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Home>>Poetry>>Poetry Collections>>The Book of My Enemy>>Recent Verse>>Fridge Magnet Sonnets

Fridge Magnet Sonnets

Picture
Except for the punctuation and capitalization, these sonnets were assembled on a refrigerator door entirely within the restrictions imposed by the Basic Magnetic Poetry Kit and the Cerebra Supplemental Kit. Whether the resulting, apparently unavoidable, pastiche of Wallace Stevens was dictated by a propensity in the mind of the author or by the nature of magnetic poetry would be nice to know. If the latter, there must now be refrigerators all over the world that look like the galley proofs of Harmonium.


                        I
I ribald sophist, you deft paragon,
Whet in our cloister languid dreams of sweet
Tongue-worship for the storm we cudgel on
With profligate palaver of bare feet.
But fiddle as we may, the shadows fall
Blue, tawdry, obdurate and lachrymose –
A torpid, adolescent caterwaul
Like tumid skin of a morose morass.
‘So what?’ you cry, and quashed I must eschew
Arid alacrity of epithet,
Be cool, austere, brusque, trenchant, true like you,
Not vapid and verbose as I am yet:
From here on in spurn brazen lusciousness,
Fetter my fecund zeal and chant fluff less.

​                        II
Unctuous misanthrope, abscond to life!
Pant in a lather for a peachy breast.
Ascetic gynophobes usurp their lust,
Rip with the tacit rusty temporal knife
Of stultifying pallid acumen
The gorgeous mist of frantic puppy love
And enervate it to the putative.
No affable abeyance can supplant
Hot need, stalwart pariah and miscreant.
Let unrequited priapism, then,
Capriciously lambaste banal repose,
Ache, pound, boil, heave, drool juice and fulminate.
Delirious love is never delicate:
A florid blood-red spring rain shakes the rose.

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      • Philip Roth's Alternative America
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      • Save Us From Celebrity
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      • The Question of Karl Kraus
      • John Bayley's Daily Bread
      • Kingsley and the Women
      • Canetti Man of Mystery
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      • The Flight from the Destroyer
      • Saying Famous Things
      • Insult to the Language
      • The Perfectly Bad Sentence
      • Happiness Writes White
      • All Stalkers Kill
      • Best Eaten Cold
      • White Shorts of Leni Reifenstahl
      • Made in Britain, More or Less
      • Movie Criticism in America
      • Show Me the Horror
      • The Measure of A.D. Hope
      • Robert Hughes Remembers
      • Modern Australian Painting
      • On Diamond Jim McClelland
      • The Voice of John Anderson
      • Niki Lauda Wins Going Slowly
      • Damon Hill's Bravest Day
      • Jonathan James-Moore
      • Ian Adam
      • Pat Kavanagh
      • Starting with Sludge
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      • Russell Davies
      • Bryan Appleyard
      • Marina Hyde
      • Bruce Beresford
      • Michael Frayn
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      • Injury Time
      • Sentenced to Life >
        • Japanese Maple
        • Sentenced to Life
        • Procedure for Disposal
        • Leçons des ténèbres
        • Driftwood Houses
        • Event Horizon
        • Neuland
        • Echo Point
        • Change of Domicile
        • Holding Court
        • Too Much Light
        • Nature Programme
        • My Latest Fever
        • Nina Kogan's Geometrical Heaven
        • The Emperor's Last Words
        • Winter Plums
      • Nefertiti in the Flak Tower >
        • Whitman and the Moth
        • The Falcon Growing Old
      • Angels over Elsinore
      • The Book of My Enemy >
        • Recent Verse
        • Verse Letters
      • Opal Sunset
      • Other Passports >
        • Recent Verse >
          • The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered
        • Parodies etc.
        • Earlier Verse
        • Verse Diaries
      • Fan Mail >
        • To Russell Davies: a letter from Cardiff
        • To Martin Amis: a letter from Indianapolis
        • To Pete Atkin: a letter from Paris
        • To Prue Shaw: a letter from Cambridge
        • To Tom Stoppard: a letter from London
        • To Peter Porter: a letter to Sydney
    • Epic Poems >
      • The River in the Sky
      • Gate of Lilacs
      • The Divine Comedy >
        • Hell - Cantos 1-3
        • Purgatory - Cantos 1-3
        • Heaven - Cantos 1-3
      • Poem of the Year
    • Books About Poetry >
      • Somewhere Becoming Rain
      • Poetry Notebook >
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      • Dancing Master
      • Faded Mansion
      • Have You got a Biro I can Borrow?
      • I Have to Learn to Live Alone Again
      • Hill of Little Shoes
      • History & Geography
      • I See the Joker
      • Laughing Boy
      • My Brother's Keeper
      • National Steel
      • Nothing Left to Say
      • Sessionman's Blues
      • Song for Rita
      • Stranger in Town
      • Sunlight Gate
      • The Egoist
      • The Eye of the Universe
      • The Ice Cream Man
      • Femme Fatale
      • The Master of the Revels
      • Thirty-year Man
      • Winter Spring
  • Video
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      • Series Three
      • Series Four
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