NEW POEM BY TODD SWIFT

Want: 2; Have: 1

For James Brookes

Last year tossed many friends into bin bags...
for all their sins, they were better alive;
thrived in the sun, dirt annoys the skin,
erodes faith. I have never met a dead

believer. We love God most when living.
The dead know the bald mysteries.
You get rich with washboard abs
and blonde curls. 90% of porn

is police handcuffs and suffering
in falconry hoods; fellators paid

to appear illegal but just over the line.
You want to be oriental potentates

with power and slaves to kneel and adore
an engorged sense of self. You crave

being craved. Wish to be Gosling,
or whoever the next Gosling is, will be.

I have been accused of murdering
my love hearts, as if I doodled scum
across my forehead on Wednesdays;
no, I am innocent of all surplus crimes

except grandiosity. Pere of my own
ubiquity, grossly over-privileged;
in the blind and dumb mirror of the networks
where I am bound by gimpy Hephaestus,

who locks up our faces in smart wire
we cannot break out of, no matter how hard
we bleat books, sighing we want to be A-list.
My V-shaped torso rises from a swamp,

triggering salivation in the audience, who’d
crawl over muscles to mouth a tensile sword.
God’s silence is not absence, it is omission.
Purely, he punishes us by not intervening.

Jehovah could come like a solar flare, burst
all the power lines, wipe our screens away.
We could be cleansed as the solar wind is,
rising out of its own circles of eruption to stay.

copyright the author, Todd Swift, 2015

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...".

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

Search This Blog