Until Further Notice....

. ...This site is closed. Apparently my views on poetry being spoken not just read appeals to far too few.  

"Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person." - Sarah Kay

 

 

 

 

Poetry Book of the Year

This time last year, filled with passion and hope following the wonderful slew of spoken word poetry that appeared here On Something For The Weekend, Sir? I had the audacity to write the following piece....

http://fishyfarts.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/poetry-book-of-year-2014-bone-monkey-by.html

Sadly this year, due to three different sets of circumstances the enthusiasm I had at that point has not so much gone as been pushed aside for awhile.

1.The incredible poets who recorded their work have not been followed by others.
2. My intention to keep this site alive by recording my own feeble efforts was thwarted when my PC was hacked preventing me from filming myself.
3. I am currently recovering from another minor stroke and find it hard to type when seeing double ('Tis a bugger and no mistake)

Hopefully, all will be back soon and firing on all cylinders.

If any of the poets who have posted here would like to recommend a book of poetry as this years favoured one, please go ahead and do so!

POETS UNITE

Hi,

I am seeking poets to join this spoken word poetry site.

The rules are few and easy.

1. First poet records his words via YouTube then posts them here. He/she leaves it a week then invites another poet to do the same. In effect a spoken word relay that will encompass the globe. It doesn’t matter which language is used – all are welcome. The idea is to spread poetry in the spoken form.

2. As this site is called "Something For the Weekend, Sir?" all posts have to be on a Friday 

That's it. Simple.

If interested contact me, Russell C.J Duffy, by e-mail - utilityfishshed@hotmail.co.uk

All the best,

Russell

Ten Reasons Why You Might Enjoy The World’s Wife - A personal view by Roger Stevens

The World’s Wife (Picador 1999) was Carol Ann Duffy’s first themed collection of poems, dealing with sexism, equality, bereavement and birth. The collection looks at important events and history – from a female perspective and often in a controversial way. She tells the wives’ stories.

1 If you are new to the poems of Carol Ann Duffy I would suggest this book as a good place to start, to find out why she is such a loved and respected poet; or if you are already familiar with her work – come here to rediscover her or just delight, once again, in these wonderful narratives.

2 To enjoy her wit and humour. Her poem Frau Freud could almost have been written by Monty Python, or appeared in Viz, with its exhausting list of names for the male member. And in Mrs Darwin…

Went to the zoo/ I said to Him/
Something about that chimpanzee reminds me of you.

3 To enjoy the exactness and rightness of her phrases.
In The Devil’s Wife - A faint sneer of thunder… In Mrs Quasimodo - the murdered music of the bells… and in Mrs Aesop – that the bird in his hand shat on his sleeve.

4 To discover the real reason why Delilah cut Samson’s hair. An act of love and kindness.

5 To spare a thought for the dilemma of Mrs Midas. The need to put a chair against her door, petrified…

4 Her cunning, clever and sometimes unexpected use of rhyme. As Mrs Winkle returns home with a pastel of Niagara to find Rip Van Winkle rattling a bottle of Viagra

5 Her poetry is honest. Even brutal. If she has something to say, she doesn’t hold back, as in the explicit Mrs Quasimodo.

When the others left,
He fucked me underneath the gaping, stricken bells
until I wept

6 For the rhythm of her lines, the rise and fall, the cadences, that propel her tales, the dash, the joie de vivre.

7 Carol Ann Duffy’s feminism underpins this collection. She has said that in order to find the truth, the female character has to be dominant. In the opening poem, Little Red Cap, she found that the original fairy tale, upon which this is based, was an example of feminism in both fairy tale and English literature. She then found a personal connection within the original story line to help form the dominant female character.

You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls.

8 The way she uses these tales to highlight men’s treatment of women. In Pygmalion’s Bride, for example, the tale of a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory, she cleverly finds a modern equivalent. The sort of man that many women know too well.

9 And who wouldn’t want to read about a female Pope…

10 Or a song about Elvis’s Twin Sister who lives in a convent…

I think of it
as Graceland here,
a land of grace

…and prays for the immortal soul of rock and roll.

Dreams

Ten Reasons Why You Might Enjoy The Book of Shadows by Don Paterson A personal view by Roger Stevens

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He has won more awards and prizes for his poetry than you can shake a stanza at. He has also published three books of aphorisms, of which The Book of Shadows is one.

1 Who wouldn’t want a book of aphorisms on their bookshelf? And this collection, by one of Britain’s finest poets is a beauty.

2 An aphorism is a terse saying, expressing a general truth, principle, or astute observation, and spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form. And what a great feeling when you read an aphorism and it speaks to you.

3 Aphorisms can be very short and witty.

4 If I try to write anything longer than a single sentence, I find myself just making things up.

5 Aphorisms can be long and chewy.

6 Poetry is a mode of reading, not of writing. We can read a poem into anything. A poet is someone skilled in manipulating that innate human capacity to make things sign. They advertise the significance of the form in its shape or speech, build in enough strangeness and intrigue to have the reader read in, enough familiarity not to repel them, and calculate enough reward for their effort. But so much poetry now is all advertisement, or all familiarity, or all strangeness, or all calculation.

7 This is a great book for dipping into. Like a botanist in a boat travelling through the coral reefs.

8 Almost everything in the room will survive you. To the room, you are already a ghost, a pathetic soft thing, coming and going.

9 If you enjoy poetry but are looking for something a little different… this is a word from the wise.

10 Falling and flying are near-identical sensations, in all but one final detail. We should remember this when we see those men and women seemingly in love with their own decline.

Aphorisms in italics are taken from The Book of Shadows.

An Appeal from the Unappealing

Ten Reasons Why… You Might Enjoy Poems on the Underground A personal view by Roger Stevens

If you’ve ever travelled on London’s Underground you will have noticed that, every now and then, between the adverts for mints and temps, there is a poem. It all began back in 1986 as an idea shared among a few friends, Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert. Wouldn’t it be a great idea, they thought, to fill the blank grey advertising slots with poems, for the public to read, think about and enjoy. London Underground liked the idea. And now, thirty years later, they have become a wonderful part of the tube journey. They provide a distraction from the crowded carriage. Sometimes they lift the spirits. They make the journey more bearable. There are several Poems on the Underground books – but here are the beginnings of ten poems showing why you might enjoy them, from the Penguin edition of 2012, published to mark London Underground’s 150^th anniversary. And a little quiz – Can you name the authors of these poems? Answers below.

1
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach…

2
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…

3
In London/ every now and then/ I get this craving/ for my mother’s food
I leave art galleries/ in search of plantains/ saltfish/ sweet potatoes…

4
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paperweight,
All the misery of manila folders…

5
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon…

6
The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said
The recent buds relax and spread/ Their greenness is a kind of grief

7
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty…

8
English Teeth, English Teeth/ Shining in the sun
A part of British heritage/ Aye, each and every one

9
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green…

10
The highway is full of big cars/ going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering/ where you’re going to turn
I got it./ Come. And be my baby…

1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley 3 Grace Nichols 4 Theodore Roethke 5 Carol Ann Duffy
6 Philip Larkin 7 William Wordsworth 8 Spike Milligan 9 Adrienne Rich 10 Maya Angelou

Mum

When Mum was discharged from hospital we were told she wouldn't last three weeks. I wrote this then, in prose form and amended it after. Since then Mum appears to be recovering. That said, the disease she has simply repeats until ultimately it claims her. However, she is now on the mend....

 

Thin now, thinner than last week, growing weaker.
Arms like bamboo.
Face gaunt, veined, hollow eyed.
Haunted eyes that follow vague ghosts
Medically all is well, apparently. ...
Unable to walk without aid.
Eats little, drinks less, sleeps a lot.

Drifting somewhere between the flickering of her eyelids and the memories of dad, of me as a child.
When she wakes she smiles seeing me the boy I was.
No longer the man but the son on whom she doted,
All my perceived crimes forgiven.
It is the passing of days.
It is right and proper.
All things must pass but must the passing be so painful for those watching?

Let her have peace.
Let her drift into dreamless sleep.
Rather than this human life unceremoniously dispatched.

Ten Reasons Why… You Might Enjoy the Poems of Carl Sandburg A personal view by Roger Stevens

Carl August Sandburg (1878 -1967) was an American poet, writer and editor who won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.  During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as a major figure in contemporary literature, especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920)

1 Carl Sandberg was a journalist and a socialist, and had a keen sense of and desire for social and economic justice, which was reflected in many of his poems. Despite being written so long ago his poems still resonate with us today.

2
A man is a man and what can you do with him?
but a machine, now you take a machine
no kids  no woman  never hungry  never thirsty
all a machine needs is a little regular attention
and plenty of grease

3 Sandburg wrote, “Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.”

4 Trafficker

Among the shadows where two streets cross,
A woman lurks in the dark and waits
To move on when a policeman heaves in view.
Smiling a broken smile from a face
Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes…

5 He was not afraid to tackle the inequities of organised religion.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they’re dead and the worms have eaten ‘em.

6 Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work -
I am the grass; I cover all.

7 He wrote many, wonderful love poems. He asks of love,
“Is it a cat with claws and wild mate screams in the black night?”

8
Your white shoulders
I remember
And your shrug of laughter

Low laughter
Shaken slow
From your white shoulders

9 He was one of the first great poets to use free verse. Critics didn’t like it, especially in the early days, calling it un-aesthetic and unpoetic. It doesn’t seem in any way unusual now, but at the time it caused quite a stink in poetic circles. And as well as tackling traditional poetic subjects, he liked to write about every day, mundane things. And popular culture. Pre-shadowing the Beat Poets.

10 Lines written for Gene Kelly to Dance To

Tell your feet the alphabet
Tell your feet the multiplication table
Tell your feet where to go, and watch ‘em go and come back...

Jesus in a Tutu

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Ten Reasons Why You Might Enjoy...."The Way Things Are" by Roger McGough

 A personal view by Roger Stevens

1 Roger McGough is probably my favourite living poet. The best-selling Mersey Sound, published by Penguin in 1967, with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, launched their careers. Roger McGough has written so many brilliant books that it’s hard to choose a favourite. But The Way Things Are is my favourite today. Tomorrow it may well be something else.

2 The poems in this book are easy to understand, easy to enjoy. Roger McGough doesn’t try to baffle you with indecipherable symbolism or impenetrable metaphor. They often work on different levels, though. I like that in a poem.

3 For the Sake of Argument

The cover of this book is yellow
But, for the sake of argument
let us call it red…

4 The poems in this book are very clever.

On the eleventh morning
Japheth burst into the cabin:
“Dreadful news, everybody, the tigers
Have eaten the bambanolas!”

5 A Literary Riddle

I am
Out of my tree
Away with the fairies.
A nut. A fruitcake. What am I?

6 If you are familiar with Roger McGough’s voice, maybe from listening to Poetry Please on Radio 4, then hearing him read these poems in your head, in his dry, distinctive Scouse accent, just adds to the pleasure.

7 There’s a good mixture of serious and funny poems in this book.

A serious poem will often end
With two lines that rhyme,
But not always.

8 The title poem is genius. “A sparkling patchwork of children’s logic, grieves quietly for the age-old fears deep down inside us all.”

9
No, the red woolly hat has not been
put on the railing to keep it warm.
When one glove is missing, both are lost
Today’s craft fair is tomorrow’s car boot sale.
The guitarist gently weeps, not the guitar.
I am your father and this is the way things are.

10
There’s always someone who spoils things, isn’t there?
We are all enjoying the story
and someone has to shout out something silly.

Roger’s most recent poetry books for children include The Penguin in Lost Property (Macmillan), with Jan Dean, and What Are We Fighting For? (Macmillan), poems about war, written with Brian Moses. The Comic Café (Frances Lincoln) is his latest children’s novel. He runs the award-winning children's poetry website, The Poetry Zone. Roger also writes for adults, plays in a band (with the legendary Robb Johnson) and performs his own songs in folk clubs. His latest album is called I Don’t Wish to Alarm You But… (Irregular Records.) He spends his time between the Loire, in France, and Brighton, where he lives with his wife and a very, very, very shy dog called Jasper.

 And here, from the not so dim and distant is a little something other from Roger....

Have you ever been embarrassed by your parents? When Joseph was a teenager he would refuse to actually walk with me and Jill in the street “in case his mates saw us.” How silly is that? And I don’t see why he should have been embarrassed by me and Jill dancing in the road at a street festival in Holland, either. He should have been proud of his step-dad. When I hoisted his mum over my head and did the splits at the same time it produced a huge cheer and applause from the crowd that had gathered around us. I was quite upset when he ran away instead of staying to help his mum carry me to the hospital. So you would think that, as a grown-up, I’d no longer be embarrassed by my parents.

But Jill and I decided to take my eighty-year-old mother for a drive in the country. It was a lovely sunny Saturday in June. We drove through the village of Northiam and saw that the local school was having a fete.

“Shall we have a look round?” I asked.

“Ooh, yes,” said Mum, “that would be nice.”

So we did. We had a go on the bottle stall and Jill won a small jar of salad cream. Then we bought a spider plant from the plant stall and watched a display of falconry.

Unfortunately the falcon man hadn’t turned up but the resourceful school decided to go ahead anyway.

Several teachers had each painted the picture of a bird of prey on a shoe box, and tied the box to their arm with a piece of string. Then each one took a turn of throwing the box up in the air while we had to imagine that it was a real bird, wheeling through the sky, and swooping on a sparrow.

The falcon I imagined was easily the best. It did somersaults and finished its display by swooping through a hoop of fire upside down.

So, Mum, Jill and me were walking around the school field enjoying the fete when a band started paying. It was the east Sussex All-Comers Ukulele and Trumpet band. They were brilliant. They played Take That’s greatest hits.

That was when my mum got embarrassing. She grabbed my hands and shouted out, really loudly, “let’s have a little dance!” then she started going round in circles, taking me with her, and every so often punching the air and whooping. An eighty-year old whooping woman dancing to Shine is not a pretty sight.

It was very, very embarrassing. The only good thing about it was that Jill went round with the hat and managed to collect seven pounds 63p. So we all treated ourselves to an ice cream and Mum bought another spider plant to keep the first one company. 

Fish

 

 

 

 

 

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Also available on the classwar karaoke survey, 0030 as set to music by the excellent Balkh. If you want to help CWK achieve its goal of funding a compilation CD, go buy their wonderful works:
https://freemusicarchive.org/…/Classwar_Karaoke_-_0030_Sur…/

Geni

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Spike, my heart, your beef is not with me, good captain. I did not let your Geni out of the bottle. Keep a lid on it. Keep it safe, safe as milk. It's rare such gifts set so many free.

Extracting Bhagwan

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Wyjasnienie by Dorota Szumilas

A spoken word piece kindly supplied by Dorota Szumilas who hails from Poland.

Terminal Hierophantiasis by Antares @ Guano Breath

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Inspired by a poem drafted in 1969 and recorded over 3 sessions in 1986. 

TERMINAL HIEROPHANTIASIS

we bow our heads in unison & listen
to benisons in latin as we
sit on satin cushions
in silence
with violent visions
of serpents & surplices
& sacred bullocks
& cassocks & castration
casting lustral pearls
at lugubrious swine
that wallow in goodswill
on the dunghill of time
popping corn & copping porn
pages from hoary wisdom torn:

O HEAVENLY FATHOPE
GRUNT UNTO US
IN THIS THE HOUR OF OUR SORDID GREED
WE PLEAD WITH BEADS OF GRUBBY CREED
IN CHUBBY FINGERS

from the foulpit to the pulpit
of the chosen pew
we send forth solemn nostrums
from the rostrum
to our beloved token jew

FORGIVE US OUR FOREFATHERS' FORESKINS
AND GIVE US THIS DAY A DULL RAP
ON THE SKULL CAP
OR SOME CLAP TRAP

oh we think we know we see
whom & how & whatsoever we should be
for all is ultimately part & parson
of immortality
(so help me)

wherefore this common porridge:
this grim & grueling gravy
in which organisms sink or swim
suspended in acute & minute animation
doomed to drink & be drunk
& perchance be merry
or to suffer indigestion &/or indigestibility?

BY THE MONAD'S GONADS,
ANSWER ME!

we bow our heads
over supper sipping soup
but does it really matter
if tablemanners are observed
or if slurping sounds delicious?
after all the tiny whiny citizens
aswoon or aswirl in their own dire mansions
in our soupy microcosm
are also busy bowing pious little heads
over teeny weeny bowls of perfect beans...
And be it so.

Composed, performed & mixed by Antares

who do I gotta kill today?

If you think that "Kill Today" is a song consisting of words that are sung, then you clearly don't know what singing is. But if audible words are not sung, then by default they must be spoken.
Therefore, this post is on-topic!
Music or not, I suggest you crank up the volume (and most especially the Bass) to the max!

A Night in the Day of a Reluctant Psychopath

Once I went walking but I lost my way
Then right up ahead was a little cafe
I walked right in, said "what's the special today?"
The waiter was a man of many years
He said "all you'll get is blood, sweat and tears."
I laughed as I shot that man in the face
Then I turned and I ran right out of that place.

Why, why, why...
Why, why, why...

Couldn't see my next move
Couldn't see my way clear
I just couldn't find my way home...

Got no money, and no place to go
Cold and hungry, and I'm feeling kinda low
Got no friends and I got no wife
Travelling light, most of my life
A man with no love, in a world with no soul
The undead living in a deep, dark hole.

Couldn't see my next move
Couldn't see my way clear
Couldn't find my way home
Can't seem to find my way home tonight...

My life is a mess and I'm out of control
Got no destination and I got no goal
I'm gonna lay me down, lay me down and die
Just wish I knew the reason why
Down on my knees I begin to pray
Lord who do I gotta kill today?
Please tell me who do I gotta kill today
I hear voices that I must obey
And I wonder why...

Why, why, why...
Why, why, why...
Can't seem to find my way home tonight.

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Cosmic Rapture and Masterymistery are two of the names by which the creator is known.
Check out his author-page at Amazon

Music / MP3 Download: Who do I gotta kill today? out now at I-Tunes