Lucy Vickery

Averse to verse

In Competition No. 3040 you were invited to submit a poem against poets or poetry.
 
Plato started it, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change. In what was a wide-ranging and spirited entry there were references to Shelley (‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’), and to Auden (‘-poetry makes nothing happen’), and to much else besides. Commendations go to Nicholas Stone, Mae Scanlan, Brian Allgar and Nigel Stuart. The winners take £30, except Basil Ransome-Davies who pockets £35.
 


There ’s Chaucer the gofer, there’s ode-machineHood,
There’s Herbert the God-bothered parson.
There’s Shakespeare the aspirant. They’re only good
For wiping a metrophobe’s arse on.
 
There’s Whitman the mystagogue, out of his tree,
There’s Tennyson, bearded and smelly.
There’s Dowson the dipso, and Cummings the twee.
They give me an ache in my belly.
 
Pound’s Cantos are voodoo, they chargrill your brain,
While Stevens amounts to a riddle
And Ginsberg the Windbag leaks verse like a drain.
The bastards are all on the fiddle.
 
They hijack the language and grind it up fine
Into tiles for a fancy mosaic.
Go stick your damn tropes where the sun doesn’t shine.
I am ad infinitum prosaic.
Basil Ransome-Davies
 
Good God, the verbiage, the guff
That gets itself laid out in print
By those who seem to weave their stuff
From contemplated navel lint.
They cast loose, looping lines to catch
Some fluttering passing thought in flight,
Or, given feelings words can’t match,
Plough on just trotting out the trite.
Worse still are those whose grandstand works
Come shrouded in some borrowed myth,
So if they have a point it lurks
Buried deep in thickening pith.
For anything that matters, prose
Will win as it has always won;
And every self-styled poet knows
That poetry gets nothing done.
W.J. Webster
 
Every iamb, every trochee, every anapestic joke he
Tries to tell is more annoying than the last one.
With each spondee, with each dactyl, she seems flaky as a fractal.








































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