On Poetry!

They had something to say about it
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T.S. Eliot:
"The best words in the best order," and
"There's no such thing as free verse."
With that I agree, for all good writing exacts its price.
So how can we know, so as not to dishonour the good name of poesy?

Some, like Roger McGough light a fuse,
While Armitage, who can inhabit the impoverished world of cliché
Leaves you dangling. The bastard!
There's something in his composition that comes from somewhere
                                                                                              else.
All I could think to say of Matthew Dickman was, "interesting!"
And I made a friend of Linda Chase, who claims to have discovered,
                                                           a new horizon in Manchester:
That poetry existed before 1950, and "even" outside of America!
And who was this Ginsberg of the Beat Generation,
                                                             whose seminal work Howl!
Railed at the status quo?

As illusive as he is clever, I followed him, Roger McGough
From the Liverpool Empire to the Blue Angel,
                          making the acquaintance of Cilla and Freddie Starr
Before carrying on down Bold Street, and Hardman Street,
To share a cappuccino in the Picasso, listening, as he "laid it all out."
"It has the ring of truth" I told myself.
But crossing the road outside the Adelphi, having said goodbye,
I found myself stranded - somewhere between incredulity and genius.

A forensic work by a forensic mind, and in your face from the off
He had me:
Hanging wallpaper,
Crunching numbers
And tediously sifting through the ruins:
Seven layers in seven rooms,
And each proportionate to each, though measured differently.
How many voices are there? and who is speaking to whom?
And astride the cliché, an instinctive need to dig - deeper!
Could it be, Paul Simon and , "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover"?
Surely not! It has to be more profound than that! And then -
From the very depth of nowhere, I unearthed them;
The immortal words of a dead, "poet, writer, and tramp."

In my lexicon "interesting!" is akin to a paragraph;
It's just that I lacked the capacity to say more.
I think, it's a stream of consciousness, as he drifts
Between the world of the adult and the world of the child,
With a hint of sadness.
A mirror image of the same thing,
He is smoking and name dropping,
And purporting to know the mind of the artist
                                                         whose worshippers
Have filled the Royal Albert Hall.
But the key is in his performance:
In the slow, - deliberate, - drag, - and exhale
                                and the electric impulse on his mind.

Linda's work is undramatic: quiet and thought provoking;
Of the kind that draws you in, keeps you focused and on the lookout.
It's from a woman's point of view.

He bore a striking resemblance to Lawrence,
                                            whose pate I was forbidden to mention.
So as host, my apologies were perfuse; I had been delayed:
                                                                         "combing my hair."
I have ordered his writings, a pathway to the Beat Generation.
In Blue Gossip, there are as many opinions as Dylan had personas.
It's not my kind of language, but then he was American;
And in any language you can Howl!

Seventy poems for his seventieth birthday, and the proceeds
Going to a worthy cause, and the paradox:
Melancholy. A world in which nothing appears to exist for itself
And where joy and laughter are hard to find.
Fleeting rendezvous.
A constellation, drug induced.
Dedications,
Speculations,
And reinterpretations.

I have been to the City of Angels,
Stayed with lonely people in lonely rooms,
Shared the fantasy of the Saturday girl,
And the tragedy of the unsuspecting housewife,
                                                                hanging out the clothes.
And still, I can't know fact from fiction.
But I have left my comfort zone, and been to The Captain's Tower
                                                                               - searching,
For the other half of me.

_______________

© Cormac E McCloskey

11th June 2012

"poet, writer, and tramp"  W. H. Davies 

The Captains Tower

Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan At Seventy

Edited by Phil Bowen Damian Furniss and David Woolley

Publishers SEREN (Poetry Wales Press Ltd) 2011

ISBN: 9781854115607