OK.
Some of the poems in this new book are in forms
but I also teach a forms of poetry class.
And as soon as I teach my student friends the form
I immediately try and suggest ways to start bending the form.
And I happen to rather enjoy the pantoum which
is-- how many of you guys know what a pantoum is?
Oh, please help us.
Come on.
Who can say it?
So the first and the second letter come from--
the second and third stanza have the question for--
Close.
Yeah.
The pantoum is, actually it's a Malayan repeating form;
it's written in quatrains, four line stanzas.
And the second and fourth line of each stanza
becomes the first and third line of the subsequent stanza right
through the end stanza and in the end stanza,
additionally, the second and fourth line
turn out to be the first and third line of the first stanza,
usually in reverse order.
OK.
There will be a quiz.
But it seemed to me because repetition is not
so interesting unless it's varied,
it seemed to me not so interesting to repeat
entire lines.
So in this poem, I repeat only parts of lines or indeed
sometimes only parts of words.
Yeah who cares?
But it seems to me to be a very kind of jittery form,
so this poem is called Jittery.
Nancy takes me to a coffee shop called
Jitters, which is I'm thinking like naming a bar drunk.
What you get when you get too much of what it
is they've got to give you though,
that's just me of course going off.
I'm feeling kind of drunk on talk and too much
coffee and Nancy's laughing easy like she maybe thinks, OK.
Me, I mean, though I'm reading into things of course, talk,
laughter, speed reading into things,
what with all the coffee and little sleep
I'm running on of late.
Things, their course, have not been great
though I'm feeling not unhappy to be alive and not asleep
and here with Nancy blabbing out my life
like some black and white Karl Malden
movie tough guy grateful to finally confess.
And yes, I'll obsess on splitting that infinitive since
Nancy knows syntax (syn-, together, plus tassein,
to arrange).
Nancy knows yoga, Neruda, dogs, and yes,
to the body's thoughtless crush on the world
and her smile flies open like a sun flushed dove.
And right, I know I talk too much and think too much about
what I'm thinking and not enough about what I say,
and simmer too long in the crock of myself,
which is right where I get when I get this way and want to say
shut up Simmerman, just shut up...
Nancy takes me to a coffee shop.