A ha!

The sound! the sound! the sounds are calling!

The opening of a poem I wrote, as an exercise: purely on the principle of
trying to rhyme every syllable, paying no heed to sense when I began it -
moments after the idea occured - blotting out any notion of having to start
with a narrational premise, and going only on the sound - begins:

Hello ladies and gentlemen
My name is Sloppy Bob

I'm usually Slippy Bob
But I've been having terrible trouble 
with my vowels.

~

At this point in my studies, in the final year of third level, the formal
classes taking in the Rothenberg Millenium poems Vol II - in the
extra-curricular side, of Irish myth and bardic study, I had come across the
term dán díreach, which literally translated means art-straight or straight
art. This is the strictest metrical form in bardic tradition,
head-crunchingly complex because every syllable/sound, has strict assonantal
or consonantal relationship, in a specific order, and took years of training
before the file came to work in it. The meter of ollamhs - poetry professors.

This was the spur behind creating a self-made-up, novice hybrid, imaginative
interpretation of the dán díreach form, which boiled down to extemprised
writing, in which the exercise was to start blank, not think of what i was
going to write, just start, and with the only rule - to rhyme, assonate and
consonate as much as I could of what came out. I have detailed the proces here.

http://irishpoetry.blogspot.com/2006/03/sloppy-bob.html

~

At age 17, a pal's sister had the belief that ultimately, life was all about
sex. We are animals and the purpose of being here is to procreate, and
everything tends toward that end - she reckoned. 

I must admit, I did wonder when I began blathering eight years ago, very
much as the last desperate act of someone life had backed into a corner, and
viewing the decision to write as a last throw of the dice I prayed would be
a genuine act and not me conning myself - if a new arty me would make me
more attractive to men, which luckily, it did. I got a lot more action in
the cottages of West Lancashire when cruising as a creative writing student,
rather than rough trade off the building site.

But joking aside - i think anyone going into the game looking for casual
encounters, becomes sorely dissapointed when they discover most of our
colleagues are people with varying degrees of 'issues' and emotional probs,
often middle aged, past their prime physically and all in all, you don't
last long if your primary spur is to swing with the saddos who populate the
open mics.

The one I trained in Write and Recite, WaR in Dublin: three years of weekly
worship with such luminaries as Paul Casey (another bardic nut who's birthed
the latest Irish poetry renaissance with O Bheal in Cork) - was effectively
men only, due to the boozy nature of the night, which you can read about in
a very witty article by another reg, Fintan O'Higgins, on an article: Poetry
in Dublin, at the Shit Creek Review

http://www.shitcreekreview.com/issue4/page37.htm?37

"Write and Recite developed, then, as a free-spirited rather masculine arena
for poetic expression. Heckling was not so much encouraged as assumed to be
the proper response to most poetry and this gave to the evening meetings a
kind of raucous freedom that was beneficial to some poets and not to others.
A certain robustness of delivery was necessary to survive the evening which
usually culminated in Gerry’s famous Five Word Slam©, where participating
poets had the duration of a pint- or cigarette- break to compose some lines
using five words suggested by the audience. The results of the competition
were compromised by the tendency of audiences to throw up the same words
week after week (“nipple” was a particular favourite), but as an exercise in
more or less ex tempore composition it was very valuable not only as a sort
of leveller by which the audience could gauge the respective skills of very
different poets, but also for the poets themselves as a way to hone their
skills and earn sex toys, which were usually the prizes on offer."

The more sedate, wine and cheese brigade I also attended, noting the lack of
cross-over between straights and crazees, but with the difference between
the two, as O'Higgins hits on the head when he writes:

"The distinction between the types of poetry available is one of atmosphere
rather than quality; in both camps the overall experience is like trying to
find a few plump raisins in a bowl of rabbit-droppings"

cheers.