Category: poetry

Can we break the rules of grammar in poetry?

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Breaking Grammar Rules in Poetry Writing

 

Quote:As the poetry canon grows beyond measure, poets increasingly reach for creative devices to make their work stand out.

Toying with grammar rules is one such device, but it is not something that can be approached carelessly. If you choose to forgo the rules because you don’t know them rather than as a creative technique, your lack of knowledge will show and the poem will present as amateurish. Of course, that’s true for all types of writing: learn the rules, and only after you have learned them, go ahead and break them.

I salute anyone who breaks the rules in the interest of art and great poetry writing just as much as I admire poets who craft meter and verse within the confines of grammar. So for this language-loving poet, either way is the right way. Walk the tight rope or jump from it and see if you can fly.

How like a dream

How like a dream this world appears to me
My mind unfocussed spreads itself about..
No details, just an outline I can see.
And  this vague dimness fills my mind with doubt.

The early sun made joy rise in my heart
As I looked out upon the gardens gold.
Of nature and each season we’re a part.
As with patience we let all our self unfold.

We are as nothing in the vast space of this sky
Where stars send light from deeps of long ago.
And yet despite my nightmares I shall try
As fears make fences if we don’t say “No.”

We have to make our dreams a home on earth;
From there creative thoughts are given birth

I’ve lost the cordless handset and my specs.

I’ve lost the cordless handset  and my specs.
I   put them down   right when the doorbell rang
I  can’t phone out nor read a message  texted

To lose more than a partner makes me vexed
Already in my heart I feel a pang
I’ve lost the cordless handset  and my specs.

I wonder what possession I’ll lose next
The knell is waiting anxious to be rung
I can’t moan nor read a message  texted

I’ll have to go next door on some pretext
But must not keep them talking for too long
I’ve lost the cordless handset  and my specs.

I feel if I continue I’ll be wrecked
But all us humans need to use our tongue
I  can’t weep nor read a message  texted

I must not rumimate nor thoughts dissect
I ‘ve been careless but I ‘ve done no wrong
I’ve lost the cordless handset  and my specs.
I  can’t speak nor read a message  texted

Oh,my dear sister, what see you there?

She’d never seem rainwater deeper than eyes
Mystery undisguised.
Round the rain puddle she ran and ran;
Too much for her dolly’s pan.
By reflections of trees ,she was hypnotised.
Curiousity’s often so wise
Oh,my dear sister what  see  you there?
I hope it’s a vision fair.
What are these ships and the tugs and the tide?
Where are the sailors who died?
This is an ocean and I’m in my boat
Come sisters dear,let us float.
We’ll never see Daddy again, ‘cos he’s here
and down her face travelled one tear.
I see him afar off, he’s meeting the Lord
There’s the archangel with his sharpest sword.
We cannot follow,no, we must go back
We each must stay on our own track.
Three little children with long  light  brown hair
On this road going to where?
Once three small sisters ,but now only two;
Eyes of one green and one  blue
By the park gate  side a pool of sea rain
We shall be three again.
One in a pushchair and one gripping tight.
I push my dear sisters into the light.
Keep hold of the handle and never let go
However the East wind does blow
Keep hold of my hands as Dad crosses the sea
Don’t hope for what cannot be.
I told her it’s only a rainwater pool,
Held in God’s hand like a jewel.
But she saw the patterns and she saw the tides
Which all human beings must ride.
For nothing is “only” and nothing is “just”.
Nothing and everything’s passed

The cello has a tender singing voice

The cello has a tender singing voice
Allows the feelings which we cannot say.
Among composers  Bach might be our choice
The cello sings   rich lyrics  with her voice.
Rostropovich, Proms ;  he played, of course.
Soviet armies  marched, the Czechs were   dazed.
The cello has a sorrowing truthful voice;
Speaks our feelings when we cannot pray.

Then we shall learn the limits of our will

When soft winds blow and air strokes our bare skin.
When days are long like melodies of youth,
when light wakes up the soul from out her sin
Then shall we know when this sweet life is truth?

When flowers droop and leaves are dried and brown;
When water’s short and all  plants are forlorn’
Then do not meet disaster with a frown,
For out of heartfelt sorrow new life’s born.

When winter’s here and all is quiet and still
And nothing seems to move or grow or speak
Then we shall learn the limits of our will
for through the soil the first green shoots will break.

For seasons change and actors come and go.
Yet through such changes, life is what we know

The Seasons

The seasons alter imperceptibly;
No point exact which demonstrates the turn.
Yet soon come changes which our eyes can see
Leaves dry and crack,;the acers seem to burn.
And so it is with human creatures too.
Each day our loved one looks unchanged to us
And yet the body alters like leaves do.
Small changes made with neither noise nor fuss.
We  are  transparent ghosts of  our old selves
And  struggle down the avenue of life
Soon death approaches with its common stealth.
And separates the husband and the wife.
In winter all is black and we despair
Yet, deep in earth,worms silently prepare.

Geese fly by

It’s Autumn weather, geese fly by,
Autumn rust,red,gold,so gay
Drystone walls edging fields,
Apples gathered,holly berries
Flash so brightly
Look like flowers
Sun shines sideways,shadows long
Of trees appear.I dwell among
Woods  where gentle beeches sing,
Swaying with the sideward wind.
See their roots, all intertwined.
Feel their geometry in the mind.
Look up now into the sky,
See the V formation high.
Geese fly home at end of day.
My heart is moved by patterned dance
In this peace and great silence
My mind widens like the sky
And in this moment I would die,
So I would stay with this still vision
Of geese set out on autumn mission.
Snails in rain pools slither near
My feet upon the terrace here
And look,upon their whorled backs
All the sense of life is packed.
And yet so easily Life’s destroyed
When blind foot steps into the void.

In kindly leaves

The sun is glaring hotly at the earth
And birds sleep deep in hidden, secret  leaves
Too much good we  know becomes a curse
The sun is staring fiercely at the earth.
Of fire and ice, which  is ,in truth, the   worse?
Which scientific theories  to believe?
The sun is glaring hotly at the earth
And birds have hidden  deep in kindly  leaves

 

I see a light fuzz of hair

 

  • I see a light fuzz of hair on your head

    like the softness of just opening leaf buds in spring.
    The chemo is over,and you wait relieved and letting that
    take you for a while before you start to face the next stage.
    Will your Spring turn to a warm enchanting Summer
    or has the cancer,as they say “spread.”
    Just for now,you’re in that lull
    so in three weeks time you will not be
    arriving for another session of drugs
    and days of sickness.

    I see the light fuzz which reminds me
    of how the cat’s fur grew back after her surgery
    and she,being unable to reflect or question,
    leaped from the fence top onto next door’s kitchen roof;
    no thought in her mind of stitches breaking.
    How beautifully the patterned fur returned
    and the vulnerable skin was covered again.
    Oh,to look into those eyes and see you dream
    about mice that live behind the shed
    and how you sat watching for hours
    and how you were alive till the very last moment.
    Then , all of a sudden,you were gone.

    Pray it will not be so forthe fragile,loving human
    now waiting and living,hoping for what you took for granted…
    a “normal” life span Or maybe just three quarters of one
    would be satisfactory;would be a beneficence
    such as trees feel when the sap turns and begins to flow back.
    bringing life out of the darkness of earth and soil.
    And another Summer comes at the right time
    and we find it,shall we say,satisfactory?

Fear of poetry

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https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/mar/21/world-poetry-day-student-occupy

Quote:

It strikes me now as singularly and politically prescient that Harrison chose to express his determination to write poetry as a form of occupation: he declares he will “occupy” the “lousy leasehold” of an elite literary tradition.Harrison’s statement anticipates the contemporary Occupy movement, with its targeting of political and social inequality, exclusion and hierarchy. The occupation of spaces of power is an attempt to level the playing field, enacting change from the bottom up.

Harrison refuses to ‘squat’ in the space of poetry, a phrase that would acknowledge his unbelonging. He occupies; he makes the space his own. And what is more, having read the poetry of Tony Harrison, my 18-year-old self was no longer frightened of this supposedly difficult form with its metrical lines, suffused with metaphor and locked in rhyme. Instead, I was also determined to wrest back and occupy poetry.

The corner of the eye

Subtle emotions ; sidelong glances
The  corner of the eye, the view of you
Noone else can see.
The rolling ego,the raising of the brow
The humorous glimpse, the grasp
The  network of our eyes
We’re spies
We’re in touch already
Some poet introduces you.
A sign of being ,say,  a late reactor
But the explosion is  on the way
We don’t know ;  our eyes work
Some  are lit ; candles in a window
I think you know; stop it and start; again

The History of Ideas, 1973-2012: Authority

BY BRIAN BLANCHFIELD
Where the correlative of reason was conviction and where the correlative
of power was obedience, the correlative of authority was trust
Your job—she gives another to the child
hip-high—is to heat the money in your hands
to the optimum warmth for purchase. Cagey,
the diversion in the same coin as his want.
It buys her time, enough that once
they round the corner, she might break into a sprint,
as one might with a pet who can keep up. But
the prophet makes eyes in his open fists
of the nickels’ glint, and we see he forbears
our guess her hector gets lost in the flash
when as if by swale we all give way to expel
a customer from the clench of us without her.
For what beneath the moths who have all night
to live do we brace ourselves as we approach?
We lean to find again the boy’s outguess of us.
Demand is double at the walk-up window, where
punishment for paltry want is to tell it again
into plexiglass the color of slobber, so others
in the bleach of halogen light may deal
their disparagement forward. For what if not
dishonor are we braced, rehearsing what to ask?
Repetition is a machine, a machine
for converting request into appeal; and
commerce, then, the window’s byproduct or
balm, depending. Red hot cashews, yellow bag.
Only because we visit by day do we know
at night what to call at the walk-up window
where two aisles of open merchandise end at
the sacral plates of clerks before us who, if
on pulleys they were carts instead or vending claws,
would be by now concussed and dented by
lever malevolence outright.
                                                    The prophet stands eye level
with the vending plunge, a here and now mechanism
he would need to invent to operate, and stands
between it and his mother. Yellow bag.
                              Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal;…                                                           because there is not enough recognition, they make art

Observe the patterns ,hidden and unread

It doesn’t matter what the teachers said
They don’t know as much as we might think
We can learn to deal with x,y,z.

These letters ,used as numbers, are not dead
But in the mind’s eye, glow  like  golden ink
It doesn’t matter what the teacher said

I learned that once when I was ill in bed
I saw a screen with  letters which were linked
We can  learn to deal with x,y,z.

The letters moved  to stand in two lines wed
Then ratios formed and thus caused me to think
It doesn’t matter what the teacher said

I saw the answer  glitter as I read
Pascal  solved it once, and then I did
We can learn to deal with x,y,z.

Observe the patterns ,hidden and unread;
Like music  which  has  scores and does their bid
I doesn’t matter what the teacher said
We can learn to deal with x,y,z.

 

 

Cut apart

Since you died ,my language  is curtailed
Can one cut a part,  and not kill all?
Since  you  left, my  wish to speak has failed.
Since you died ,my language  is curtailed
I have lost the main,not mere detail.
As Eve lost Eden after the great Fall.
Since you died ,my language  is curtailed
Can one cut just part, yet not kill  all?

Now the Devil’s comin’ out as grey.

 

There are no hours and minutes in a day
Whatever Nokia Lumias  might display
Babylonian  clocktowers hover;
Cracked a wall , now built in Dover,
There are     sixty cuckoos to gainsay.

Day and night, or hey, what black and white
People range in hues of  fruits delight
I like  olive  and    Greenpeacers
Wearing  hats  from crowns off steeples
Day and night,oh  shall we take a  flight?

I see the Berlin Wall is coming back
Mexico   has  ordered   ten sick    plaques
Trump has  promised work forever:
Dangerous walls  from Hell to Dover
Even God has  been electro-shocked

No ,these demons cannot get across
They’re stuck in an inferno; what is worse……….
God  now  can’t  be  omnipresent.
He has  high  walls   around Grace Crescent.
Holy Moses,who  can take this flak?

If you miss yer dinner,don’t it hurt?
Same as if yer finger gets a cut
Refugees with their  feet   bleeding–
Christ,we’re underwhelmed in feelings
Get a barbed wire fence, and kick them back.

The Lord’s THEIR shepherd, so we’re gonna pay.
He  watches  US  like  NEVER  from today
We’re   ex-colonial criminals
We’re Self-esteem Unlimited.
Now the Devil’s comin’ out as grey.

Oh,someone jumped the Central Line today
Could not take this life so  full  of play
Oxford Street was blocked by walls
Of vehicles  sent to the Call.
What is my vocation,what my Play?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smile at me

I miss the hand that used to hold  my hand
I miss the eyes that  used  to  comfort me
The needs of love don’t  feel like a demand
I miss the hand that  caressed  my  held hand
I miss your love  and miss you as a  friend.
When you gazed , your eyes lit what you’d see.
I miss the hand that used to warm  my hand
I miss the eyes that  used  to smile at me.

I miss your arms around me in the dark
I miss the early morning,  thoughts unspoke
On Purbeck Hills; the  Easter singing lark
I miss your arms around me in the park
Poole Harbour’s beauty is a living spark
Sharing silent glances as we walked
I miss your arms around me in the dark
I miss the mornings, though we   rarely spoke

Silent sharing ;  company in  love.
With strangers,  we must  manufacture talk.
To be silent ;the dome of sky above
To be silent ;  the  spaciousness of    love.
With strangers, how their talk can jolt and shove
I held your hand and stroked it when we walked
Silent   caring;  sympathy of  love.
Not strangers blindly   snatching in the dark.

Can we find the space between the words?

How like a prison is this cubicle
So small I’m like a fish inside  a net

My heart beats with a rhythm unmusical
As with sharp terror, I am now beset.
–
We humans were not made to be en-walled
Our ancestors were gatherers in the woods.
Now  industry  demands freedom be stalled
For production and  consumption of  their goods.

And  executives in advertising   work
In  offices  where they  combine their words
Religiously like members of the Kirk
Yet envying the freedom of wild birds.

Can we  be ourselves in such a world?
Can we find the space between the words?

The uncanny is a space which I avoid

 

The uncanny is a space which I avoid
I do not wish to meet with spirits  vile.
Though with a man ,it’s true that I have toyed.
I  dropped them all and sane was I the while.

Yet when I met your eyes so dark  and strange
A force more strong than my own pulled me in.
A   premonition that my life would change,
Before I knew your double,your dark twin.

In dreams and  in my nightmares he will come
To capture me and take me  to his land.
I do not know what choice to make of man
Nor how to count infinity by hand

The double is an augury of death
Yet in this space uncanny is a path

It may not be this me

The  small birds are singing above me
Two  hearts are entwined in my dreams
I shall need  to be here when you call
For I have a vocation for life.
And I need to write  at  least fifty poems
Before    autumn weather arrives

The  man in the raincoat  bereaved
Had a large parcel for me.
It was the  book of your mother’s   new poems
Just as I saw in my dreams
There were sonnets and tercets of sorts
I did not recognise others  at all


I wonder will my  cousin  call
I so  want  to see him arrive
After   a meta- journey by horse and by cart
Is  the poetry reminiscent of me?
My nightmare and all of my dreams
Contribute to the themes of my poems

 

The illusions I create in my  dreams
Have their voices and they play  their part
But illusions are not aimed to  decide
They are soporific   nightmares on TV
I roam all around in my rhymes
Till a metaphor arrives to oblige.

 

I wonder if the schema of dreams,
More often our wishes distort;
So it  is transcribed in our poem
What possibility drives
The collection of folk I call me?
But it may not be this me at all.

Ode to My Socks

Pablo Neruda, 1904 – 1973

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as though into
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were
two fish made
of wool,
two long sharks
sea-blue, shot
through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so handsome
for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that woven
fire,
of those glowing
socks.

Nevertheless
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as learned men
collect
sacred texts,
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
into a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle who hand
over the very rare
green deer
to the spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the magnificent
socks
and then my shoes.

The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
in winter.

If I no longer love you

 
If I no longer  love you when you die
And quickly fill your space with a new man
Then perhaps my  claiming love was  but a lie
And I can fill  you place  with anyone.
Are not our  friends unique and therefore lost
When death pulls them away to darker shores?
Yet we  will love each one despite the cost.
And when we weep,  is this not  what life’s for?
Loss and gain and loss and gain again
A pattern from the infant to the sage
So joy and pain and joy and pain remain.
Who knows what is inscribed on the page?
To feel,to suffer, then feel joy once more
Will open up  to show us Heaven’s door

Her eyes faltered.

It appears the world is a verb not a noun.
I’ve had my suspicions of course,
I know that’s how I see,
Not yet having achieved object constancy
I see afresh,which is alarming until one adapts.
I see the way you see on Heroin,
But for me,it’s free.
I never knew if mother was the same person today,
Or some new other mother.
She did have the same hands
But her eyes faltered.
I gave them all the same name,
Like a folder on the computer.
Let’s see how many mothers I created!
In the end I had to go to school
To get some kind of safety net.
We had alternative explanations there
Like we were saved from sin.
But who can save us from multiple mothers?
I never let on,though I felt stressed sometimes
By all the changes.
Couldn’t things be more fixed?
Dreams end,but life goes on
Being a verb it has to act, you see.
If it were a noun it would be enclosed
By many parameters,grids like stunning geometric orgasms,
Quite beautiful to look at it but never felt.
Feeling is the art of life.
Art is the life of the feelings.
What are the feelings of the feelings?
Who understands the heart of Ar

In heaven I’ll be whole

The sun is shining brightly
Shall I sit by the pool?
No,I always live my  life by
Rigid personal rules.

Last week’s unruly weather
Let rain fell down in spools
I might have had the heating on;
Oh,those rigid personal rules.

Wear a dress from Mayday
Wear  coats when winter’s cool
Only wash your hair on weekends
That’s a personal rigid rule

But,Ma ,my hair is oily
The girls all point in school.
Don’t be such a  cry baby
Don’t  be such a fool.

Ma,I’ve done my homework
I’m top of all my year!
Can I have an hour alone?
She thwacked me on the ear.

I was her little puppet
And she controlled my strings
Till I caught my Guardian angel
And I stole her sturdy wings.

Well,Ma died  half my life away
But  she is now a ghoul
Watching me so patiently
With her chart of rigid rules.

She didn’t leave me no money
She didn’t leave me no jewels.
She just left me a message
All my rules are  yours.

I cried ,Holy Moses
She is worse than God
She made rules for everything
From  love to  boiling cod.

Don’t bath when you’ve your period
Don’t let your brothers see
You are now a woman
But  you’re still under me

I think I’ll leave those rules behind
And if it makes me fear
God will send a devil round,
I’ll hit  him with this spear.

Flexible  our bodies
Flexible our minds
We must climb the mountain
And leave those rules behind.

Following personal rules
Can make us feel secure
But  our vocation calls to us
And cares not if we’re   pure.

Steal  and purloin all you need
From books and people too.
Follow your own calling
While you share our human zoo.

And share your learning freely
Give as well as take
Oh,my Lord ,I see some men
Carrying a stake.

They are going to burn my body
But they can’t touch my  soul
Wrap me well in flax,  my dear.
In heaven ,I’ll be whole

The poison tree by Wm BLAKE

My feeling is he told his friend not that he shouted and yelled at him though with a good friend it might be possible for them to help you when you get angry,even when you berate them

 

I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veil’d the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Blindsight

Blindsight scattered my wits
Like whitened bones
Across the deserts of my mind.
I descended into blackness.
Love shrank into the tame cat
By the fire,unacknowledged hate
Grew to fill the room.
I stared too much,
A full stop grew gigantic
Crowded out
All the words in the sentence
I saw nothing but this dot
Now a gigantic black hole
Into which I was dragged.
An energy coming from within my own head
Sucked me into the black hole.
That place was the wrong sort of dearkness.
Within that full stop,
Love Fundamental became invisible.
Disappered into the dark.
I dragged my eyes away
And saw the moon appear , so eerie,
It shone,grey silver.
If I had opened my eyees wider
I would not now lament
What I destroyed in the wormhole
Of the black dot that drew my eye
Into a tunnel of darkness
It blinded me to the light
Did not let me read the sentences
Beside the full stop.
An error of focus left hate
Unacknowledged,unmitigated unredeemed,
Kept from love or goodness
Afraid to spoil my love with hate,
The fear of hate became
That which spoiled all else else,
By freezing Love itself

My eyes were set upon some other world

The white geranium was a birthday gift
It flowered profusely all  last summer long
When winter came, I hid it in  the  hedge
To protect it and its loved life prolong

In spring I took it out to give it light.
Already flowers were visible and large
And so it lived  upon my  patio steps
I hoped that many buds would soon emerge

My eyes were set upon  some other world
I did not look at it for  seven weeks
The same large flowers were there yet looking grey
At last ,I realised  my mind  had been asleep

I picked it up to pull it from the pot
It broke in half ; it was   man  made,oh fool!
Yet for an entire year, it had me tricked;
As if I mistook tin for precious jewels.

Oh, absent mind; oh cruelly confused gaze.
Oh,woman blind;how foolish are  your days!

 

I have shuddered

I have  heard  grass singing in  the wind.
I   have walked through poppy fields in  sun
I have  struggled  when dark rain descends
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I have watched  trees’ shadows in the ponds
I have  crossed the  arctic wastes of pain
I have  heard  grass singing in the wind.

 

Another soul is writing  with my hand
I have  wept  while loaning him  my pen
I have   struggled  when dark rain descends

 

I have seen  the edges  of the mind
I  have   sensed a  silence un-contained.
I have  heard  grass singing in  the wind.

 

I have  grieved for   all who are confined
I have  cringed at  creeds of  cunning  men
I have  crawled  when  crushing  rain  comes down

 

 

I have seen the storm  through camera lens.
I have felt the   solar system bend.
I have  heard  grass singing in  the wind.
I have  shuddered  when dark rain descends