Sonnet progress

I've so far written 52 sonnets of my projected total of 155 - Shakespeare wrote 154; see what I'm doing?

Here are a couple of relatively recent efforts. 43 seems to be some kind of attack on ivory tower relativism, and 47 ridicules the vapid raptasticness of Kate Tempest:-

Sonnet 43

Reason suborned by shallow sentiment;

old culture chloroformed, hog-tied and gagged;

facts executed, and their corpses dragged

through lecture halls of Anglia and Trent.

Truth twisted on the relativist’s rack;

philosophy traduced, and maimed, and marred;

poor questions begging in the seminar;

and beauty drowning in a lake of cack.

The march through institutions, once begun,

acquires momentum, grows unstoppable.

So logic’s murdered and is beastly dead,

and Gramsci’s parasitic worms have won.

Sleep now, brainfart, and dream of shitting bull,

for nothing else exists inside your head.

Sonnet 47

That trite millennial aerial, Tempest

channels, inevitably, Caliban.

It lies beneath her dignity to scan

her adventitious rhymes - a palimpsest,

whose artificial patois has effaced,

beneath a sediment of right-on grime

(Cultural Marxism’s squalidest crime),

high culture’s faintest unregarded trace.

Eternal shame of cringing TV pimp,

of fawning critic, slave to passing fad,

of coked-up literary copraphage!

That agency’s limp-wristed PR gimp

should lavish praise on something quite so bad

marks the degeneracy of the age.

Publication of the Twisted50 anthology, featuring my story Lolitasaurus

Chris Jones and his colleagues at Create50 have been so good as to include my short story Lolitasaurus in their inaugural Twisted50 anthology. This will be out on Kindle in the next few days, with a paperback edition to follow in a week or two. Here's a link to their website.

My newest sonnet, inspired by the inexpressible loveliness of Stokes Croft

Sonnet 32

Perplexed and eke disgusted, I look out

through windows on the street at broken men,

and scope a swarm controlled by pathogens,

all yellow eyes and chronic shuffling gout.

Tuberculosis spits from blackened teeth,

from winnowed skulls the septic flesh withdraws,

and diabetic wounds are scratched with claws,

disclosing the obscenity beneath.

Where once was moderation and restraint

with freely chosen boundaries to keep,

is now the consequence of lawless vice:

squalor, indignity, and rancid taint,

nightmare while reason, opiated, sleeps,

and souls embedded comatose in ice.

Sonnet frenzy - and Sonnet 21

Having written the first half of Odour Issues by February, I abruptly left off in order to get stuck into a welter of short stories. Having written eight or ten stories, probably by the beginning of May, I took up anew with the Montpeliad, which had been languishing for a couple of years as the 40 line introduction to a Papist (Pope - giddy?) satire of the follies of Montpelier in Bristol, where I have lived for over a decade. The Montpeliad being completed, very swiftly published in Bristol 247, and daubed as previously described on the walls of Meat/Liquor, I have now embarked on a sonnet frenzy. The thinking here is that Shakespeare wrote - correct me if I'm wrong - 154 sonnets, so I can write 155 of the bastards. Anyway, I've written 21 so far, in a variety of Petrarchan and Shakespearean rhyme scheme, although none so far in the Spenserian style. My latest effort is a sort of experimental reverse Petrarchan, insofar as the sestet precedes the octet.

Sonnet 21

Has Earth to show anything more uncouth?

Dulled to a greyness now, the underpants

cling limply to his calamari cleft:

their seventh week as barnacle to youth,

a scowling spitting verminous pissant

of all the social niceties bereft.

Fair maiden, pharmaceutically fatigued

carps like a slave in his triumphant ear;

joins, renegade, the world against him leagued.

Where is the valium of yesteryear?

Not to be had at 6am, for sure.

Watch from your window as the forms recede.

A brief crescendo. Someone slams a door.

You lie upon your bed and try to read.

I Join the Ranks of Bristol's Graffitirati.

I recently spent an entire week writing utter filth on the walls of the disabled toilet in Stokes Croft Bar MeatLiquor. The Montpeliad, all 620 lines of it, is now up in glorious monochrome Sharpie, and I have tendonitis of the inside elbow.*

I'll get myself back down there in the next day or two and take some pictures. For now, I thought I would take the opportunity to thank Chris and his team for being so very nice about the weirdo in the khazi.

*19.10.16 I saw the doctor about this a few weeks ago, and she diagnosed bicep tendonitis. It's not really getting any better as yet, sad to say.

An amusing juxtaposition in yesterday's Guardian

In the echo chamber that is modern leftism, it is of course perfectly normal for the bourse of a newly failed state to be entering a bull market:-

Sonnet 14

Sonnet 14 has as its target a certain particularly coarse kind of rage which seems lately to have overtaken political discourse on the left of the spectrum. I'm thinking particularly of

(i) the anti-semitism controversy which Livingstone & Galloway and more recently Corbyn have got caught up in;

and, perhaps more immediately of

(ii) the reaction of many Remainers to the Brexit vote, and the bullying and coercive tones adopted by Remainers, which - and here's my theory - drove Leavers underground. This explanation accounts quite well for the surprising nature of the result; call this the 'quiet leaver' explanation.

Anyway, without further ado, here's the work in question.

Sonnet 14

Your face inflamed with that bottomless rage,

that fashionable nihilism quite bereft

of moderation or respect for age:

the ranting coarseness of the modern left.

There’s more decorum in the ape-house yet

than iv’ry towers in defence of Mao.

Fly to your eco-conference by jet,

and do not ask the little people how

your cosmopolitan outlook’s at odds

with their quotidian reality:

the shop-workers, the carriers of hods;

to you, of course, utmost banality,

something to rant about in Stokes Croft bars

while buying the coke and ordering the cars.

Sonnet 14 has a Shakespearean rhyme scheme:- abab cdcd efef gg. Regarding the volta, I would hesitate to say that it's in its traditional place at line 9. In fact, I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is one, although there are a couple of shifts in tone. So ... not entirely orthodox in every way, but at least it's in iambic pentameter and has one of the orthodox rhyme schemes.