Form

Painful as it may be for him to confess it, the present author’s treatise on comparative prosody is pretty much the last thing you should refer to unless you wish your manuscript to turn immediately to recycled paper (you know they don’t mail them back anymore, don’t you?). However, a few sensible guidelines and a couple of sound examples will solve the dilemma of how to write poetry that pleaseth the Submission Editor. Let’s state, then, some useful rules.

• Never use ten syllables in a line. It’s much safer to stay under.
• Don’t even think of rhyming. Sporadic half-rhymes of the most incoherent type will make you look ‘smart’ but only if they are cast about at random. Following even a vague pattern is considered bad taste.
• Never use more than two lines with the same number of syllables or of stresses. An exception is using a costant number of syllables by breaking words in two at the end of the line, as in:

However, even this is somewhat old style: you can irritate the reader as much and with much less effort by arranging random line breaks in random-length lines. It also sounds deliciously e.e. cummings.

• Use difficult words sparingly, but do use them, particularly if you don’t know what they mean. The present author has once met a rather silly girl who, meaning to write ‘yellow’, thought of replacing this commonplace word with the pigment lutein, but could only think of ‘lanthanum’ (‘a metal’, inform us professors Cotton and Wilkinson in their wonderful book on inorganic chemistry, ‘of pale grey colour’). Her editor was ecstatic. In particular, in the USA and in Canada, use Latinate or, better, Greek words, like ‘chalcogenide’, in England use obscure Anglo-Saxon words like ‘reeve’, in Australia use names of abstruse animals or plants, like ‘wobbegong’ and in Ireland (or, rather, if you are pretending to be Irish), use Celtic terms like ‘crwth’ or ‘loch’. In Canada you can use French words, preferably those that are never used in English: why say ‘cheese’ when you can have ‘fromage’ instead? A thesaurus (or, in the latter case, a French dictionary) will be a precious help, but try not to use it too sensibly. Linger on dubious equivalencies and terms you’ve never heard before.
• Alternate endings, and in particular don’t dream of using only masculine ones. It is considered sexist.

This said, and keeping in mind what said in the previous chapter, let’s see how a poem could be built. The market is full of books that tell you that to conceive a poem you need to ‘relax, surround yourself with pleasant things’ and crap like that. The Present Author begs to differ: you are probably haggled by an ugly wife and surrounded by the garish toys of your spoilt children and still should produce a steady stream of poems. It is his (the P.A.’s) opinion that you can do so starting from any viable source, and that this ought not to consist of actual literature. Let’s take as an example his list of groceries. It reads:

Yoghurt
Cherries
Oregano
Salmon
Olives
Cucumbers
Toilet paper
Deodorant
Lemons

It should be immediately obvious that there is something very wrong about it. Olives, oregano and cucumbers denounce the writer as the wop he actually is and imply that he might have more serum than cholesterol in his blood. That they ought to be expunged is obvious. The absence of alcohol in the list is enough to incense any born Englishman, and ought to be fixed as well. Yoghurt is a tad too healthy and should better be removed. The rest is fairly acceptable: the yoghurt is a tad too healthy but can be tolerated and oregano can be doctored to something exotic. Let’s then rewrite the list, choosing a theme, for example Jamaican:
(Cherries)
Mace
Akee
Cod
Toilet paper
Deodorant
Lime
Rum

Now let’s build around this, tentatively. First thing, let’s make the writer a dipsomaniac and express it ‘poetically’, introducing at the same time the idea that a supermarket might help:

1. Another empty bottle of Appleton [you treat yourself to the best, what?] rolls on the floor,
2. And stops on the bed sheets
3. Still reeking of you and of me
4. While your bronze body bends
5. Cutting the last lime
6. Your shape suggesting the yielding ripeness of the akee
7. That’s not there.

This said, let’s see whew we stand; the writer being a male, we can do without the cherries.

Mace
Akee
Cod
Toilet paper
Deodorant
Lime
Rum

Seen the turn things have taken, it seems hard to introduce the toilet paper theme; perhaps we can festoon it somewhere on the floor between lines 2 and 3 for the American market (which loves toilet implements). Mace is quite easy: outside the Caribbean it is known only as a self-defence gas and nobody has the faintest of what it smells like. We can therefore shamelessly plunge in the stereotype that tropical women, other than having a bronze skin, also smell like tropical spices. Cod requires a bit of originality, but after all this hogwash it will pass unobserved. Let’s see the almost-finished product:

1. In the streets the rasta-
2. farians celebrate
3. their absent
5. prophet
6. with poor festoons.
7. Inside
8. Another empty bottle of Apple-
9. ton rolls on the
10. floor and
11. stops on the
12. bed-sheets still reeking of
13. you and of
14. me your faint scent of the
15. mace that is
16. not there
18. while your bronze body
19. bends cutting the last
20. lime your shape suggests the yiel-
21. ding ripeness of the
22. akee
23. that is not
24. there
26. And I wish
27. sometimes we
28. were like those simple
29. believers cook-
30. ing rice and cod
31. that is
32. almost not there
34. and laying out rolls
35. of toilet
36. paper in the wind for Halié
37. Selassié
38. Who’s never been
39. Here.

Now, you might think of calling it a day, but you shouldn’t. It is crappy enough, and cutting all phrases exactly where it makes them least clear improves on it a lot in the eye of the reviewer but it isn’t pretentious enough yet. This is the time for clipping the most blatant stereotypes and replacing them with Roget-induced nonsense; it is the time for clouding the lack of ideas with cloudy grammar and excesses of gerundives. Let’s get some sourcebook on Jamaica and se ourselves to work. The best parts to rogetise are:

‘poor’ (line 6): Anglo-Saxon countries dislike the word and replace it with U.S. ‘underprivileged’, U.K. ‘working class’ and Canadian ‘native’. Australians never even allude to the concept.

‘bronze body’ (line 12): it’s a bit too stereotypical. Another metal would do, even a pale grey one, but it’s better not to let us be dragged by chemistry too much; a mineral, perhaps? A chalcogenide, for instance? The problem here is that we have to retain the concept that the woman is a tropical type.

‘ripeness’ (line 14) is too commonly referred to a body, sounds too sexual and on top of that if you are talking of akee, people expect something more exotic along with it.

‘faint’ (line 10) is one of those words people connect with old poetry.

The Present Author will eventually get around to improving this piece further; in the meanwhile, you can email him with your own suggestions. Preposterous enough pieces will promptly be published on this site (if not on paper).