Poem By Dominic McLoughlin

I'm very glad to welcome Dominic McLoughlin to the Friday Poem feature here at Eyewear, especially at a time when he has had such recent good news: having a poem place second in the very competitive National Poetry Competition 2005 (UK). To read that poem, go here:

www.poetrysociety.org.uk/comp/comp05.htm

His poems have appeared in the anthology Entering the Tapestry edited by Mimi Khalvati and Graham Fawcett (Enitharmon, 2003), and in magazines including The Rialto, The Shop (from which the poem below is taken) and The Oxford Magazine, and at nthposition. He lives in London, England.

The Asking Price

What am I bid for the crocked, the broken-backed
the well-past-its-sell-by-date, the tear-stained and pain-wracked?
Who’ll give me a starting price
on this lonely parcel that meant something once?

I, for one will bid you the moon and the stars and the sun.
I’ll give heaven and earth and all I am worth,
God and the angels, looney tunes,
all the half-remembered lyrics from my youth.

Well if nobody else in the room is bidding
this gentleman seems to have covered the floor
with collateral that sounds awfully impressive
though it can’t be strictly accounted for.

And for those who’re wondering
if they should have waved their paddle
let me just re-cap on the kind of twaddle
this lot is described as having become.

It’s useless, incompetent, gauche
on a losing streak, up to no good, humourless, weak.
Amongst its many faults is a fatal flaw
it doesn’t think it deserves to be valued anymore.

What am I bid? The moon! What do I hear? The sun!
Your last chance to speak. I’ll give you everything! Going, going,
gone.

poem by Dominic McLoughlin
originally published in The Shop Issue 9, Summer 2002

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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