New Poem by Todd Swift

first draft of my first poem in months...

As ‘Heavenly Bodies’ by Tamaryn played

I came out of myself, lost the way, was the river in the middle

of the road, the third movement, the moving van, a targeted thing,

gossamer wing, the last to fire on the smoking man; fiddle

with your days if you can, until you break a string. I was giddy,

lost, grown relatively fat, measureless to myself, on a high
shelf, but toppling; I fell in love most days, many ways;

should have been a donut glaze; I floated like heat haze; broke

laws like others gauze; runners ran through the tape of my dreams.

Was seamless, fragmented, and head of the department of looms;

I ran from hall to hall patterning rooms; was a shoe-gaze instrumental.

They could have put me down as mental if they’d caught me then.

But I was so alone in the music of dreamy unstoppable procession

of being forgotten; a shoe in the back; coin under the shoe; more me

than you, but less of me than no one at all; the sigh before the squall;

the breath before the rattle; endless mindless universal prattle:

mitochondrion and collider, spermatid and nucleus, spattering.

poem by Todd Swift; revised online 28/11/2012

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....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"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...".

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