My present project:- a single act, five scene play.

I've spent the last few weeks since finishing the sonnets grappling in a desultory way with my next project. A Bad Poet & Worse Neighbours is envisaged as a five scene five part play in iambic pentameter. It's going to be pretty dark and at the same time humorous and hopefully witty. It seems to defy identification with any particular genre. I guess the iambic pentameter format will give it an Elizabethan or Jacobean feel, whereas the grotesquerie could be of those ages but could easily be of later provenance - Hogarthian, perhaps, or more contemporary. The small size of the cast is certainly of a piece with modern theatre.

Progress with the Bad Poet & Worse Neighbours has been rather slow, as it always is at the beginning of a project. So far, I've written about two thirds of the first scene. I've also been reading a few plays - Chekhov and Marlowe so far (bizarre juxtaposition, I realise) although I've just taken delivery of a bunch of Restoration & 18th century stuff + Ibsen. I should have done this before of course. I'm really happy with the way The Senseless Counterfeit happened. All the same, writing a Jacobean revenge tragedy without having read very widely at all in drama smacks of foolishness, even though I got lucky.

I'll elaborate on the Bad Poet at further length once I've made a bit more progress with it

Now I have written one more than The One ... And a Publication in French

Item (1)

Last Thursday, for the first time ever, I wrote four sonnets in one day. These happened to be numbers 152-155, which meant that I finally beat Shakespeare's 154. I'm presently going through the tiresome process of rewriting all the embarrassingly many efforts that aren't up to scratch, which I guess will take a few weeks. I'll still hold off publishing the 155 as a collection for a little while afterwards, however, as I would quite like to get at least half a dozen or so published independently.

          .......... speaking of which ..........

Item (2)

I'm delighted to announce that Sonnet 141, which has the dubious distinction of being my one and only piece of creative writing in French, has nevertheless been accepted by the French Literary Review for publication this coming October.

My Sonnet 74 Commended in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly

I'm delighted and proud to announce that the Sentinel Literary Quarterly has commended my Sonnet 74 in their quarterly prize competition. Congratulations to the prize winners, and to my fellow commendees.

I presume that there is some kind of embargo in place against my reproducing Sonnet 74 here. No problem with this whatsoever. Here's a link. You'll find my effort on page 8.

Sonnets: a Progress Update

It's been a ridiculously long time since my last post on this blog - three months! I vow to mend my ways.

In particular, the last sonnet I posted was no.76, the Leigh Delamere sonnet which I guerrilla-published as a Trip Advisor review of the eponymous service station. This sonnet, and what I did with it, has made a few people laugh, which is exactly what I hoped for it, it being quite a light-hearted affair.

Since Leigh Delamere, I've written a further 60 sonnets, so I'm now 155-136=19 sonnets from my Shakespeare-rinsing target. Here are a few examples:-

The first one's about Ed Victor, the literary agent.

Sonnet 77

Old Mr Victor’s robbing graves again,

but shall be back anon in Bayley Street

with shrivelled gonads of Amartya Sen

sewn into his exquisite trouser pleat.

Inside his office, on his trophy shelf,

Woolf’s womb, formaldehyded in a glass,

floats next to smirking shrunken head of Self,

wordless for once (and thankfully). Stuffed arse

(a buttock each of Amis père et fils)

does duty as a very tasteful pouffe.

A Welsh oak desk’s mounted on limbs (MacNeice);

and Eliot’s eyeballs stare in mute reproof

from collage painting made of choicest cuts

of Malcolm Gladwell and Kurt Vonnegut.

The next one was written as a good-natured piss-take of colleagues in one of the writing groups I've joined.

Sonnet 85

At tables, separate, in anoraks

we hunch, composing as we decompose,

each skull ballooning with its poison sac,

hatching the tapeworms through each mucoid nose.

Here crouch the fifth rate novelists, and there

the memoir mis’rab’lists. Unclean! Unclean!

The poet, paranoid, balefully glares,

at filth accumulating on her screen.

Abruptly back the playwright scrapes his chair,

stands up and flees crying, “Obscene! Obscene!”

Occasioned now is shift of adipose,

a grunt or two, scratching of bum or back.

We hunch, composing as we decompose

at tables, separate, in anoraks.

This one is about some chaps with huge beards going to the gym.

Sonnet 91

The oarsmen, grunting, heave; and now they row.

Nietzschean Vikings, later on the necks

of monks to whet their blades, erstwhile must go

meek ’mongst the elderly of either sex.

These do not pander to the outward forms

of sage, being garrulous and in the way.

Now Eidur frets and Sven inwardly storms.

They find, downstairs, a fjord. Whereof, coins pay

for heroes, whom its cubits twenty-five

Urd heedlessly, or Skuld, propels along

and back anon. ’Tis writ: we’re not to dive.

Nor are the tunes like Volga Boatmen’s Songs,

but jangling fuckery played far too loud

for Aquaerobic’s geriatric crowd.

The last one is what you might call a meta-sonnet, i.e. it's a sonnet about writing sonnets. Meta-sonnetry can feel a bit self-indulgent, but I still think I got a pretty decent piece of verse out of it. Another curious feature is that the rhyme scheme is what might be thought of as reverse Wyatt; in that the Petrarchan sestet typical of Wyatt comes before the Shakespearean octet also typical of Wyatt..

Sonnet 109

You reach a stage, even with stuff like this

(which some take for an elevated thing),

when it becomes routine and workaday.

Grasp you your speculum. Look into quis

and quod. You’ll find that a canary rings

the change. Marsyas at this point is flayed,

and Najibullah afterwards unmanned.

Habitually, reference is made

to time, involving hour glass and sand,

and how beauty is truth and yet shall fade.

Some guff about doubloons to bevel off.

Lastly, the dedication; this made trite,

as if to mask a snigger with a cough:

“My Lord of Bristol, and his catamite.”

POETRY COMPETITION:- THE DUNTHORNE PRIZE

Richard Craven is pleased to announce a new poetry competition. The Dunthorne Prize will be awarded for the best, i.e. worst, poem modelled on Joe Dunthorne's "Poem in which I practice happiness". The judges (Richard Craven) will be on the look-out for banality, talent's absence, and cultural deracination. Meretricious rhyme, inadvertently jarring meter, crude sententiousness, and infantile allusions to association football are all acceptable.

1st Prize: a cheque for £100
2nd prize: the opportunity to sit naked with your head in a bucket in a corner of the living room of the judges (Richard Craven) for a period not exceeding 12 hours.

Rules.
1. Poems not exceeding 50 lines are to be sent in the body of an email to rmcraven1@icloud.com.
2. Name & address for despatch of cheque in case of winning, i.e. losing, poem in the body of the email underneath the entry.
3. Deadline: 1 April 2017.
4. The decision of the judges (Richard Craven) is final.
5. The judges (Richard Craven) reserve the right to publicise, or suppress, the results of the competition, as they see fit.
6. The judges (Richard Craven) reserve the right to publish a selection of entries as an admonitory anthology, without further recompense to those whose entries are featured.

New page for pisspoor poetry, inspired by "Poem in which I practice happiness", by Joe Dunthorne in the New Statesman

Just now, I was scanning the New Statesman, and came upon what has to be the most facile, disgusting piece of doggerel ever accorded the dignity of publication. Ladies & gentleman, I give you the excrescence known as "Poem in which I practice happiness". It was conceived by one Joe Dunthorne who is, somehow, the garnerererer of a panoply of awards for his, er, writing. Don't ask me, that's what Wikipedia says. And he's got a British Council listing, according to which he is a Faber New Poet. That's Faber, remember them? T.S.Eliot must be turning in his fucking grave.

Anyway, here is his ickle poemy woemy. Those of a delicate disposition are advised to look away now:-

"I love pigeons
even when their claws are stumps
and they walk as though in heels.
I love guinea pigs
for the idea they are in some way
a pig. Their heartbeats make their bodies
vibrate. I like to pretend
to answer them. Whom may I say is speaking?
I love football. More people love football
than love social justice
but that doesn't mean football
isn't brilliant. Whenever I head the ball
I feel a poem evaporate.
I hate the bit of the poem
where you're obliged
to hate something.
I love the piano.
I love true crime.
I love the sun
when it arrives
like a tray
of drinks."

And the New Statesman published this. E.J.Thribb, eat your heart out. I despair.

Actually, I don't despair. What I have decided to do is start a new page on this blog, for pisspoor poetry which somehow manages to get published.

British Library EThOS: On the singularity of the world : an actual-counterpart theory of modality

British Library EThOS: On the singularity of the world : an actual-counterpart theory of modality