The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Toni
A solitary crow does not a murder make I like to think I am not even sinister unlike the direction sign I sit upon I will not even defend my perch if a bigger bird takes a notion to supplant me, in a blink I will fly away to keep the peace. You thought different? We crows get a bad press but I don’t care a jot…
The three poems by dead poets I have chosen to read for last night’s Dead Poets Society challenge by kim881 in Poetics, Uncategorized over at the dVerse Poets Pub are all from poets I studied at school and have continued to love all my life – great teachers have a lot to answer for…
Andrew Marvell 1621–1678
Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress‘ is surely one of the most famous poems of attempted seduction ever written. I live within a day-out’s journey from Marvell’s birthplace, Hull where the muddy tide of Humber is about as wide as the Ganges and I wonder whether sailor’s tales informed Marvell’s poem. The last time I visited Hull, I met two young lovers sitting on the plinth of Andrew Marvell’s lifesize statue and acquainted them with the poem…
WB Yeats was also a favourite at school and later, when I moved to Sligo in the west of Ireland and Yeats’ home town, I was commissioned to paint a mural of the poet and his work and you can see a much younger me from 1995 being interviewed on television whilst up a ladder painting the mural. Searching for a poem suitable for this challenge, I came across The Mask, an unusual (for Yeats) Question and Response format with an ABABA rhyme scheme
Hughes in 1986. PHOTO: NILS JORGENSEN/REX SHUTTERSTOCK
Lastly, I chose ‘A Grin‘ from Ted Hughes’ wonderful collection of poems ‘Crow’ although this is not one of the poems referencing the scurrilous Crow. If I had to keep one volume of poetry it would be this…
Having read these three dead poets, I’m afraid I could not write a poem based on just one of them and so my offering below channels all three, Yeats for the form, Ted Hughes for the title and theme and Marvell for the intimations of mortality and perhaps the poetic shot at immortality…
A Grin
‘Centre stage on the birthing bed Did you grin for your role through the pain?’ ‘I thought how easily I could end up dead And grinned to think you’d never touch me again Don’t fucking touch me! I shouted!
‘Did you grin at the banality of death by car crash You who imagined yourself great and with longevity?’ ‘I thought of my wife who always thought me rash And my secretary always seasoning work with levity Urging me to slow down – but I had to dash…’
‘I watched your grin, my eyes open, yours closed And wondered, coming together, if we really were?’ ‘You were so deep the thought never arose That we were two, a separate him and her I never thought at all as into me you flowed…’
‘Whatever before death caused your rictus grin Will be replaced in time by the skull’s secret smile’ ‘What tales within my skull locked in Now deliquescing, bodily integrity defiled In the game of Life, none of us can win.’
‘Your poetic attempt at seduction Already lived three hundred and fifty years Is poetry the way – immortality to win?’ ‘I never won that girl nor any like her But it makes me grin – the onward admiration…’
P.S. I realise now that we were supposed to write based on one of Kim’s chosen three poems but when I saw the challenge last night, my Covid head was stuffed with cotton wool and it is only this morning that I was feeling better sufficiently to write something and by then, the idea that we choose our own three poems had settled in… Sorry Kim! And so below is a response to one of your poem choices Dylan Thomas’ ‘Once It Was the Colour of Saying’.
Once It Was the Colour of Saying
Once a year at least, I listen to Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas and steep myself in the poetry of his play the play of his poetry as he carries us around the small Welsh town of his imagination borne into the night and through the waking day revisiting the cast of characters until we love their foibled ways and wish like the Reverend Eli Jenkins in his poem within a poem “To stroll among our trees and stray In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down, And hear the Dewi sing all day, And never, never leave the town.”
