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| A cartoon I found after writing my poem: odd that knee-trembling and chips are equated here too. |
The English Strain is
complete. The latest part of it, Hap: Understudies
of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is now available from Knives Forks and Spoons
here:
https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch-by-robert-sheppard-26-pages
You can read about the whole ‘English Strain’ project, if
you like, in a post that has links to some other accounts, and earlier parts,
of this work:
here.
But: to today’s addition to the project. The second book of The English Strain is entitled Bad Idea and it is a re-working of the
whole of Michael Drayton’s sequence Idea,
that’s 63 poems by the way. I will
post one at a time, when they are finished (but
only if I feel it appropriate in terms of topicality).
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| A classic bag of chips |
Here’s today.
XXI
A shitless scumbag Member entreated his ‘tart’
to a filing-cabinet knee-trembler and implored me
to draft his chat-up (as a sonnet)! I’d rather write
amendments to May’s doomed deal. (I did that too.)
With the same juggernaut passion he brought
to legislation and rural affairs of the heart,
I dashed off verses so ambiguous that even they
might pass for a glittery Leave campaign jingle.
He whispered my dead droppings in her ears,
like Cabinet ministers courting the shires. My line
about ‘flipping your bag of British chips as you climax’
seemed to woo her. But she was secretly recording.
He’ll need
more than the Attorney General’s advice:
No deal is
good and ‘no-deal’ is worse.
7th December 2018
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| I believe this was of use to the resourceful intern in the poem (deliberately unvoiced: she doesn't need a voice: she is recording). |
It’s quite faithful to Drayton in its way (probably about as
much as the unnamed MP of the poem), and I’m pleased with the final line. 21 is a
third of the way through the poems. Do I change style rapidly? Or not? I’ve a
plan for 100 word sonnets and the final third being quennets? I don’t know.
Poetics is speculative, a thumbnail, not a blueprint. (I’m quoting myself
there.)
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| Innocent filing cabinet |
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| In his Parliamentary dreams: his XXX files |
Drayton is largely out of print at the moment, though I have
found a ‘Poly-Olberon’ project online, (the whole epic online, which is
refreshing), and his fine sonnet sequence ‘Idea’ is available online, including
the one I’ve just translated above; have a look at both, the latter being:
Although I am using
Tuley, Mark. ed. Elizabethan
Sonnet Cycles: Five Major Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: by Samuel Daniel, Michael
Drayton, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. Crescent
Moon Publishing, Maidstone: Kent,
2010,
 |
| Drayton looking characteristically miserable; just a fucking 'esquire', that's all he is. |
a careless book that even misses one sonnet out!
There are more excerpts from The English Strain coming up in PN
Review in the future, and in Poetry
Wales now. There’s another on Smithereens
as I outline in an adjacent post on this blog. I’ve not sent any of these Bad Idea ones out yet. They are amassing
if anybody wants them. And I'm available if anybody wants me to read them.
