More Poems

from various places

.

There are four poems here, newly-added in May, 2005. They are Small World, published in Poetry Salzburg Review; Annals of the Poor, a Triolet published in Staple; Notes on Contributors, a rather strange poem (you might think) that appeared in The Yellow Crane; and Corris, published in Borderlines.

~

Small World

                                    Blue Lagoon Postage Stamp Album, price sixpence:
                                    his gateway to the world at ten years old.

                                    President Gottlieb, of somewhere called Ceskoslovensko,
                                    is a kindly looking man,
                                    somewhat of the cast of the family doctor.

                                    Tigers of many colours
                                    roar imperially from other pages,
                                    whilst somewhere near the front,
                                    under a sort of sub-heading to Australia,
                                    Captain Cook discovers New Zealand in miniature.

                                    The World is a wonderful place
                                    on these brightly-coloured bits of paper:
                                    five hundred and twenty-three small pictures
                                    celebrate the nobility of mankind.

                                    Only when the World is writ more large
                                    can flaws in printer's ink be seen.

~

Annals of the Poor

                                                        The short and simple annals of the poor
                                                                   not now engraved on cool white stone:
                                                        spraycans now more likely draw
                                                        the short and simple annals of the poor.
                                                        In subways, hallways now we score
                                                               memorials of but poor renown:
                                                        the short and simple annals of the poor,
                                                               not now engraved on cool white stone.

~

Notes on Contributors

Mary Bo Suds lives in Blandford Forum with her ducks. She is a poet and critic, and is the leading exponent of the Development of Mygobylism.

Victar Jonse teaches Pottery and Creative Writing in Skanthorpe, Links. He is Dyslexic.

Johanna Winkle is a publicist in a committed Lesbian relationship with an American Citizen. Her second book of poems, Serious Monogamy, is due from Earnest Books next year.

Ted Rolfe is currently translating the Tibetan Book of the Gu-gu into Ancient Greek. He is a practitioner of Onanism and the Tantric Arts.

Myra Broadbent is the Deputy Co-ordinator for a Community Arts Centre in Cape Cornwall, working on a part-time basis. She is widely published in magazines and her first collection, Grandma's Minge is due out next year.

Peter Wolfe sent us his shopping list, not his precious poetry (perhaps). In 1993, he was the acclaimed third prize winner in the poetry competition of the High Offton Writers' Literature Society.

Sylvia Starkers is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Indeterminate Structuralist Thinking in Yoni Wesleyan College, New York, New York. She lives in Littlehampton.

Gideon December lives in Surrey with his mother but he is a frequent traveller to Tirgu Mures, where he is a student of Advanced Expiation. He is currently working on his first novel, Tigger.

Betty Bluff is a former editor of Snot magazine. She pioneered the Flying Buttress school of poetry and her first collection is due out next year from Make Believe Press.

Jaroslav Hasek is dead.

Edna Everidge Savage works with the Upper Cwmtrwch Healing Arts Society. Her poetry has appeared in Ask Auntie, Dinnae Nuthin', Finnegan's Wank, Garn, Zebra's Folly and elsewhere.

~

Corris

                                    Stables built in stone;
                                    temple to an age
                                    of iron reality,
                                    of Masters and Men
                                    are all that is now left.

                                    That, and half-a-mile
                                    of red and rusting rail
                                    defying the cool logic of the present.

                                    Time was when engine number three
                                    stoutly worked its load
                                    of slate, and servants of slate,
                                    over thirteen rainwashed miles.

                                    Time was when your purpose
                                    was as sure as steel rivets,
                                    as solid as slatebed track,
                                    ripped from the heart of the mountain.

                                    Now they strive to bring you back
                                    in bright-painted, polished glory.
                                    A symbol of material past
                                    or of an absent present?