Category Archive: Poetry
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
"...and the Nobel goes to..."
The 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Though a defensible choice (after all, didn’t the Man in Black himself say of Dylan: “This man can rhyme the tick of time”*), we see little point in arguing the point. The Varnished Culture congratulates him and trusts that he will not take it too seriously. We have written before on the alien ceremonies, the Noh system of awards, reserved for the very few. “Competitions are set by the people who win them” says a character…
Continue Reading →Looking Up At the Stars
(image of Descent into the Maelstrom by Harry Clarke)
Today, 3rd October 1849, they found Edgar Allan Poe delirious in a gutter on the streets of Baltimore. The treating doctor remarked upon Poe’s “expansive forehead…and those full-orbed and mellow, yet soulful eyes for which he was so noticeable when himself, now lustreless…” He died 4 days later. And, as his strength Failed him at length He met a pilgrim shadow – “Shadow.” said he, “Where can it be – This land of Eldorado?”
Continue Reading →The Greatest
Ali takes out the Fab Four with one punch (photo by Autore Sconosciuto)
Muhammad Ali (January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) threw in the towel yesterday. Born Cassius Clay (he took his new names, respectively, from The Prophet and a commanding general of the third Caliphate), he was really the smartest and sweetest heavyweight. His poetry was naïve but he was pure poetry-in-motion in the ring – he looked great, he moved beautifully and his mouth was as fast as his feet and fists. Those titanic fights of the seventies (boxing’s apotheosis) linger in the mind, even for those who hate the sport: the 1971 loss to Joe Frazier, the Rumble in the Jungle over Foreman in 1974; the Thriller…
Continue Reading →“Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages”
(Painting of William Shakespeare attributed to John Taylor)
Commemorating the death of the Bard (April 23 (?) 1564 to April 23, 1616) today, we note that William Shakespeare mesmerised his world, and the world ever since, although recently it seemed his status had become diminished. We predict this to be a mere phase. His plays are still staged and he will persist (to some, annoyingly so) in outpointing everyone else. Here are some random tributes, old and new: Shakespeare changes the entire meaning of what it is to have created a man made out of words. [Harold Bloom, The Western Canon 1994] What is generally forgotten is that Shakespeare himself is…
Continue Reading →Howl
By T.A. Steinlen
It is 60 years since Allen Ginsberg wrote and recorded this remarkable poem. It is a sort of Beat Waste Land, filled with dark allusions, written in a fresh and very personal style, reminiscent of Whitman (with touches of Ezra Pound). Rather than striking one as factually correct (some of the hellishness may be more from peyote than memory), it impresses as a work of great subjective truth, a nightmarish daydream of depravity, longing and sorrow. It is also probably the first explicitly gay poem, starkly and graphically so. What impresses most, however, are the cadence, the monadic effect, and some killer lines:…
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