New Poem by Todd Swift

first draft of my first poem in months...

As ‘Heavenly Bodies’ by Tamaryn played

I came out of myself, lost the way, was the river in the middle

of the road, the third movement, the moving van, a targeted thing,

gossamer wing, the last to fire on the smoking man; fiddle

with your days if you can, until you break a string. I was giddy,

lost, grown relatively fat, measureless to myself, on a high
shelf, but toppling; I fell in love most days, many ways;

should have been a donut glaze; I floated like heat haze; broke

laws like others gauze; runners ran through the tape of my dreams.

Was seamless, fragmented, and head of the department of looms;

I ran from hall to hall patterning rooms; was a shoe-gaze instrumental.

They could have put me down as mental if they’d caught me then.

But I was so alone in the music of dreamy unstoppable procession

of being forgotten; a shoe in the back; coin under the shoe; more me

than you, but less of me than no one at all; the sigh before the squall;

the breath before the rattle; endless mindless universal prattle:

mitochondrion and collider, spermatid and nucleus, spattering.

poem by Todd Swift; revised online 28/11/2012

Comments

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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