Ernest Slyman


Little Mad Verses

I.

Similarly I have pursued
the long road
that runs through the day,
the one that edges
across the white shoulder
of a girl leaning
over to pet a cat.

II.

Who more
deserves a red rose
than a field of marigolds?

III.

The rose bloom
passions mellow
late apples loom,
come dark
stars ripen and glow.

IV.

I'm a rhinoceros beetle,
my brother's a mole,
my sister's a girl ---
God bless her soul.



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<reading name="One">

Could the author be encouraged to release section IV (which has some
measure of tension, shock, surprise, to it) on its own? I-III seem
platitudinous, milky, and don't add to it. The throwaway title is
unhelpful, and could also be dropped.

</reading>


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<reading name="Two">

Removing the chevrons after copying the writing across from its incoming
message page to its reply message page. Parodic songs. I pulled out Yeat's
'Crazy Jane' poems, plunged cliched responses into 'Crazy Jane and Jack The
Journeyman':

'I know, although when looks meet
 I tremble to the bone,
 The more I leave the door unlatched
 The sooner love is gone,
 For love is but a skein unwound
 Between the dark and dawn.'

Then read again -

>Similarly I have pursued
>the long road
>that runs through the day,
>the one that edges
>across the white shoulder
>of a girl leaning
>over to pet a cat.

One line of likenesses and the pursuit of likenesses. Melodic skein. What
reading an e-mail message on Eudora does to margins. There is a small left
and unbalancing right hand spacialisation here. Four numbered sections,
four differing 'styles' being sweetly engaged with. Williams and Dickinson
and Pound all sipping herb teas among fragrances here. The sleightest, for
me, II; too much depends on the black letters surfing this otherwise blank
screen, so much indeed that the plums in the fridge have gone rotten whilst
reading. Overcooked resonance. But overcooking is intention here surely,
from sugar to treacle. The rhyming o's of III, scheme broken by 'come dark'
whose brevity creates a blank rhyme, these ooms and ows give portentious
sly pleasure. I hear the singer cutting in energetically with 'I'm a
rhinoceros beetle' and the pock-marked roll of the rocks in the teen grind
displays a time-warped casserole. Sing it out loud. Let the memory of its
melodies, its rhymes, its rhythms infect your walking as you walk out to
the shops to buy that promised Golden Treasury.

</reading>


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<reading name="Three">

   I have had a think about the above, and my comments can be passed
on anonymously, for what they are worth.Not recommended.

   Within its limits, a well-written poem, but I waited in vain for
it to do much more than pursue a set of imagist exercises. I see that
it is a poem which wants to cast off the weight of pursuing anything,
and it seems to call out so much for a musical setting, I am amazed
not to find it featuring on a concert programme for songs by Poulenc.
A disappointment for me is that the poem doesn't seem
patient enough with the limits of language, able to work with the
frustration of never being musical enough, but seems all too avid to
empty itself into music rather than delay, poetically, that musical
horizon.

</reading>




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