with thought and speech. The more I read that last stanza the more chilling it is - a chilling total disorientation. Heart of darkness territory.

I thought the Durrell suffered from too much geometry - my mind was whizzing round curves and cambers and concavity till I was dizzy. It was like 'how many images can you squeeze into a telephione box?'
Last linemhad a punch though.

Durrell always tried to squeeze as much as possible into his poems. Unpacking them is a career in itself.

Here's a less serious one...

Piccadilly

At the hub of Empire little Eros stands
Warming his testicles in chilly hands;
They dare not take him down before
They pass the anti-masturbation law.
But when at last the nation's purity
Is one day locked in in firm security,
They'll shift the Roman exile for to be
The patron saint of our psychiatry.

On reflection, it's almost prescient, given the increasingly fascist nature of UK and US society...

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it's almost prescient
...and worse than that, it doesn't scan

How so?

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I don't think poems should scan.
Or rhyme for that matter.

This is the only thread on the internet where you can read poems by Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles. That can't be bad.

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Course it's not bad! Until Ian posted, I didn't even know Fowles wrote poetry!
And it's chillingly good.

Fowles had a book of poetry published in 1973 by the Ecco Press, titled, er, Poems.

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I bought a book of poems (Classic FM: One Hundred Favourite Poems) from a charity shop while on a family holiday back home near sunny Doncaster last week. There are a number of poems that I'm really enjoying but, as it's twenty years (and a couple of weeks) since my mother died of cancer, I'm going to share two about death that you probably know very well.

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