Opening Chapter Blag

Haiku Competition

Occasionally the Blag will set a competition. For this special launch issue your mission is to write a Haiku. You can define Haiku the way you want to, but for the purposes of this competition the type of Haiku that will stand the best chance of winning will be:

• A short poem written in English and formatted into 3 lines
• The first line should be five syllables
• The second line should be seven syllables
• The third line should be five syllables
• Direct metaphors, similes and other poetic devices should be avoided
• The poem should be an observation of part of the cycle of nature

Here’s an example of the type of Haiku we are looking for.

blown leaves collecting
at the foot of the elder
the forest is bare

 

A selection of Haiku will be published in the next issue of the Blag and one will be chosen to receive the prize of a signed book

Please send your entries to the Blag by using the form on the contact page with the subject “Haiku competition”. Please include your name, location and e-mail address with the statement: “This Haiku is my own original unpublished work”

by Barbara Smith

The real poetry I’ve discovered over the last while is mostly due to a confluence of influences – the blog and the internet. God bless high speed internet access. There are some real gems if you’re prepared to spend time cruising from one link to another. I am here to help you in that voyage of discovery, and cut down on some of the time spent online fruitlessly, so let’s get going.

First off, I’m pointing you in the general direction of Rob MacKenzie. Rob I came across via a Open University student who partook of PFFA (and was a damn fine writer too). Some explanations are in order here. MacKenzie moderates for Poetry Free For All, a poetry workshop website, devoted to the critiqueing of poetry. I can verify that the standards of critting and writing on this forum are high, and are getting higher. You can begin in the General forum and work your way through the various levels as your confidence and knowledge begins to increase.

Why crit? I hear you ask. For the same reasons as face to face work-shopping improves your writing. It is very difficult to keep writing in a vacuum. You learn to read a piece using the technical jargon, and can strip down elements in a poem easily, seeing how the sum is made of its differential parts. Critting then improves your own writing. You can see quicker what won’t work way before you go to the forum. PFFA can offer valuable readings of your poem, showing you that people don’t always see things the way you do. It helps remove the ego from the writing, and lets the writing do the talking instead.

Back to MacKenzie, however. In his blog over a period of time, I have seen his writing, sending out and getting poetry published, winning praise and a reputation for his work. His blog is interesting reading too. He often reviews collections or poets, and likes to raise issues outside of poetry too – see some of his archived posts on Celebrity Big Brother.

How about his work, then? I’d describe Rob’s work as using metre and form, as well as very vivid imagery. Metre is where there is an underlying rhythm – tum te tum te – or te tum te tum- they are the most basic units of analysis, the te is the unstressed word, the tum is the stressed, where the eye or voice lingers slightly longer. Form is where the poem is organised into stanzas or compartments.

Traditionally you organise a particular idea into each one –so that a poem is like a train with compartments joined together by the direction the train is going in and the rhythm, the noise it makes on the tracks. That’s how it’s supposed to work, but it is generally a lot easier to spot in other peoples work than in your own! Rob has a pamphlet available sampling some of his work, and I hope it won’t be too long before we are seeing his first collection.

Rob’s pamphlet The Clown of Natural Sorrow was published in 2005 by Happenstance Press. It contains a muscular grouping of twenty six poems. The main themes linking them are places and people. His way of looking things is quite unusual and he treads a fine line between showing and telling, the two main tools of writing. Showing is when the writer uses the actions of the protagonist or subject to allow the reader the impression of what is going on behind the scenes. Telling is when the writer just straight up and tells you, leaving no room for building your own impressions. An example of showing from MacKenzie’s work:

From ‘The Hedge Artist’

The latest caller wants to shape my hedge like a Great Dane
to dunk the Scotch Terrier across the road
in shadow. He works for both sides. […]

Instead of just going for ‘my dog is bigger than yours’ McKenzie introduces the idea of a go-between, the hedge artist. This seems surreal and makes the reader think about the situation beyond the normal social context. He shows us this by building up the telling details, and letting the reader read between the lines. Where we get the confirmation of this is at the end of the poem:

[…] he says to drop the work
would leave someone else worse to pick it up. Of course,
all I care about it keeping up appearances.

That last line is telling the reader, giving the final clue as to the thrust of the poem.

I spoke earlier of how McKenzie uses form and metre in his poetry, so here’s a look at a sonnet that he has in The Clown of Natural Sorrow:

Girl Playing Sudoku on the 7.15

I sit down opposite. She doesn’t blink
or cough, her pencil-scratch the only noise
beyond the train’s dull chitchat. Teenage boys
slouch up the centre-aisle, unleash to the stink
of Lynx. She keeps on scrawling to the brink
of suffocation. I admire her poise,
open windows, plumb my brain for ploys
to start a conversation. I can’t think.

Our eyes squint out of synch. Although I stare,
I don’t dare interrupt her concentration
and when she finally completes the square
I focus on the floor. One hesitation
begins a hesitation. I set up solitaire.
The train heaves on, already past my station.

Firstly look at the rhyming scheme at the end of lines. This sonnet uses end-stopped rhyme: blink/stink, brink/think, noise/boys, and poise/ploys. The first eight lines are grouped together making a stanza of eight lines or an octet. The rhyme scheme is also abba abba. And those rhymes because they are one syllable long, are called masculine rhymes (they just are, okay?). Two syllable rhymes like station, hesiTATION, concenTRATION are called feminine ones. Because the scheme is abba abba in the first octet, this looks like it could be an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. Looking at the second stanza or sestet (six lines) will show is whether that is true.

The sestet scheme here looks to be stare/square/soliTAIRE , which we’ll call c and the opposing rhyme we will call d. So, cd,cd,cd – this is a variation on the expected format of the Italian sonnet which can be cdd cee or any other variation of cde. It is not an English sonnet, as they usually end on a couplet with a brand new rhyme: gg. Still with me?

After looking at the rhyme scheme, it’s time to think about the rhythm. Well there is a gentle te tum, te tum, going on there, with variations. I don’t want to get too hung up on this aspect, but it is enough to say that the metre is loosely iambic pentameter which is stress based. An iamb is a foot, usually consisting of a light stress, a dot, and a heavy stress, a cross, pattern:

I FOCus ON the FLOOR. One hesitation
. x / . x / . x / etc.

The stresses in the early part of line are my emphasis – and I may well have it wrong. Read it out loud for yourself to hear where the stress falls. If you’re very interested in metre and rhythm, there are some great books out there particularly by Mary Oliver. Google her Rules for the Dance and A Poetry Handbook.

Putting together rhythm and rhyme in this sonnet then, can add a lot to our enjoyment of it giving extra meaning under the surface of the poem: the rhythm suggests the rocking of the train that the narrator is on; the rhymes emphasise the figures that the narrator mentions: the sheer concentration of the other passenger: blink etc. the teenage boys; and also effectively places the narrator of the poem in the reader’s mind. We can see and feel through the narrator, this train and the fascination with the Sudoku completer. These work additionally with the imagery that MacKenzie has created.

I hope you might enjoy this enough to lend some support to Rob Mackenzie and try out his poetry for yourself – there is a common maxim these days that everyone who wrote poetry bought just one book each, there would be lot more riches for poets to share. Whether that is true or not, being able to illuminate what makes poetry so interesting beyond the internal ‘hmm,’ is great fun. Next time out, we’ll look beyond the shores of Europe to see what else is out there.

***

Barbara Smith’s first collection of poetry, Kairos, published by Doghouse Press is available now.

Barbara blogs at Barbara’s Bleuuugh!

Interview with J.T. Ahearn
The American Poet, a modest tiger

A lot of poetry is published on the Internet, a quick Google search for ‘online poetry’ displays over 65 million results. The quality of the vast majority of that poetry is at best mediocre and trying to find anything decent is like trying to teach a dog to purr. When I first came across the work of American poet John T Ahearn (JTA) I started to read with the usual sigh, expecting another bark or at best a low growl. Not so, this guy purrs like a tiger. JTA is a fiery, opinionated and hugely talented poet. His work will be the subject of doctorates in a couple of decades, if he can get published that is.

John lurked in the shadows of the literary blogs for a while, occasionally snarling in the dark with his acerbic and often very funny comments. Then one or two far-sighted bloggers including Bill Liversidge and the Inner Minx somehow managed to convince him to start his own blog. The result is Wordcarving and I suggest you get round there as soon as you can and make his acquaintance so that you can brag to your grandchildren about how you were there in the beginning.

John is THE contemporary American poet and needs to be published by a major publisher now.

The Blag is delighted to have had the opportunity to interview JTA - The American Poet. Here are the results.

BLAG: When did you start writing poetry and what prompted you to write that first verse?

JTA: It was an assignment, in the fourth grade. Mrs. Dushman gave us a homework task to write a poem about something in American history (!), and I walked home with the usual feeling of impending failure and doom. I knew nothing about poetry (or history) and didn’t want to know. It was for girls. But once I began actually hacking it out, it was fun. Easy. I got some facts wrong, and I’m sure the verse was execrable, but Mrs. D, who viewed me as a scabby, untidy imposition, seemed to see me with new eyes. She read it to the class, walked around to my seat and squeezed my shoulder. The changes weren’t lost on me, but I didn’t write anything else for a long time, until I realized that girls were nice, or could be nice. Output increased dramatically when I fell in love with Ruth—summer before seventh grade. None of these masterworks has resurfaced, and my fervent hope is that they never will.

BLAG: Your poems are obviously very well-crafted, do you find the work of crafting a poem difficult?

JTA: Crafting is the very essence of the—er—craft. Once you move past the idea of poetry as pure expression–some kind of emotional evulsion valid in and of itself—you’re left with the fact that a poem is a mechanism, a set of ordered parts working together to produce an effect in the world, an experience in the reader’s mind that’s identical, or at least analogous, to the one which impelled the writing. Whatever devices are called for to make the parts work, they do always seem to require inordinate jigging, chiselling, paring, and dovetailing, but it’s not difficult. It’s not really work. It can be enormously frustrating, but it’s also the greatest fun one person can have.

BLAG: How did you develop your skills as a poet?

JTA: We all develop—if we do—by repetition, by correcting our inevitable mistakes and learning from them, and by learning about mistakes as well. Over time, slowly, painfully, I learned that mistakes are actually what it’s all about, or they can point to what it’s all about. They’re not failures, or not merely failures, but opportunities to grow. Thinking of mistakes as failures creates self-doubt and fear of the blank page, which is the chief cause of blocking. In reality, mistakes may be the subconscious trying to inform us of things we aren’t seeing yet, or not seeing properly. My writing life changed when I learned to welcome my mistakes, embrace them, make tea for them. Listen to them. Then, I correct. And then correct that.

Of course, I could be wrong…

BLAG: What poets do you read and are you influenced by anyone in particular.

JTA: I’ve read everybody, to the extent that’s possible, but I keep coming back to Auden, Larkin, and Anthony Hecht. I had a longish infatuation with Eliot when I was young, but I find him oppressive now. I love reading Wallace Stevens, but I must confess I don’t understand much of it; still, I can get drunk on the music. For what it’s worth, I still think Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill is the loveliest thing ever written.

BLAG: How important is being an American to your work as a poet?

JTA: I’d like to say that being a US citizen doesn’t matter much, but I suppose it does. We don’t read poetry here, by and large, not as a nation, Bobby Frost notwithstanding, and there are endless distractions. The fact is, (with exceptions—the actual number may be large, but it’s a tiny fraction of the population) nobody cares about poetry here, and they care still less whether you write it or not, though they may think you odd for not tending to business. Still, you’ll be allowed to do it, and do it as you please, if you can manage the trick of also staying alive. In other words, you’ll be totally ignored unless you take tireless steps to attract attention. This confers a degree of freedom that isn’t yet a universal in our world; I’m truly thankful for that freedom. Also, the bins are always full of wonderful food, and I’m free to sleep under some very good bridges. No, sorry, check that—Homeland Security…

BLAG: You resisted starting a blog of your own for a long time. What was it that finally gave you the push to display your work in this way

JTA: It came in an email one day—a fait accompli, all put together, passwords, even the first post—accompanied by a rather challenging note, something about a “wee timrous sleekin beastie.” All I had to do was fill out the bio and push “Publish,” that irresistible word. What could I do? Presented that way, it looked better than my previous working plan, which was to bury as many mss as I could manage in earthenware jars, sealed with propylis, and live in hope that I’d be accepted as part of the Plastic Age of AmPo by whatever archaeologists were lucky enough to dig one up in the next millenium or two. I pushed the button.

BLAG: You are a damn good poet. Have you been published? If not - why not? If just a little bit, why only a little bit?

JTA: Published? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. If you’d call it that. Back in the sixties. Eliotic clabber, preposterous, inane. Underground Press. Nothing survives, fortunately. (“Shall these bones live?” No.) Later, I dutifully sent things out, and dutifully accepted them back, from places I now see were far above my station. My problem was a familiar one, I think: I’d have been ashamed to belong to any club that would have had me as a member. I just thought the littles weren’t worth the postage, and I still don’t think they are. The reasons? Don’t get me started. Just read em.

Nevertheless, I have persevered with the journals I actually read, and so have they persevered with their returns, and here we are.

BLAG: What function, if any, does a poet have in society?

JTA: I’m not sure the poet has any function in society different to anyone else. I’ve heard it said that poets are the Voices of society, but I don’t really believe it. When Yeats was singing as an “Irish Poet,” he really wasn’t at his best, was he? It’s difficult enough to sing in your own voice, without worrying about society, but if you do it well enough, people will adopt your voice and call it theirs. Think it’s theirs.

Poets can also serve as a pointed example of what can happen to a person who refuses to conform…

BLAG: Can you explain what prompted you to write the poem Village Life (printed below). What’s it about?

JTA: place in 1648, in the Ukraine. The raiders were Cossacks, but they might just as well have been Romans, Mongols, Goths, Saxons, Danes, Romanians, Turks, Belgians, Japanese, Nazis, Janjaweeds, or good old American GIs. The salient fact about the poem is the last line: “There was no news.”

BLAG: or do you think poetry needs any explanation or should it speak for itself

JTA: I wouldn’t say poetry never needs an explanation, but if it doesn’t speak for itself it’s lost.

BLAG: Is global warming an issue for you?

JTA: Global warming is an issue for us all. Believe it or don’t—doesn’t matter. It’s happening, and there’s no place to hide.

BLAG: Is the world going to hell in a handbasket?

JTA: The world is the handbasket, a small one, and more fragile than we knew. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bottom fell out, but there are signs of hope. I think the fact that young people are increasingly singling out galloping corporatism as the chief problem is a hopeful sign. Whether enough leverage can be mustered to turn things around—without a Malthusian cataclysm—remains to be seen, but I have hope.

BLAG: Some of your poems and your award-winning short story “Snow” display a spiritual awareness. Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual or religious person?

JTA: I try to be mindful, to remember that each moment of existence is absolutely unique and irreplaceable and precious beyond calculation. I look up at the night sky and I’m struck dumb with wonder at the tiny slice I can see, and with the wonder of being there to do it at all.

I’m an atheist, but I believe Jesus was one hell of great rabbi who taught what he had to teach and wouldn’t take it back, no matter what. All the hoodoo they added later does him no honor.

Church? No, it makes me feel dirty.

BLAG: How do you earn a living?

JTA: Currently I’m a Photoshop/Illustrator jockey, but I’ve had a million jobs: electrician, editor, hemp farmer, art director, technical illustrator, technical writer, psychiatric aide, sign painter, film editor, apiarist, guitar player, stringed instrument repairman, bartender, pinball mechanic, dishwasher, breakfast cook, etc etc etc… You asked.

BLAG: If you could choose to spend a night in a pub with 5 people, living or dead, who would they be? Why?

JTA: Vincent van Gogh, Samuel Clemens, Christopher Marlowe, Percy Shelley, and James Joyce. Fine lads all. After suitably intricate and well-tempered deliberations, we’d wreck the place. And Eva Cassidy, to sing us all back home.

BLAG: Any personal information/biographical details you wish to give?

JTA: I’ve just turned sixty. I’m getting a bit worried. But I just got a fresh pair of rock and roll shoes and a new pair of cheap sunglasses, and I hope to be still twitching when they carry me out of here.

***

Village Life
by JT Ahearn

Once there was a village. Sheep,
a few cows here and there,
barley all around, gold
enough. Down the gentle slope
a little stream cut through
willows and waist-high grass,
where fishes raced each other to see
which would grace the tables first.
There was no priest, but one would come
from time to time to shrive what sins
there were and praise the local ale.
Life went on. Things made sense.

Raiders came one day at dawn.
They didn’t stay. They killed the men,
cut them to bits with their famous swords;
they dashed out the children’s brains
against the ancient trees, forced
the women to watch their children die.
Then they raped the women to death,
praising the local ale. They slit
the women open when they’d finished,
filled the cavities with cats,
unholy beasts they didn’t like.
Then they were gone. Good afternoon.

No one was left to bury the dead.
Dogs and carrion birds grew fat;
nothing else moved, except
curls of smoke here and there,
the stream with its new fingers of blood.
The village became a place of death;
no one came to praise the ale.
Any who chanced upon the scene
retraced the steps that brought them there,
found a way around the place,
left it to sun and rain and birds
to purify the scattered bones.

Word spread. Neighbors wore
the blank mask of grief and fear.
They turned on their radios
to hear the news. There was no news.

***

John T Ahearn blogs at Wordcarving.