Exercise#3: Liars, damned liars and poets

[bodkin]

See Nash's Tales from the bare-knuckle poet or my I have such powers....

Write a poem that is either:

• (like Nash's) based on a single untrue concept, or
• (like mine) a stream of complete whoppers from one end to the other

Attach your poems below and in about two weeks I'll bestow the biggest fibber with a $1,000,000,000 in prize money (*)

Have at it, you duplicitous scoundrels!

Ian

(*) the lying has already begun...

[Ros]

Both such excellent poems. What a wonderful excuse to have to read them again.

(not lying yet, honest...)


Ros

[Nash]

Hey! Mine was all true! Every word of it.

[Antcliff]

The Secret Life of Hedgehogs

High in their high hills,
they play bassoons,
note perfecto, so sagacious.
They contemplate in Proto-Gallic,
annotate Herodotus,
paste old fragments of Heraclitus.

And if the sceptic in you thinks,
“this all seems so unlikely?”,
please note:
they don’t think much of us,
they don't even really like us.

[bodkin]

[Jackie]

Are we allowed to start with either

...and then there was the time

or

I can . . .?

You've both got the rhetoric down pat.

Jackie

[bodkin]

Are we allowed to start with either

...and then there was the time

or

I can . . .?

You've both got the rhetoric down pat.

Jackie

I don't see why not, they are both everyday phrases, nothing anybody could claim copyright on...

Ian

[Antcliff]

Reminding people of the exercise....get yer false claims in!

[bodkin]

Surely we cannot only have one entry? Everybody lies! Sherlock Holmes was telling in some detail earlier... We were sitting at a table in the British Home Stores Canteen ("Holmes Store" I said, and he ignored me) and Queen Victory was just squaring up to give Sue Pollard a proper seeing-to over a minor misunderstanding and the last Belgian bun- Anyway: Surely not only one? Holmes deduced that this would be the case. "Obviously you pretend to be agnostic," he told the waitress, "and live with at least two maiden Aunts within three miles of an airship factory"--well anybody could have seen that, I mean she had asymmetric elbows and a tattoo of Ingmar Bergman--and then he went on examine the froth on my cappuccino, and told me there would be only one reply to my latest exercise on Poet's Graves. But he *has* been wrong before. Remember the case of the left-handed accordion player? Or the time that Rupert Everett tried to steal the FA cup using a microlite and 300 feet of bungee cord?

Surely not only one? Even John Major got more than that, with his "write your own policies" exercise.

So go on... prove him wrong.

[Jackie]

Ian, do you know why we refer to the narrator in our poems as "N"? Because poets lie all the time. Confabulators, that's us. So if you give me a challenge like this, I have to feel around for the truth first, to know where to start from. I'll get there.

Jackie

[Nash]

~


Do you remember the old days
when ripe apples would gently
disconnect from the branch
and bob on autumn breezes?
After storms, the Cider Meisters
would pay us a penny a sack
for all we could collect.

So off we’d set across the flatlands
to the great wild orchards that existed then.
Armed with spiked sticks tipped with hen’s teeth
and nets woven by nests of tamed spiderlings.
Avoiding the ferns that didn’t unfurl
like they do now, but would shoot
straight from the ground, piercing
even the most hobnailed of boots.

Back when a pinhead was the smallest thing we could imagine,
until all those angels started dancing on them.





~

[bodkin]

The Secret Life of Hedgehogs

High in their high hills,
they play bassoons,
note perfecto, so sagacious.
They contemplate in Proto-Gallic,
annotate Herodotus,
paste old fragments of Heraclitus.

And if the sceptic in you thinks,
“this all seems so unlikely?”,
please note:
they don’t think much of us,
they don't even really like us.

Hi Seth, I like that is this both wildly confabulating and also quietly understated.

That can't be an easy balance to strike

Ian

[bodkin]

Do you remember the old days
when ripe apples would gently
disconnect from the branch
and bob on autumn breezes?
After storms, the Cider Meisters
would pay us a penny a sack
for all we could collect.

So off we’d set across the flatlands
to the great wild orchards that existed then.
Armed with spiked sticks tipped with hen’s teeth
and nets woven by nests of tamed spiderlings.
Avoiding the ferns that didn’t unfurl
like they do now, but would shoot
straight from the ground, piercing
even the most hobnailed of boots.

Back when a pinhead was the smallest thing we could imagine,
until all those angels started dancing on them.

The ferns are the part of this that's most going to stay with my, Nash! I can just imagine the coiled tips snapping open like steel springs...

Although actually the self-bobbing apples will probably also be a lovely image to keep in mind

Ian

[clemonz]

The Secret Life of Hedgehogs

High in their high hills,
they play bassoons,
note perfecto, so sagacious.
They contemplate in Proto-Gallic,
annotate Herodotus,
paste old fragments of Heraclitus.

And if the sceptic in you thinks,
“this all seems so unlikely?”,
please note:
they don’t think much of us,
they don't even really like us.

snappy, but you shouldn't have to rely on the title to make something ironically witty.

sagacious / Heraclitus, is a good rhyme

[Antcliff]

Thanks Ian,

Hi Seth, I like that is this both wildly confabulating and also quietly understated.
That can't be an easy balance to strike

It may be my natural mode of interaction.

Thanks Clemonz,

snappy, but you shouldn't have to rely on the title to make something ironically witty.

You can always use the title to further some aim of the poem..wit, irony, or whatever else. The title is as much part of the poem as the text beneath it.

Nash,
yes, I do recall those days. Although we got twopenny a sack....those cider meisters you worked for must have been minimum wage dodgers. The flying apples = great. Despite the whimsy, the whole seems attractively elegaic. Very appealing...one of my favourites of yours in fact.

And this...

and nets woven by nests of tamed spiderlings.

nice cluster of n/t/s

And I like any reference to the dancing on pins image. Nice close.

Your poem reminds that I have a fairies/dancing on a pin poem that I wrote a couple of years ago. I had forgotten about it...going for it now if I can find it in my files. It fits this exercise.


Seth

[Antcliff]

Their Way of Loving

Fairies –
they dance upon a pin;
millions, trillions, or
at least a few.

Sub-microscopic groovers
to a tiny-hokey-cokey,
their ways are hard to state,
review.

But, still, they dance away,
somewhere out beyond the dials,
not loving one to one,
but twenty one to twenty two.

[bodkin]

You're not ready for the truth

I lied to you through all your lives as years
unfolded one-by-one and I maintained
I was middle-aged and a geek. Inexcusable,
I know, but when you are a supermodel, discretion
is a way of life. I will not feed the tabloid fiends
and horny creeps, who stalk my casualest friends
and this is also why, when I had to go collect
my Nobel prize, I used an assumed name
--I said that I was 'Ann' and they assumed it true.

And what else can you do, when you're out fighting crime
in the ancient city night, and an old fashioned journo
with his poppy flash bulb and huge camera
doorsteps you dropping stocking-headed men
on the precinct house steps.
Who is this masked hero?
--of course, you lie.