Non-Winners

I took the idea of using stanzas of different form within the same poem from Christina Rossetti, whose poems I greatly enjoyed reading a couple of years ago. There is also a pattern of internal rhymes which bind the outer stanzas to each other and ditto the internal stanzas. I found this idea in the poems of Jack Clemo, an interesting Cornish poet who died some years ago. For good measure I find I also used assonance in lines one and three of the outer stanzas.

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Helping in 1981
Sift many hundred poems for
A competition won with lordly ease
By Tony Harrison, dismayed,
I waded through a swamp of raw
Ill-written doggerel untouched by sun;
But, oh, the black emotions thus                                          
Revealed: love-struck, self-hating, stark-afraid!

In flat free verse or badly-rhymed

Unstable stanzas, these poor “rude                                     
Mechanicals” – housewives or silly salesmen –
Poured out inchoate griefs which chimed                              
Brokenly like the toys of children;
Their subjects were those of an Aeschylus
Or Shakespeare, timeless if misviewed –
Love’s lack or its spurning, old age,
Loneliness, illness and the worm of death,
Longing for loved ones scribbled from the page.

By contrast, the “professionals”,

Penning cool ironies, discreet
And small, worried deflectedly at woes –
Money and lust, confessionals
Of status, failed affairs and blows
Suffered for art by its elite, pilous
And informal. At paltry heat
Their verse barely bubbled, content
To ignore all major themes, like the breath
Of God, and lean like reeds as others leant.

Bemusingly, the amateurs

Had told the truth; their horrified
Tugging at facts like burrs – that cruel disease
Kills and balked love deranges souls –
Shamed the ironists. Those who chide
Their lack of skill, buffing their miniatures
Of taste, know not the body’s pus
Nor honest telling which alone consoles.

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© June 2013