You Know
It’s National Poetry Day again. Duffy’s
droning on the radio (again) and you’re on
at the Poetry Society, whither I am headed
to undress your double offbeats with my ears.
But you’ve got a face like a spanked arse;
you’ve got a voice like a spanked arse. But
I clap along with the rest of the clowns relieved
when the prize-giving’s over. You won (again)
with your thumping Great I Am in clumping iambics.
You can’t beat a posy conduit for poesy’s soft con job;
yet neither can you beat off love’s stiff competition.
Heads you win the laurels; tails I lose Laura;
my name is reduced
to a rhyme-scheme you use:
the clapped-out alternative to you-know-whose.
See here
and here
and here
and here for more on my Petrarch
obsession/project, including how to purchase Petrarch 3 from Crater press in its 'map' edition. Read the
'original' translation (if you see what I mean) and the doggie version here. Then buy it, if you haven't already.
The first review of Petrarch 3 by Alan Baker may be read on Litterbug, here. The
second response, by Martin Palmer (blog to the right!) here.
A general piece on my sonnet-writing may be read here. See another recent sonnet in International
Times here: http://internationaltimes.it/avenge
See three of the 'Wyatts' here. And the link
takes you to more, excerpts from Hap:Understudies
of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch (though the first, introductory, poem ‘Perhaps a
Mishap’ is not a version of Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch).
See three of the 'Wyatts' here. And the link
I am currently writing through Charlotte Smith's versions of Petrarch, Sussex poems, in fact.
