A Calling of The Circle
Part Three
I call to you fading sunset
Join this circle of the turning year
Your soft blue light
dripping the western sky
Bringing cool mists
Blessed be the autumn time
Join this circle of the year
In the twilight’s full cup
I call to you in the West
Hail and welcome
At the equinox of autumn
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A Calling of The Circle
Part Two
I call to you hot midday
Join this circle of the turning year
Your burnished red light
Climbing the Southern sky
Bringing blazing fire<
Blessed be the Midsummer
Join this circle of the year
In the fiery wand of midday
I call to you in the South
Hail and welcome
At the height of Summer
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A Calling of the Circle
Part one
I call to you bright sunrise
Join this circle of the year
Your yellow light
Climbing the eastern sky
Bringing sweet fresh air
Blessed be the springtide
Join this circle of the year
With the dawn’s sharp sword
I call to you in the East
Hail and welcome
At the equinox of spring
Today I have attempted to write in the Ode form – my inspiration was discovering that the local art museum in town has a piece of Grayson Perry pottery on loan. From that it’s a small step to the inevitable duff pun that gave me my title…
Ode On A Grayson Urn
I’m not big on museum pottery,
Not even if it’s done archaeologically,
Not Meisen shepherd, nor Stafford teapot,
Beaker people beakers inspire me not.
Yet today I felt my enthusiasm burn
While gazing at a Grayson Perry urn
Bulbous fat vase, rounded proud and brazen
Where flowers, faces, and colours are glazen
For among splotches and gilded lillies,
Grayson throws in pictures of big willies.
Day 10 of NaPoWriMo
Darling, When I think Of You
Salome
by Pierre et Gilles
Augmented photograph. 1991
Darling, when I think of you…
My skin tingles, hairs rise.
In my dry gummy mouth
I taste a metallic
Taint of terror.
In my mind
I see a red-flare distress beacon
Bloom glaring
In the empty dark sea night sky.
I hear klaxons ringing out
Harmonics of horror.
I smell the sweat of my own fear.
Darling, in truth,
I try not to think of you…
Too often.
Today I am posting up a poem from my new chapbook – Clutches of Love. I was lucky enough to have Katya Lubarr of the Cat Basket write the introduction, which I was very pleased with. We are hoping to collaborate on a similar chapbook anthology in time for Valetines Day 2019 and we’ll soon be putting a call out for contributions.
But, finally this chapbook of Clutches of Love is finished, and is available to buy print-on-demand from my Esoterranean Books store on Etsy, the chapbook is priced at £5.
The Short Answer Chapbook for sale here
NaPoWriWee
I don’t know if I will make it through NaPoWriMo. I have sorely struggled to write productively daily. At times I wondered why, in light of the fact that I have never called myself a poet and never showed much interest in poetry before, I set myself to write a poem a day for a month. I was maundering about the weather and housecleaning for a couple of days before I realised I needed a plan, a framework to get me through a month without feeling it was pointless. That’s when I decided to use the NaPoWriMo month to research and experiment with poetic forms. I wrote a haiku, then I chose to make a cut-up of David Bowie lyrics into a Shakespearean sonnet. I re-examined earlier experiments with Beat poet Brion Gysin’s Permutation Poems, researched and attempted a Triolet, and I’m planning next week to find out about Kenning poems, a form used throughout the Dark Ages as a semi-sacred form – think Odin losing an eye, hanging on a tree for nine days and nights, in order to gain knowledge of the runes and achieve mastery over language.
So, on the bright side – I may not actually make it through NaPoWriMo, but I have made it through the first week. I’ve done a NaPoWriWee, and I’m hoping to do another one soon.
Today’s poem is a Haiku, called April, like a reprise of the poem I wrote on the first day.
April
Daffodils clamour, high blue sky,
Yearning equinox,
In the promise of summer.
The Short Answer Chapbook for sale here
Yesterday I got a new domain name for my blog/website. I am very excited, I’m sure it will help my SEO profile. Even though I don’t know what that means.
I’m so inspired I wrote an haiku about it.
bella basura dot com
Please note my new domain name
Easy to recall
It’s bella basura dot com
The main reason I did it, apart from the fact that wordpress kept suggesting to me that I did it, was to remove intrusive pop-up ads. So here’s another poem I wrote about it.
This time it’s a triolet.
bella basura dot com
Go to bella basura dot com
For your bella basura needs
Like me! follow! links at bottom
Go to bella basura dot com
See where bella is coming from
Go to bella basura dot com
For all your bella basura needs
Please update your bookmark and send me a message in the comments to let me know.
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Arthur Rimbeau
A Formal Excercise
Research is easy with the internet. When I decided write a poem for NaPoWriMo in the most difficult form I could find, google quickly threw me a TRIOLET. A form popular in the seventeenth century and derived from the form of traditional French folk songs. It is a form considered hard to do well, and prone to doggerel. Arthur Rimbeau was apparently fond of them, although as he only did them in French, so I don’t know how stilted they might be.
Although research is easy on the internet, particularly straight forward things like formal poetic conventions, it is also a minefield of confusions, lies and sheer bullshit.
After ploughing through myriad internet-borne variations of what a TRIOLET is, I cobbled together my own interpretation, a working formula for writing a TRIOLET. Unfortunately by this time my imagination and creativity had been worn thin, and I ended up writing a poem about writing a poem – YAWN!
Here is the definition of TRIOLET that I used in day 6 of NaPoWriMo.
TRIOLET – In it’s English form consists of eight lines of iambic tetrameters,
with a repetitive rhyme scheme ABaAabAB
The first line being repeated in lines 4 and 7
The second line repeated in the eighth line.
The resultant poem is HERE
Credit – OK Google for the image of Arthur Rimbeau.
The Short Answer Chapbook for sale here
Today, the 5th day of NaPoWriMo, I went back to a poem I first constructed in 1998. 
Taking the Permutation Poems of Brion Gysin as a starting point, a form that is defined simply as listing the random re-arranging of a the words in a four or five word sentence. I was particularly influenced by his poem Kick That Habit Man. ( written manually in 1959). I actually saw this particular poem performed back in 1982 at The Final Academy in the Brixton Ritzy. That weekend found Brion Gysin performing alongside fellow beat writers William Burroughs, John Gionio, as well as sound artist Z’ev and Genesis P-Orridge’s nascent Psychic Television.
They were performances that deeply impressed my mind, as a working class 18 year-old who had jumped the train from the home counties to be at this event, it was a peak experience in my development as a writer.
Years later, in 1998 in fact, I coerced a geek-friend into writing a simple computer programme to generate a list of word order permutations of any given four-word phrase.
Suddenly, I could write like Brion Gysin at the touch of a button.
In this context, my programmed poems are connected to a literary formal continuum that first appeared ten years before Gysin named them Permutation Poems. In George Orwell’s 1984, popular proletarian culture is dominated by “sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator” (George Orwell 1984 Part 2 Chapter 4 Secker and Warburg 1949). Later, J G Ballard in Vermilliion Sands (published in 1971), describes “a world in which verse is churned out to order by a machine, and is measured by its length” (Chris Beckett The Context and Date of Composition of an Abandoned Literary Draft Electronic British Library Journal, Mar 2014). Further, the concept of mechanically derived literature has resonances in current debate around definitions of AI. It seems to me, that Permutation Poems may yet prove to be a dominating form for poetry in the 21st century.
The most successful of my programmed poems was entitled “F**king”, and is reproduced in full on my NaPoWriMo page here.
The Short Answer Chapbook for sale here
My third napowrimo day – and although it’s probably cheating, and certainly blatant plagiarism – I have constructed a sonnet made up entirely from doctored David Bowie lyrics.
Sonnet For David Bowie
So I am pushing through the market square
Where I do see so many mothers crying.
We heard the news that just came over the air
They say we have five years left to die in.
Although last night they loved you and your things,
It is on Am-e-ri-ka’s tortured brow,
Those angels opening doors and pulling some strings
Know that Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow.
But there’s a Starman waiting in the sky
While it has got your mother in a whirl,
There is a Starman waiting in the sky
Not sure if you are a boy or a girl
Run for the shadows in these golden years
Wha wha, gold, wha wha wha, golden years.
