A new 'form' I have been working on...

I've been thinking on and off for some time now about a type of poem which uses information / thoughts gathered over a week (or so) and which then attempts to draw these strands together.

Part of the influence was that thing where a subject can curiously crop up in close proximity - eg Che Guevara turned up in conversation / images / overheard conversation / the media four or five times within a few days a few weeks back.

Recently, I've written two new poems which I call 'hebdomads' - I want to set it as an exercise in a class, but I need more people to write one! Anyone want to have a go?

The 'rules' are these - the general tone should be fairly chatty, moving from theme to theme - I worked up this form as an antidote to having overdosed on taut and metrical poems in my latest manuscript.

The form is 9 tercets, fairly long lines. A somewhat chatty tone. The information used in the poem should come together over about one week - take notes, think of overheard conversations, domestic situations, facts garnered from the media. The poem should work by BOTH juxtaposing the stuff from the week, and drawing strands between two dominant subjects.

In the poems below, to state the obvious, the main themes are hearing and questions then power and wings.

Two more things - I will at some point in a week or so remove these poems, so they can be submitted elsewhere. Anyone posting one of these - I can do the same thing if you wish. Also, the second piece is still at draft stage and needs some work - no need to point that out to me.

The Micro... titles is just my thing - not part of the schtick.

Any questions, just ask...

;)

(sorry - have now removed my poems as I may publish them elsewhere)

Petrol Lives

Several concave children gave evidence
of internal heating deficiencies, ghosts, they said,
even when the next farm was ‘kiss-my-ass’ republican

it would consist of ‘abominable behaviours’ though
we knew parenting was edible pulp.
Anyway, Lucy’s relatives were all cholesterol.

Boiling was never a precise art, not like
having hives and the itching would not subside
for days. “Creaking is leaking,” the factor said.

For now make contact with low ceilinged
distended circuits and use the yellow jersey
sweater Maud brought from Saffron’s,

the turkey handed waster as we knew her.
Powering up the certain suit was all cluster
and bluster. No one packed it in. No one moved.

Several planes coalesced into a single black basin,
pin columns of bronze integument failed to hold
the listless creepers. Motion sickness everywhere,

even the loyal hangers-on seemed biting and thick.
No synapse provided proof but the buttresses
left the cellar housing all wishy washy. “It was like a pit

of fat. We knew they were in the oil. He was a loafer, too.
Never coming out.” The desk sergeant made calls:
one with a giant gland and uppity manoeuvres

which held the bones of the family together,
the other, long distance, was less secure, “I can break him.
He will cry with the teeth of it.” On ring back now.

Oh yes. Sounds great. I'll have a go. Thank-you!

Rita's Creatures

Donny Scues’ Waz-mobile was only
heard in Mulbrox, like several rust jobs deep,
whacking out The Cool Kids for Compton or Big D

or cruising Aldo’s for a big widow night of bliss.
Alien detox. Crustadelic. All over soil fanatics.
It made me barf. Sissy's kids was through with Donny anyways

but comforting though she was I really doubt
the seamless crotch was so fantastic in the seat.
You know it, too. That place is dog perfect.

How come eating cuties is so bad anyway.
Gricedale’s everlasting crudités always
left me smelling of clam soda or kelp and gave me gas,

like I’d done a week in Tina’s salon as she stubbed out
one thousand L&Ms next to the extreme nail dipper.
All that chicken gone to waist.

Slow season. Big learning, burning earth day.
Some commotion held our attention for an hour
like anti-saucer vigilantes moaning about hell

as the deli off takes sashayed through Montgomery
on a featureless pine hunt, parrots braying.
Bettie crawled out to ask, “Is that you, Vernon?”

But the phone in died. Donny’s bucket of love.
How come so much style can be wasted
on a creature? Even the heat ain’t pure in that life.

I mind my nails on the bag spinner and pack away
another sister’s yesterdays. I am not leaving here.
That’s one hunnerd forty two dollars, Ma’am.

Perfect challenge for me Roddy. Tomorrow I'm off to Glencanisp Lodge, by Suilven, for a week. We'll see what happens.

Cultural Static

The manufacturers of pernicious cultural
viruses were hawking liquid pep-me-ups
laced with pharmaceutical cocaine, and pimping

rolls in the hay with the Dowager Jones,
long withering out young men’s revenue
all along the Hammersmith Flyover.

Economically lubricious, perhaps? But it played
merry hell with my concentration, like pop-ups
for Viagra intruding into my research on the lesser-known

sobriquets of Alexander Fleming’s fungus collection.
And it was no better in the eldritch capital –
the gallery attendants neglecting the finer points

of invigilation, crashing into our jolly mental game
of joining the black spots in Hogarth’s 'Marriage a la Mode'
to spell Glaxo-Smithkline (in the Cyrillic alphabet) with,

“Pint of Theakstons?”
“Go on! Pint of axle-grease!”
But the reviews augured well for Doctor Faustus

in conversation with Doctor Octopus,
about the four stages of cruelty, at the Autopsy Museum.
Prolix? Well, yes. But nothing a surgical scalpel wouldn’t fix.

And we’d good seats: centre aisle, middle row stalls.
No creaking backrests. It wasn’t that the argument
was difficult to follow; more a consequence of

the ill-timed fanfare of a meta-ironic,
polyphonic ring-tone which, these days, I suppose,
is what passes for personality.

Roddy there's nothing like an assigment like this to make you feel as if your previous week had no dominant strands. I had all sorts of ideas about writing something over the weekend but, in a word, no. I'll keep on it.

Thanks everyone.

Fascinated by Chris's overnight efforts (monodomad?) and enjoyed them but perhaps he'll have to explain how they fit the rules other than by shape!

Looking forward to seeing Katy's, Colin's, Jacqui's and others.

David's is a fine example which seems to fit all the rules and get the feel of the form. No less than I'd expect of one of the best newer poets around at the moment. Though I think he owes Nick Cave a twenty-seventh of any future royalties of that poem. ;)

Black Cod

Every time you go it’s like another meal gone cold
before it’s eaten and I’m hungry. The wave took Burma
left it drowned and there’s no aid allowed to cross

the border. You promised me black cod at Nobu but you
never deliver; I’m still waiting. The sea carries whole houses
away, corpses float amid the risk of cholera. We’re sick

with waiting on the edge, the sea’s too hot for swimming
but the fish look delicious, irresistible in fact. After The Lion King
I swallowed a dozen oysters in that great fish restaurant whose name

I keep forgetting. The streets swelter in this unexpected steam
while relief work continues elsewhere. We nurse our starved hearts
and only gin and lemon at that fancy bar you took me to

can help us now. There will be wholesale death of mad hopes
and innocents but none of us have lost the will to live. There’s champagne
chilling in the fridge, women still carry children miles for food

and heroes dredge the living from rubble. As Iris brushes on the dye
in her illegal hairdressing empire, the woman in foils comforts
a small Chinese girl who is not her own. I gasp

at the hero with tatooed biceps who sits in his wheelchair in the centre
of the photograph in Hello Magazine showing off his stumps
of legs for damp-palmed princes as if they were medals.

The water pressure is miraculous. I’m hoping you’ll rescue me
as I admire the blond streak Iris painted bold across my brow but will you
know me now? On Virgin Radio they’re offering one last chance

to three has-been bands. While children cry for sweet water, I’ll cry
for you and drink from this glass with a salted edge and suck
these olive pips till they’re dry. Then I’ll taste the mystery of your grin.

Birthday Girls

I left you at Lewisham Station. You recommended
Anger Management websites. I suggested you f*** off.
This roundabout can’t take the sheer level of bile.

File this episode away with the time you stole the key
to break in. You had the same look as that McCann girl,
beaming from another tabloid anniversary cash-in.

Carmen, whom I later discovered was freelance,
manoeuvred me onto the spiral staircase. I clutched
a stack of hardbacks, withdrawn at random, I think.

Drink? The wine arrived whilst I was sleeping.
When Ben approached, a chance encounter,
I was thinking of the climber, how it clogged

the trellis in Bishops Square. A sentence chugged.
My doppelganger is a middle-aged grunter in a blue
checked shirt with four young girls, one of whom speaks.

The leak still leaks. Their desktop basins are huge and shiny.
Your mother would have disapproved. Ruth looked kind of
sheepish and her cheek, when I kissed it, was greasy.

A list of things (towel rails, walls, doors, folders, me, us)
I might avoid the breaking of; Sebastian Tellier singing
No no no no no no no / Toi est moi, c’est comme tu sais.

The gay one from Shipwrecked is lost at sea. Mappa Mundi
as art installation impresses me, but you can’t grasp
the lines, or how North Greenwich is a peninsular

and all buses go one of two directions. Upper middle-class
inflections drown out the talk of Trevor Eve. We leave
and as I clasp your hand, you whisper, Really, I’m fine.

Shit and Sweeteners

We are throwing away tons of edible food every day
according to the findings of a latest survey conducted by
Sky News while Burmese survivors of a big wind are without

bread and clean water; the world wants to help,
but it’s hindered by a government that drags its polished
boots; waves away planes of aid; ums and ahs

about issuing visas to foreign helpers. Are they trying
to hide something far worst than children lying in the streets,
holding hands as they die; bodies floating in rivers; damming

streams; hanging from telephone wires. My sister fusses
over scratches she picked up from hawthorns while gathering
fruit for Sunday’s pie; my son: pissed out of his mind

celebrates Swansea’s promotion to the Championship League;
a rapist hangs himself a week before his day in court.
Good! He’s saved the taxpayer a few quid! Things are really

looking up when a gas explosion that blows a house to bits
leaves no-one dead or hurt and two of my poems are accepted
by a choosey magazine that has given space to Heaney

and Armitage, but I’m soon shot down in flames when I read
the Times and find that home repossessions have peaked
to an all-time high. I’m three months behind with payments

thanks to a broken leg which I came by while toppling off
my uninsured Kawasaki when taking a bend that was decked
with loose chippings which had fallen from the back of a truck

that searched for a pump which still spouted diesel during
the ongoing dispute among oil refinery workers and their
top-of-the-rich-list employers who need fucking, in my opinion.

Removed, but I'll leave the music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imrfo-uRjcE

The Week’s Retreat


Not much perambulation to report
this week; not many peregrinations.
The universe’s connective tissue is weak.

The days go featureless, impressionless
as a hovercraft over unfootprinted snow,
blank as a comic book guy before his eyes,

unthink as a pen with no well for ink,
no wishes for its well, unsought as well.
No idea would dare to create a stink.

Monday stared like a cretin, whereas Tuesday
was surprised. I read that Robert Rauschenberg had died.
Wednesday: uneven coverage and twisted cable.

Friends’ families and friends fall sick, as if cancer
had hoist itself down off its faceless night
to scuttle among us, eating our young.

No wonder I’m crabby. No surprise, my friend,
we got our wires crossed over the weekend, left gaps
too big unsaid. But I’m all teenagers these days,

eyeliner, dirty cups in the living room,
moons in undrunk tea: you could fall in.
Every day is a narrow shaft, but to them it’s as round

as a starburst, sweet as a Starburst. How did we come
to such a stony spot, withdrawing by email
into a couple of uninhabitable shells?

Caked in detritus, tangled in lines of thought
or the talons of some bird – the great clawed tit –
conman or guardian – that nests in a black hole.

[Removinated by Uncle Zeddy]

Thanks to everyone who has written one of these and posted here or sent me the poem privately. If anyone has any others to add, can you do so soon, as I want to use soem in a class on Thursday.

I will take this thread down in a week or so, so all poems remain publishable.

'I will take this thread down in a week or so, so all poems remain publishable'

This is an interesting one; some magazines and comps specifically say that if your poem has been on the internet, it's been published and therefore isn't eligible. Am I the only who's confused? Maybe you've already discussed this here.

And thanks, Roddy, for the whole idea of the hebdomad. It really works I think.

A bit late, I know, but thought I might as well post my attempt:

Life Beyond the Test Card

Did you see that: another survivor—woman more than
100 years old—pulled from the rubble? Elsewhere
in the stricken provinces, some reporter presses a phone

into the hand of a trapped man, his last conversation
with his wife spattered worldwide as his speech falters.
He’s hearing noises? No, he’s hearing voices.

They claim they can speak to the dead, but with the dead
who can really tell there’s anybody there to listen?
You can understand the motivation, I suppose,

but when the dead begin to talk back
—and I don’t mean archive footage here at all—
it becomes a different question altogether.

Meanwhile, in the stricken provinces and elsewhere,
questions are being asked, the really tough ones.
It’s all about the sense of scale and why you should

be a socialist. In other news, the distance
our children are allowed to wander unaccompanied
has shrunk by 90 per cent over a mere 20 years.

It’s all about how far you buy into the climate of fear.
Please do not leave your luggage unattended.
Life these days is invariably much more complex

than when we were in short trousers, as Robert Winston
might say. But do you remember the old cathode ray TVs,
how, on switch off, the picture would dwindle to a white dot?

Now, it’s all so slick—sleek flat LCD sets in the front room,
big plasma screens dotted around the city centres—
nothing to follow as the tube powers down.

Roddy: you may like to know that our StAnza Board meeting this evening was held in the Hebdomadar's Room in St Andrews. Naturally I thought of you as our Hebdomadar-General. A bit weird sitting under the portraits of George Buchanan and The Admirable Crichton.

I didn't write a hebdomad at Glencanisp - the stanzas were too closely linked on themes of the landscape and wildlife - like seeing an otter on the lochan, climbing Suilven etc - not contrasting enough to form a hebdomad. I did write a poem some years back based on a sequence of photos on a film strip (I remember film), and that was more like the form you describe. However, it was a crap poem.

Colin

I read my effort in public a few weeks ago. My preamble about the form (with ref to Poets on Fire and Roddy) met with great interest from the poetry groupies assembled.

Well Tom, you or somebody else must have made an impression, because yesterday six people reached Baroque in Hackney through Google searches on "Hebdomad Lumsden". (Either that or one person did the search six times...)

So i had an interesting chat with Roddy about this new form and its evolution; it seems that part of the hebdomad is that it needs detail which is not directly thematically linked. So I went back to my notebook and revised the poem. As this is a form in progress, I guess we all need to get to grips with the rules.

Black Cod

Every time you leave it’s like another meal gone cold
before it’s eaten and I’m hungry. The wave took Burma
left it drowned and there’s no aid allowed to cross the border.

You promised me black cod at Nobu but you never deliver.
In the courtyard at Somerset house the men are building a stage
for something to do with Nokia. The sea carries houses away,

corpses float amid the risk of cholera. We’re sick with waiting
on the edge, the sea’s too hot for swimming but the fish is irresistible.
After the Lion King I swallowed a dozen oysters in that restaurant

whose name I forget. The streets swelter in unexpected steam
while relief work continues elsewhere. We nurse our starved hearts
and only gin and lemon at that fancy bar you took me to

can help us now. There will be wholesale death of mad hopes
and innocents but none of us have lost the will to live. There’s Moet
chilling in the fridge, women still carry children miles for food

and heroes dredge the living from rubble. As Iris brushes on dye
in her illegal hairdressing empire, the woman in foils comforts
a small Chinese girl who is not her own. Myleene Klass changed

her outfit three times at the awards bash and a hero
with tatooed biceps in his wheelchair dead centre of the photo
displays his stumps of legs for damp-palmed princes.

The water pressure is miraculous. I hope you’ll rescue me as I admire
the blond streak Iris painted bold across my brow but will you
know me now? On Virgin Radio they’re offering one last chance

to three has-been bands. While children cry for sweet water, I’ll cry
for you, drink from this glass with a salted edge and suck
these olive pips till they’re dry. Then I’ll taste the mystery of your grin.

Yes, I showed most of the hebdomads here to one of my groups as I was setting it as an exercise. Much of the discussion was about how the business of the strands works - there should be two thematic strands which appear in the poem, but it's about more than neatly plaiting these strands. Rather, the strands should stand out from the stuff around them. I think Katy's (which I know is still unfinished, as my second one is) does this well, David's too and Jacqui's works better now that she has added some other detail from the week from which the strands emerge. Rob's Glory Box is as good a poem as any on this thread, but lacks a few details outside the strands (my students were also unclear about the he becoming an I). At some point, I'll write a fuller explanation of the form, but I'm still progressing with it myself at this point.

I'll take this thread down in a few days, so if anyone wants to post a poem, do so soon.

Hope it's not too late - but after hearing Tom Chivers do his I've been fascinated by the form. Here's my first draft.

we have to get off before the bridge. What?
we have to get off the bloody bus before the bloody bridge
You don't have ta shout

then take your bloody earphones out
it's that wee shit Craig David, Monday.... Tuesday.... Wednesday
Bloody fecking Monday, watch out for the bridge, wont ya?

...and then it all kicked off and we laid into that Spurs lot...
I seen you on the terraces, season ticket holder, are you?
Not me mate, too expensive, need to get to sixteen home games in a season

to make it worth your while.... Took Her For Drink on TUESDAY...
Ya never take me for a bloody drink, ya pissed up bitch
Have we reached the bridge yet, I can't see shite for all this rain

...and the train up from Farnborough is expensive enough
Farborough, I'll be damned, I used to live there
Cove? I'll be damned, I lived in Cove too

Arundel Estate?, I'll be damned, Artillery Lane?
no Smith Street, I was a welder at the yards
I'll be damned IT's THE BLOODY BRIDGE

Well get up off your arse then
WE WERE MAKING LOVE BY WEDNESDAY
I won't fecking make love ta ya if we don't get off th' bloody bus

Twenty years I spent, apprenticed, man and boy, at the shipyard
an electrician, been a Gunner all my life, up and down the country
got a bit of turf from the old stadium at Highbury

And every Saturday in the sixties, we'd sharpen coins and put stones in socks
and wage war on the terraces against all that would come against us
and by quarter to five... WE CHILLED ON SUNDAY

Can the thread not be left up for others to have a go at the form? Individuals can remove poems they want to submit as and when they do, right? Or is the form itself top secret?

Like it's 1999

A raucous but stoneless acceptance is what it was,
a waving off, an underground gala for the mayor.
Let's always have a party the day before surrender.

That's his interpretation. I'm inclined to agree,
but I'm thinking: can I hijack the jukebox somehow,
avoid the dire song that they base the last round on?

Atlantis art supplies were piping out Phil Collins,
crooning like the world was coming to an end,
so I'm all full up on sweet junk today, thanks guys.

Too late - and back to the bottle tops tomorrow,
cutaways of 'closures' handed round the room,
glued to plywood. Will the final witness change his tune?

Will he balls. It's down to who draws the last breath
in every case, from vodka roll-on sheath cap contracts
to missing ships. Just hope for a melodious exchange,

free of muttering - the kind that spilled from your mouth
when the G string snapped again and no one had a spare.
Well, what do you expect at the eleventh hour?

Freak happenings have send-offs like partying drunks,
gather up to jump you just before you put your plan
into action, armed with mix tapes and Now 64.

Hence the weekend's pile-up of debacles. While elsewhere,
disaster follows cataclysm, none of it heralding
a getting to grips or a chorus of order.

Guy from Alba Nova handed out roses
before the last song. Most of the audience
had left, so I got one. I flung it in the air.

This ain't a hebdomad. It started out as an attempt at one but went somewhere else (I'm only posting the link as a curiosity really)...

http://www.ukauthors.com/modules.php?name=...ticle&sid=21827

...thanks for the inspiration tho. It's a fascinating form. I've been fiddling with something else (erm...) and wanna see if I can manage an unmetrical rhymer that fits the strands rule.

Which could all take a while (as Jon mentions, it would be a shame if the thread couldn't be kept for a while?)...

Okay - if anyone wants to take their poem down so it can be sent for publication, please do so - I'll leave the thread...

Forms in post-modern times are meant to be flexible, and undermined. For instance, if the hebdomad is 27 lines long I can suggest three dominant themes interwoven (three cubed equals twenty seven), not just two -- which is obviously self-serving as that's what I've done here.

The poem on the page enacts the way I (we) have attention to critical events distracted and broken up in these 24-hour blog-news-sensory overload times. I live part-time in Lebanon.

cheers,

Norbert Hirschhorn

POEM FOR TWO VOICES

...a Chinese couple renew their vows in the rubble…
Irena Sendler died this week, ninety-eight, a Polish
…of earthquake, lying face-to-face for three days…

social worker who saved Warsaw Ghetto children
…whispering how they’ve taken one another for granted…
blood is different colors here: sandstone, marble, blue

smuggling them under her skirt, in potato sacks, coffins
...their bodies numb but not their love as his right arm…
in Lebanon politicians play the children’s game

of who can lean out the window the furthest
…nestles her neck, her left arm under his head…
Lebanon, like swimming in honey, dangerously endearing

proud oleander, yellow-leaved ginestra, spring’s last poppy
…the shape of their lives gone or yet to come…
from my Beirut window: container ships, a German destroyer –

friends here are dear, some would even save me
… the constriction causes gangrene…
London an affair of the head, Lebanon an affair of the heart

shotgun shells litter the hills, raptors go elsewhere to eat
…their daughter, their only child, somewhere safe, please God…
– fishing boats, sailboats, yachts with helipads, brown bodied boys

swimming off the rocks Syrian laborers – short, wiry, brown;
…school houses collapsed during lessons of math…
one on a pneumatic drill without gloves, without ear covers

I listen to Goldberg Variations (he’ll return deaf and shaking)
over and over to the screams of children at recess next door
peach juice dribbles my chin

Beirut, June 2008

I performed my Hebdomad last night, and I found it really difficult to get the two conversations, and four characters across. I also ended up singing the Craig David bits - not my best talent!

As Tom said in his post, when explaining the format everyone pricked up their ears and leant forward - I think the overheard conversations give new poets something to grab hold of and twist a poem around, a firm foundation for creativity.

My one question then is how best to get across the different voices in performance of the Hebdomad - and looking then at Norberts piece (Hi! Norbert) - with the three sources of voice, seemingingly equally divided across the stanza, is that an easier way to deal with my problem?

This might be the occasion to have more than one reader performing the poem.

Norbert