The Author & His Work
One of the great figures of history
‘Stupor Mundi’ (The Wonder of the World)
Most gifted, best educated, the most complex
Our knowledge through the mist
Calumny and legend
He gathered ideas
Maintained close relations
And liberally supported
The first sonnet
The fullest and most adequate body promulgated
As a performer
Extraordinary experiments developed into a legend
Children he caused to be brought up in silence
Would speak the language of their parents
In vain the children all died
His revolutionary conception
Was a tool
Only the sure results
Out of their magical context
In the archaic cosmos of appropriate objects
Ancestors had been a peacetime substitute
It was more, it was an act
Of love (ex amore) an intellectual exercise
The charm lay in the mysterious power
That can only be learnt from a teacher
He hunted to learn more
He studied he conducted his own observations
Finally after thirty years of preparation
With his own hand or dictated
Bankruptcy
The antique store star is in his element
In love games, being quite familiar.
With the attendant stupids up and down
Going the rounds at mealtimes stay
With them. The last batsman must not get so
The all star cast Oliver’s tobacco baseball. Stroke
Of poetic excellence, source of sweeping
Changes. See the money spinning
Plant above, determined on success.
Nitric acid, a quart, of unusual blend as nationally
And internationally imbibed. Taken in
An animal quite recently home. Swallow
Say try to find something to repair
A puncture. Creaking amusement for country wear
Changes Aintree for a fence. To achieve
Success your expected nominal objective
Present an entertainment, male or female, national
Leader. To get round it
Lean over. Returned thrice that is
To secure a gain. Producing stone:
Ancient Greeks; making inroads: ‘Romance’
Arranged for violins.
Conversely
It’s dark off the pier. Here
An article right against any snakes
Is a colourless figure in India.
Here a cheery prelude to athletic victory.
At once, the mill. Those who do, have
Only, to rub dry sticks for it
Plays false between the stakes made.
Here the establishment religiously gives a big puff
And we hear the mini reversing fast.
Time – there’s the rub – as wily as a sailor
With only one idea.
I own a Columbian island and a young horse
Angrily cavorting round Mile End. Say it
The struggle (to stay a bachelor) avails him not.
Control the goal – three parts decided.
She gives thanks for food to Wednesday’s father
And classic rents pay Homer’s occasional job as a tipster.
She might lose a thousand yet show a capital gain
On an island where only equilibrists can set foot
So alarming those others who canvass protection
The function of the combination lock.
One way to get glued onto a quarter acre
Agree perhaps to embrace one nymph
Most popular in the range of sweets.
Pinochle has no such orchestral connections:
Confirm the unorthodox number inside.
Moorland Glory, or Swann’s Vestas
Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally,
not perfectly, understood
Displayed and laid out, featuring the word ‘new’
New is an old word get a new one
To assist me selling toys
What does it teach other than the fact
You don’t get much nowadays
In 4000 BC the Babylonians had 16 types of beer
I suppose it’s alright, after all
We’ll outlive them. Raise your hat
To the past by all means but take off
Your coat to the future. Carelessness
Can pull down in an hour what enterprise
Has taken years to build. A tenor of
I will not pass this way again
Much to the delight of the audience.
The snow must be two feet deep, I never thought
You’d make it up the path.
Following the country code
Protect wildlife, wild plants and trees
Go carefully on country roads
Respect the life of the countryside
The wildlife of today
Is not ours
We have it in trust and must account for it
To those who come after.
Did you hear about the Scotsman who invented a mousetrap
Which kills the mouse before it eats the cheese?
A cooked goose does not lay eggs
A quack is an unqualified vet
Who treats ducks. A customer in a department store
Was standing doing nothing
I’m not back from lunch yet.
There are women today
And men with sideburns
Shorter than they ever thought they would be.
All the teachers are cross-eyed
They never could control their pupils.
Coup de Main
Five quarters duck lofty club-bar rubbish
With a short but sound composition – secure.
It’s from the oldest opera. As a wise precaution
Ten cat-men break the laws of pain
In an old man’s stride. As first offenders
A portly body of nurses is detailed fast
In a gross Roman style of wrestling.
The old man hides the remedy in the grass
For Cupid’s dart is right to be artful
In turns and locks as stated on the city.
Watch the number on this horse
It exceeds Caesar’s rugged beauty.
The winners achieve the FA test
To make you jump like a cat and creepy
Things with wings and gaunt and grisly spectres
Like a Brighton belle. Two ordinary girls
Go west to play boo in the back row
Of the band. Like an item of wedding wear
On the street the doctor met the boy
Scintillating
Operetta Supercargo Aurora Container
Providing capsules of celestial form
Like swift ether on the way out. Well
Past it, put in for, a marigold increases
Feeling its tears ease as sound as instructions
To mix with the inferior… No use blaming
The stars, he was told dramatically.
A hand or a leg today hobbles home.
Send an oar for a sample to come in contact
With everybody in charge. In the lake’s lustrous way
Evangelising fellow-provincials it used to be
The correct thing but stopped it
Just for a handful of silver.
He left us
to turn right up among the carnations.
Complete clearance of betrayal.
The bark which then bit us in essence
The capstan… A pitiful girl
Gulping, a good friend, sounds
A good day to
Avoid the woman without publicly
Just have the words encased. An Olympian measure
Of course and like a counterpane
‘Divine’ shines forth upon our hills, invulnerable
After it dips, but quite what to expect
From an anxious fillip, too. If you get lost
Bid me despair and I’ll despair
Under that Cypress tree. The gates are all
Suspended. Straw-hatted they sigh and glug
Their Turkish coffee at home
Grow Your Own
In Scotland, although it is like a banana
Look out when the insect is about to turn hostile.
Unfamiliar, ale beats food they plow through mud.
And get what’s virtually a kick
In the teeth with a change of ends. Being a rogue
Bearing, with air and grace in it, the act about drink
Sees one expelled. A soft tale told differently
In a high pitched voice from the country
Secured the release of a few. In part of Africa
What hasn’t been swallowed is placed. In the total
There is danger. In the swift preparation
Of medicines wandering along. Am I, and here is
A most beautiful tree, boy who had embraced girl?
Is beaten trim arrangement? Reading to a girl
From South America of trade and Pounds Shillings and Pence,
Parties in which a tedious person is taken in.
By a novelist, place for two gentlemen not having
Much room. Forced to become an astronaut-animal
Which makes the insect run away
When earth’s last picture is painted. And the
(Fill in this blank) are twisted and dried.
Repeat for the educated who have lost their heads
Wanting to alter the system. Try making changes.
Outside the class tripped and fell after a second something
Hard on the ground. Makes a crawling creature lame,
Stranded, with a pain. Almost too friendly
Placed between the sheets
In a sleeper going north.
Rosebud
A dish covers the meanings of fishing a
River under which a Welsh poet wrote
His novel subject being sensitive last year
Scooped delicacies on which a fellow spirit
Gets up a poem set with little thorns.
Take the charred entrails in, with hairs singeing.
Art for short, perhaps the Grandfather scorns aid
He was as bad a poet as he sounded
Lost in the mouth. But a man’s fruit
His own short genealogy of clauses
Is not original of course, but one that carries him
In a neat condition, all bent and
If-less, to a lady, or God.
I’ve a question today. One would think
The poetry of aunts would be uplifting.
In time their heads would develop
Thoughts – surely no-one could have a poor opinion
Hurried to give directions to a car.
Tales of the frozen north. Watching the edge.
The future matches, for one of these pieces
Bright water is accompanying the girl
Crowned like a saint who has taken her vows
Improbably. Still you miss the introduction
And vanish – on condition of not calling.
Cut down the river crossing and hurry back
At some speed to tell the tale
It seems to keep the war-time changes down
There a battle takes place in his hands.
The Corsaire
These quietly conducted horses
On the garden roller make it hot
For bards, such honesty to seek
To be one’s own inheritor
Is the case done to a turn
For a jackal-headed dog. One
Leads a god’s life, Mum being
So unbending. To conclude:
A small number can cause hell.
A heated blowing up
The touchstone, even the cause
Of quarrels within which
The gulf of night a sorrel
Sound if let out in dribbles
Goes underground from Orkney west.
Cascade, make it rend
As he did the golden engine.
A moment. Make an impression
Or else a bump. Are they
Uncle’s leaf-chasers that
Have lost their own? After all
Where are conkers to be found?
But its teeth are not grinders.
Old Akela’s fun is wild
Unpredictable. She pines
For a rabbitskin coat.
The heart shrinks from them
No basic ratio, for Dear
The nursery rhyme
Makes its own way across
To a children’s town, dis-
Cretely on the way to
Being sated. Beneath his work
He charges low, his policy
Is full of Scotch and cheese.
It is in Egypt
Or up in Heaven’s embrace.
Charming
Rags of time escaped down the shady walk
For a bee tells Orpheus’s crime
Correction: on call for an encore
You get the bird for high living in Greece
There are rude fellows of the sort
In the salon hiccup snobbish and afraid
The side dimensions are temporary
Straightened out of a bent cask
Its contents lethal sounding and left the place
A mess for those who enjoy crafty ruses
At their feet the dash broke
Like fire after morning, it is alright
To run like this and make Mum tick over
Vernally she returns upon the scene
In the hot afternoon the drive is dotted with spittle
He makes much of what’s not there
A white bird beckons, wreathed in smiles
In a regretful mood, feeling oriental for a moment
Music was forgotten but not his role
His diplomatic badge bore the mail
Make light of it he did
But begged a little change, the boy
Hinged over into the man who builds
A store in the holy forest
A man of value in the whole territory
Who hears the missing people’s feet
Still going past (him) in the street
‘Master’ at hand nevertheless he makes it
And flies to tackle the seven acts
Played by a man
Dodo You’re Not Dead
The Syntactic Revolution
Starting from a position very like a sequence
builds on the dislocation between the meaning
which it usually produces
Once again I must stress this sequence like long poems
it is evolved from a prolonged structuring of fragments
its nature cannot be demonstrated in sentences
in piecemeal quotation however
Alas I shall have to break off and resume several lines later
I Remember You/You’re Driving Me Crazy
No one could claim that these lines are meaningless
but you are uncertain how to extract meaning from them
for instance ‘duck’ is a verb
which it would have to be
or a noun – what is if is a verb
of (and what is that too?) lead to
who, finally, is writing this poem?
We all know that identity from knowledge of language
but can say nothing, but wait
perhaps we can say something, perhaps
we do, after all, extract a theme
security gained the traditional way
Falling in Love With You (Take Two)
Then by the stroke of the penis in the way other
offences can only be rectified by strokes of the pen
the title would bear this out as titles do
too much. Unaccounted from what world and in
what world, and can they co-exist? What is
w + o + r + l + d anyway, which we know
from an external discourse was gross.
They are arranged on the page to look blank.
Blank indeed it denies us these enigmatic phrases
that co-habit in an imaginative realm
for the solace of believing in the mind
all part of some larger meaning we are not allowed
to escape. Visual interpretation in scraps
we tantalisingly fail to fit together
stranded meaning without extension
into the world as other poems have it.
The Very Thought of You
Can even tell that this theme is your own
lines seem to refer to the dislocation they embody
in surrounding the right environment.
Try making changes ambiguous, it may mean
impossible. Educated to try making changes
and alter the system it may (and in my opinion
does) mean we can’t make changes. The obscurity
hides an extreme control over the relations.
‘Nancy! Nancy! Yer Da’s a pansy!’
The Song is You
This that makes apparent chaos hide extreme control
borne out by another in the same sequence
creates a new convention (or revivifies the old
convention of the refrain): The Sentence.
Extreme control hides chaos and are split up
and intruded on a connected sequence of lines.
The subject of these lines is ambiguous as the title.
‘Moorland Glory,’ or, ‘Swann’s Vestas’ to indicate two themes
the first connected with an idealised picture of nature
and the second with a reductive attitude towards the past
concealed in a bad pun. The attitude is summed up.
For You
This might be a and how we can it by
or it might be an against this the bad
the latter while we suggest the former.
We simply don’t know for the literary past
appropriate conventions ironic joke
seriousness attitude puns syntax
unconnected phrases this reminds us.
Other forms the refrain to rob words and
fill them with a new functional meaning
in the structure. Such extreme detachment
from any discourse to discover what is content
and what form. We are reminded by the frightening
personal resemblance of this work detached from experience.
And I Can’t Wait All Day For You
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Neglected Information was published in 1972 by Barry MacSweeney’s Blacksuede Boot Press in an edition of 200 copies with an illustrated cover designed by Philip Crozier.
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