Tuesday Poem - Anti-circ by Vidyan Ravinthiran

Anti-circ

The seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades…Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle.

—Vladimir Nabokov

Once I cracked Lolita’s spine I found myself knee-deep in cheesecake;

my not-quite-fist unclenched, disclosed a wet cluster of blackberries.

Tennyson sank me into new car smell and a plush interior; the extras

threw roses and sweetmeats at my tinted glass across the cordon.

Reading Wilfred Owen I was Attenborough’s thrilled silence

breathing round a bird whose syrinx learned to imitate a chainsaw;

the walls of my house crashed down in fumes of plaster and rayed glass

the night I dropped Naipaul. Joe Sacco’s Palestine had the sad

dilapidated scent of changing rooms at school, plaques of mud

hole-punched by studs. Hopkins shone a walkable torchbeam

between rooftops; I felt gay as Mary Poppins then feared my mum

would drop me. Updike’s prose flaunted the revealed

cleanliness of a girl’s arse, its well-briefed sway up the stairs ahead;

and when I called up from the stacks Enoch Powell’s uncut First Poems

her skilled tongue agitated my thankfully intact frenulum.

I came upon this poem in The Best British Poetry 2011 and just straight out took to it. Vidyan is a poet I haven't come across before, and his biography at the back of the anthology doesn't give too much away, so all I can really say is what he says - "Vidyan Ravinthiran is a lecturer at Oxford and a research fellow at Cambridge." The poem was first published in Horizon Review.

I did find the poem quite tricky, in the very best sort of way. I had to look up the meaning of frenulum, and I was glad I did. And I got a funny feeling that the reference to Enoch Powell is social rather than literary comment LOL. I misread it as Ezra Pound on my first go, and then I went, no. It's Enoch Powell.  

PS I got an email from Vidyan with a bio.

VR's work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Rialto, Modern Poetry in Translation, Magma, The Oxonian Review, The North, Blackbox Manifold, Ambit, Poetry Wales, Envoi, Wave Composition, Stand, Nthposition, Tower Poetry, The Yellow Nib, Likestarlings, Poetry Proper, Fuselit, Oxford Poetry, Agenda, Iota, Horizon Review and Smiths Knoll; it has been anthologised in Joining Music With Reason (Waywiser Press, 2010), The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011), The Best British Poetry (Salt, 2011), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon, 2012) and Birdbook 2 (Sidekick, 2012). A pamphlet, At Home or Nowhere, was published by Tall-Lighthouse Press in 2008.

Tuesday Poem - Talking To You by Ken Bolton

Talking To You

It is 2 or 3 o'clock

in the afternoon.

I'm sitting here, reading

O'Hara's poem

the one that begins

"It is 1.55 in Cambridge"

he's at Jimmy's place (I'm

at the desk)

looking

sad &

wistful.

I am

too &

why not—drinking the

very last

of my bourbon, a drink I have

slowly developed a taste for

(since my

birthday, when I got it,

& now, nearly nine months later)

(Thankyou,

Julie & Neil).

In this poem

(it seems I'm

talking

to you now)

O'Hara says

what will happen to him?

& what about some

poems he mentions

What about me?

will I ever get given

bourbon again?

& what about the poems I might write?

will they ever get written?

& suddenly

an amazing self pity

comes

'over' me

I could almost have asked

those questions

seriously.  Otis

Rush is

no longer

on the record player

has not been

for hours

though the light on the record player glows

but the

intense sad notes

still 'haunt' the air, & affect the view

out

through

the bars

of the street

& factory

across the road, with their

own grid

of wire & bars

on all their windows

—staring back

the sunday traffic, occasionally, roaring past

I get up, & put on

Lou Reed's

'Rock n Roll',

which I love.  It

always makes the bars

seem more

neutrally rigorous

which is

how I'm beginning to feel

now.   I've

always wanted to do something

as good as

'Rock n Roll' though I'm

not doing that now.

but something continuously 'repetitive'

but not static

that moved,

that was

a continuous 'prolongation'

of a single

mood,

'intellectual'

but

unthinking,

physical

That's what I tried to do in

Terrific days

though then

I did not know "Rock n Roll" so well

though I must've heard it.

But that was partly my intention.

Something tells me

not to leave this poem,

as I   stand now

drumming on the page

interestingly,  to the intro to

"Sweet Jane", 'torn'

between the feeling

that I have

nothing to say,

& that

—if I leave it—

to pick up later

I will not

finish the poem

Here is just one of the lively pieces from Ken Bolton's Selected Poems, published by Shearsman Books. The book is extremely lively, and even borders on iconoclastic! I had the pleasure of hearing Ken read at Collected Works in Melbourne and my goodness, he can put a poem across. 

 

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2012/bolton.html

Tuesday Poem - Sky Burial by Ali Alizadeh

Sky Burial

for John Kinsella

I really want to be fed

to vultures when I’m dead. My toddler

on the verge of using spoon

will be assigned to serve, when I’m done

his father’s cadaver, sliced and spread

to sky’s black scavengers. Why not

– my wife often asks – cremation

à la her desired dissemination

of charred fragments in the breeze

wreathing a mountain range? I answer

and confess. To a lifetime of feasting

on birds. (She’s baffled, a vegetarian

alien to guilt accumulated

in the gullet of a carnivore hooked

on the thighs, breast and wings

of the avian.) A concatenation

of culinary memories. Chicken

kebab: grilled squares stabbed

onto a bayonet-like skewer

at my uncle’s wedding just before

the War. Poultry so scarce in Tehran

the viscous taste became a hunger

for an end to Saddam’s bombing raids

and when Mum did somehow bring home

a frozen, beige clump and cooked us

khoresht baadenjan with morgh

the other three in the family gave me

– without my comprehending

the complexity of their munificence –

all the tender, fatless, skinless fillets

and I devoured. When we finally fled

the acerbic scent (‘secret herbs, spices’)

of cheap deep-fried flesh, vital

emblem of the American empire

galvanised my senses upon arrival

in Australia. Chiko Rolls at the tuck shop

(made with mutton, I later discovered,

despite the name) diverted, occasionally

from the howls – “Speak English!

Say something, camel fucker!” – and then

smoking with a surfie dope-dealer

who worked at Red Rooster between art

classes at university. I lived off

bread, baked beans and starchy noodles

but for a treat – to recover

from rejections by girls, ridicule by lecturers

who found my thoughts and paintings

pointless – I’d resort to a sodden

marked down BBQ chook

wilting below the deli counter, late

at night in a Gold Coast supermarket

biting the singed bird’s sinews

with terrible anger. Finally I left

for Melbourne to ‘make it’ as a poet

and to locate a hypothetical woman

who’d tolerate me. When I did find her

I also found (to my gastronomic

terror) she was a vegetarian. The end

of my fetish for feathered beasts? Hardly

could you call her a proselytiser

but what a traveller. Honeymoon

in Vietnam: tofu tossed with lemongrass

for her, pieces of quails and other murdered

birds decked my chopsticks. In China

I struggled to order without

embarrassment at the restaurants

since ‘chicken’ in Mandarin

distanced by one tonal accent from

‘prostitute’. And so on. Tavuk

shish kebabs in Istanbul, turkey strips

(ersatz bacon) in Dubai. Can this

addiction be assuaged by the virtues

of ethical consumerism, barnyard

fowls? My wife looks away. The truth

hurts even more because what’s wasted

on feeding me meat becomes heat

and melts the world. And I had

a pet rooster once, regal with his red crown

fierce after the targeted killing of my

sister’s speckled hen by one of Tehran’s

infamous crows. I can still hear

my rooster’s sad, lonesome howl

creep out of his quivering beak

when I enjoy murgh tikka masala (or shamefully

for an anti-capitalist, a Zinger). I cringe

past the glistening corpses of Beijing ducks

but my mouth moistens. So please

a secular sky burial for me. A machete

doing the work of maggots’ teeth

on my dead body. And proffer the chops

to the vultures to apologise for a lifetime

of eating their kind. Aquiline beaks

tearing morsels of my muscles

and then tenderised and regurgitated

for frenetic, squawking chicks.