NaPoWriMo - 2017

Every year at this time, the international poetry community takes part in NaPoWriMo — National Poetry Writing Month.

"National" is now an inaccuracy, it happens everywhere, and the idea is to write one poem a day, every day, for the whole of April.  They don't have to be great poems, or polished, or even necessarily complete...  there just has to be something poem-like that you can show to your fellow poets.

Many of my favourite efforts originate from this exercise, like this or this so I make a point of trying to participate every year.

This year I think I'll do it naked — by which I mean I'll post the poems here, unedited, as I turn them out.

Expect a poem for every day, not always on the day in question, I do have a life and it would be unrealistic not to allow a little give and take, but expect 30 brand new poems in roughly the next 30 days.

I have the first two already, watch this space...

P. G. Wodehocracy

Alternative Forms of Government

(an occasional series)

Number I


P. G. Wodehocracy


As laid down in the many works of theory penned by the great political philosopher P. G. Wodehouse, primary legislation is proposed by hatchet-faced aunts who chew limes and breed suspicion and Pekingese.

The office of Chancellor is performed by a series of interchangeably bluff American millionaire businessmen.  Money, outspokenness, and attractive unmarried offspring are the only requirements for this post.  It is preferred if they make their money from a single, slightly-humorous commodity, so that they can be known as "The Pickle King" or "Mr Wonder Tonic."

Debate is achieved by various bright young things, who support or oppose each motion via surreptitious acquisition of culturally significant tokens such as antique Spode coffee pots, drafts of the black-sheep uncle's memoires, prize Persian cats, policeman's helmets etc.  Separation of interests is achieved by assuming different names and/or disguise for each new piece of legislation.

For matters of greater constitutional weight, larger cultural tokens are required, such as prize pigs, Bentleys, or the hand of the attractive niece of the under gardener (currently engaged to the American millionaire's son.)

The role of the Civil Service is taken by a host of butlers, footmen, bookies and private detectives.  Each funds his department by accepting "considerations" for activities such as overlooking two young, titled gentlemen manhandling a marble urn up the stairs.

Budget for larger capital expenditure is controlled by conspiracy to acquire money from aunts, uncles and the American millionaire on the pretext of needing to pay bookies, get married, open small crêpe restaurants...


All those in favour: pursue your fiancée to Cannes and sneak about trying to catch her having lunch with Squiffy Elberforth; those opposed: hide in the shrubbery and await a chance to swipe the watercolour that your friend the artist sold the Duchess by mistake...

Courtship

A risky proposition,
earlier today

I went to a launch event for Deadly, Delicate by Kate Garrett, who I'd never met before but who is just as interesting in person as she'd seemed via the internet (this is not true of everybody...)

This is a pamphlet of poems centred around the theme of female pirates (with a degree of historical accuracy plus a dollop of poetic imagination; there's a LGBT angle too.)  It's a great pamphlet, and I recommend it.

(If you wanted something more solid, I also recommend Kate's previous book The Density of Salt; I reviewed it in Antiphon and it was one I really enjoyed...)

Anyway...  there was an open-mic aspect to the book launch and I read Girl, Unaccompanied — which I shall post in a week or so — and also The Man who Ate the World which was in retrospect a mistake, because it's quite a complex poem and the pub (poets in a pub, who'd credit it) was quite noisy by then.

I should have read the following.  Hopefully it will mislead you until the very last line.

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Courtship

I need you -- she is blushing, closer now;
this is in the limo, en route to the hotel --
to take me in a hostile way.  Tell me how
you'll own me.  Talk dirty.  Say you'll sell
subsidiaries and drive your staff
to penetrate my org chart, stripping
assets and rationalise the hell from chaff
in the top brass.  Her breath is hot.  She nips
his ear.  Expose me in the press
where my practices aren't up to scratch
then tie me with injunctions.  I confess
that being in legal knots makes my breath catch.
Slap me in jail...  He's eager for the deal.  It's hard
to think.  She has already cloned his credit cards.

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Originally also published in Antiphon