Poetic Talk

 

Some, perhaps many, would say poetry concerns itself (too much?) with sweet and lovely things – like birds and flowers, music and beautiful landscapes, not to mention love itself – with even poignant emotions like grief given a bitter-sweet flavour.

But as we all know, life is littered with obstacles, formidable difficulties and frustrations. Not to mention excrement... please read on.

Here's a man only half way through an appalling list of challenges, telling us about a particularly foul one.

Little wonder then that in these circumstances he'd have been pretty foul-mouthed himself. We know that he had a vile temper, so I'm sure he'd have been an outspoken effer and blinder.

Conventionally though, poetry – especially the afore-mentioned Fotherington-tomas stuff – would never ever have included such a vocabulary, even though these are words to be heard all the time, especially when emotions are running high.

Which perhaps explains my difficulty wanting to use such an 'unpoetic' word in the first line of this poem. (And failing, worried that I might fall foul (sic) of some AI monitoring system).

But I can excuse myself – interesting that I ever felt the need to – by saying it's not me talking, it's Hercules.

All of which suggests how heavy is the weight of the body of 'conventional poetry' ** in bearing down upon, potentially suppressing and possibly even suffocating the fresh expression of experience, raw emotion, subjective responses and narrative, in everyday language – arguably the whole point of poetry.

A Dirty Job

Some jobs are so *ucking filthy

how the hell do you make a start

let alone finish it?

 

Those stables for example.

Choked with shit.  I mean it.

You would need a lot more

 

than a JCB to clear that lot.

OK, my strength is legendary

but that wasn't going

 

to be enough. So I thought –

Get Some Help.  A Big Solution

is what I needed. Then –

 

bend the rivers!  It came to me

just like that.  Of course it's best

to be super strong when

 

you're shifting a river. Still

it did the trick – washed the whole place

completely clean.  No shit

 

after that I just stood and watched.

Take that, I thought – job done

give us the next hit.

**OK, I appreciate there is a whole stream, or should I say river, of bloody and violent poetry from Gilgamesh, via  Homer and Beowulf  through to the present... but you know what I mean.