Poetry


Well, colour me impressed! I must admit, I had rather low expectations for the outcome of this particular mêlée but once again my loyal readers have dazzled me with their wit and their prowess in the literary arena. The task was to write a piece of Sildenafil Spam in the style of your favourite poet. The Cownoscenti rose to the challenge like they’d been popping the little blue numbers all night.

It was a tough call to sift out a winner.

Universal Head
set the tone early by channelling Ted Hughes as his muse, and he held the field for quite a few days in front of a good many contenders. Jedimacfan completely missed the point and showed that he is probably already employed by could easily rival the spammers, with an effort that would undoubtedly cause Joyce Kilmer to writhe in horror. And later topped it with something even more gag-worthy. Cissy Strutt managed an awesomely impressive e. e. cummings-style creation and it has to be said that if spamming was around in his day and nominative determinism has anything in it, I’m sure cummings would have been right in the spammy fray.

Casey‘s muse, Thomas Spams Eliot, shows us why his initials anagrammatize handily into ‘toilets’ with some verse that doesn’t stray altogether too far from something the real T. S. might have penned. A very worthy effort in two parts, and very nearly the winner.

Sagacious Hillbilly managed to persuade Tennyson to ring in a whole cast of reprobates to dance a spammy jig and Tequila Mockingbird fired right back, but alas, The Reverend was quite unable to work out who she was riffing on. My bad, TMock!

A guest visit from Spam Ayres* cements her position as the person you’d most like to avoid at a party, and Phoebe Fay‘s re-interpretation of Ozymandias gives new meaning to the term ‘rock hard erection’.

But the person who I have chosen to be the Tetherd Cow Ahead Literary Ambassador to SpamCon 08† is…

Tastes Like Chicken!

Yes, TLC managed almost to reach the lofty heights of The Cow’s own Laureate Rupert Brookes’ wonderful creation, with a William Cullen Bryant-style ode that is at once tragic and hopeful. If ever there was a romantic paean to the powers of Viagra, this is it.

Tastes Like Chicken, The Cow Salutes you. I will need a mailing address where I can send you your prize. Write to me at [reverend-at-tetherdcow.com] with your PO Box or park bench number.

Thank you everyone! Once again, I doff my bone-clad top-hat to yez all!

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*US readers should probably go here to understand the humour in this. (The entry would have had a much greater chance of winning had it been an audio recording, btw)

†There is no such thing, alas. The reason for this is fairly obvious – if all the world’s spammers were to meet in one place at the same time, then I believe that not a single person on the entire planet would object to the deployment of a small nuclear device at that location.

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Spam Observations #45

Terrapraeta, longtime Cow reader and sometime commenter, earlier this week had a cheery howdy-doody from her new-found friend Rhonda K Lugo. With her well-honed Cow sensibilities, TP instantly knew I would need to bring Rhonda’s musings to the attention of the Cownoscenti.

Those of you with keen memories will recall that a little while back I suggested to Fabron Jenkins and his spammy pals that their ham-fisted wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach could do with some re-imagining (as they like to say in the ad business) and that they therefore might like to consider waxing a little more poetic with their paeans to Sildenafil.

Sure enough, with the sophistication of Keats and Brooke and the subtlety of Yeats and Eliot, Rhonda K is first out of the starting gates:

Now that you’ve got a girl that’s hot
You wanna screw her juicy twat.
She’s full of passion, she’s so nice!
But would your penile size suffice?
Not sure she will long for more?
You need a wang she would adore!
But how to raise it long and thick?
Your only hope is MegaDik!
You’ll get so wanted super-size
And see wild craving in her eyes!
Your rod will stuff her poon so deep,
Tonight you’ll hardly fall asleep!

Ah, the passion! The yearning! The verve! The style! Not quite how Rupert would have put it, fair enough, but hey, at least Rhonda’s giving it a go!

So. You all know what the The Reverend does when he sees that the ante is desirous of upping – yes, that’s right, he holds a competition!

Namely: Write a piece of spam in the style of your favourite poet.

Now pay careful attention to The Rules:

• Your favourite poet may not be yourself.

• Your favourite poet may not be Joey Polanski.

• Your favourite poet may not be Rhonda K Lugo.

• NO references to Rasputin. Save that for January 1.

OK. Have at it Acowlytes. There will be a prize. If Joey wins he can nominate to whom his prize is delivered.

This morning, while listening to the radio I heard the following two items of interest:

The director of this year’s Young Writer’s Festival in Newcastle NSW, Nick Powell, was asked how the opening day went on Saturday and he declared enthusiastically that ‘it literally blew my mind!’

No, Nick, it really didn’t, because you’re talking to us on the radio. If it literally blew your mind you’d most likely be in a cold metal cabinet with a tag on your toe, and someone would be sloshing liberal quantities of Clorox over the Writer’s Festival office floors. It figuratively blew your mind, perhaps, and it seems to me that if it is incumbent on anyone to know difference between those two things it should be the director of a Writer’s Festival for chrissakes.

On the same show, reviewer Geoff Page dispensed some pearls of wisdom about poet Jane Gibian’s new collection Ardent.

There is considerable range here, from the mystery of the title poem… through certain semi-satirical works… to several impressive haiku and tanka sequences. These latter forms can be a trap for younger poets who take them to be easier to write than they are, especially since, quite reasonably these days, we ignore the strict syllabic requirements of the Japanese.

Whoa there boy!

When did it become quite reasonable to abandon the strict syllabic requirements of the haiku? I said it before about limericks, and I’ll say it again about haiku: you can forget all about the structure of the form if you like, but then the thing you’re writing is not a haiku!. It is a short non-rhyming poem. Or, being charitable maybe, a short haiku-like poem. BUT IT IS NOT A HAIKU.

Allow me to draw an analogy: an elephant is a big heavy grey mammal with four solid legs and a fearsome demeanour. If we ‘ignore the strict descriptive requirements’ of the biologists we could call it a rhinoceros. Indeed, an elephant even bears some superficial resemblances to a rhinoceros, but I put it to you Mr Page: you may disagree with the biologists about what it is, but that does not actually change anything in reality.

So. A traditional Japanese haiku is a poetry form such that three lines consist of five syllables, seven syllables and then five again. There are many variations of this form that are similar to haiku, such as senryu, haibun, kimo, scifaiku and waka, but here’s the thing – they are variations, and are not called haiku! That’s why they have other names.

The Reverend sighs
When those who keep the language
Are its greatest foes

Spam Observations #41

It’s not enough that I am constantly plagued by bad poetry by my readers here on The Cow. Now the spammers are at it. This missive from my new best feiend Pauline:

Gorgeous presents You may find,
Make this clear to your mind
Morning, noon or even night
Here’s the link that you want
http://www.crapwatches.com
Rolex, Cartie and much more
Hurry up, this is YOUR store!

Regards, Pauline

Now, I’ve replaced the URL that Pauline was kind enough to send, for the obvious reason that I don’t want to give these idiots any additional publicity, but I have not touched the scanning or the rhyme.

I draw your attention to the lines:


Morning, noon or even night
Here’s the link that you want
http://www.crapwatches.com

I mean, really. Not even a vague attempt at rhyming. ‘night’ and ‘want’? ‘want’ and ‘.com’? And scan? Forget it! Cheeze. You’d think Pauline could do better than that. After all, if you’re going to use crap poetry to spam people, it doesn’t actually matter what kind of nonsense you write so you could make it anything and still get the rhyme right at least. What about:


Here’s a link that is the bomb
http://www.crapwatches.com

Or maybe:


Morning, noon or even night
Here’s the link to set you right!

Not in the same league as my Mr Brooke, I know, but c’mon Pauline! Work with me!

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I sincerely hope that Pauline’s ‘poem’ doesn’t herald a new trend in spamming. I don’t think my delicate constitution can take it.

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Flag

Australia Day, a holiday in which some Australians apparently feel the need to inflict their Australianess upon anyone whom they don’t feel is Australian enough, has come and gone with a minimum of incident.

Personally, I really dislike the jingoistic display of Nationalism that goes with the holiday. It’s tasteless and crass, and for the most part meaningless for a great many White Australians who dwell eternally in some kind of isolated limbo outpost of the British Isles and resolutely still attempt to conjure the Green and Pleasant Land in a continent that is predominately desert.*

Most Australians are, even today, foreigners living in a strange land and I wonder if the hoo-ha of Australia Day is just a desperate attempt to reassure our group consciousness that yes, we really truly belong here.

The self-delusion is intriguingly illuminated in the words of our National Anthem:

Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil,
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in Nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia fair!
In joyful strains then let us sing,
“Advance Australia fair!”

Beneath our radiant southern Cross,
We’ll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing
“Advance Australia fair!”

Let’s examine some of those extravagant claims:

‘We are young and free’

Our population, like most of the Western World is aging, so generally speaking we are not young. Free? Well, I guess that depends on your point of view. Australian citizen David Hicks is not exactly free. And people who don’t kiss the flag are not exactly free. But I guess ‘Some of us are young and most of us are free’ doesn’t scan so well.

‘We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil’

Not right now we don’t. We’ve got parched deserts of red earth that blows up in vast dry dust storms. We’ve got crackling-dry eucalyptus forests that burst into flames at the touch of a discarded cigarette butt. We are experiencing the worst recorded drought in Colonial White history. Farmers are going out of business faster than you can say ‘Tie me kangaroo down sport’.

‘Our land abounds in Nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;’

This is true. Hardly anyone notices however, because they are too busy clearing Nature’s gifts with bulldozers to build shopping centres or digging up the abundant land to get at the coal underneath.

‘Beneath our radiant southern Cross,’

Sadly, our Radiant Southern Cross is not very visible through the pollution in most capital cities, Australia being as it is, the highest producer of CO2 per capita of any country in the world.

‘For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share’

Boundless plains of bone-dry dirt made worse by the aforementioned clearing of Nature’s gifts. Which we’ll share with you if you demonstrate the proper Aussie Valuesâ„¢

Moving on, it’s also interesting to examine some of the verses of the National Anthem that are left out of the Official Version:

When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d,
To trace wide oceans o’er,
True British courage bore him on,
Till he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England’s flag,
The standard of the brave;
With all her faults we love her still,
“Brittannia rules the wave!

In joyful strains then let us sing
“Advance Australia fair!”

Shou’d foreign foe e’er sight our coast,
Or dare a foot to land,
We’ll rouse to arms like sires of yore
To guard our native strand;
Brittannia then shall surely know,
Beyond wide ocean’s roll,
Her sons in fair Australia’s land
Still keep a British soul
.
In joyful strains the let us sing
“Advance Australia fair!”

The execrable language is crime enough (‘We’ll rouse to arms like sires of yore’? Puh-leeze!) but the toadying up to The Empire is, I fear, something that still runs deep in Australian psyche. True, we toady to a different Empire these days, but there’s a distinct smell of ‘once a crawler, always a crawler’.

If it was me, I’d flush the whole thing down the dunny and replace it with something much more beautiful:

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies –
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

With some hint of poetry like those immortal words of Dorothea McKellar running through all our veins, maybe we might at last shake off our 19th Century Empirical shackles and grow to love this country for what it is rather than remain hell-bent on demeaning it as a source of plunder and something to be conquered for our materialistic gain.

Maybe then Australia Day will mean something more than just waving a flag.

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*Including the Prime Minister, John Howard, and his cabinet, who doggedly resist efforts to discard the outdated English monarchy and allow Australians to have the republic that should be ours if we were really sincere about advancing Australia fair with any kind of ‘courage’ like it says in the song…

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Quothe the Raven

I thought you might like to see one of my favourite and most valued treasures – an 1884 edition of Edgar Allan Poe‘s dark and beautiful poem The Raven, illustrated by Gustav Doré.

Raven Cover

This is an imposing large format book about 380mm x 470mm (15in x 18.5in) and is profusely illustrated with Doré’s astonishing engravings. The cover is detailed in gold leaf.

Publishing Date

Doré famously used a technique of overprinting with white ink to make his bright areas glow. The method is not in use in his interpretations of The Raven unfortunately, but this means that the images are even more marvelous for the incredible dynamic range of brightness and darkness they achieve.

Perfume from an Unseen Censer

The Rare and Radiant Maiden

This Home by Horror Haunted

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