Poetry

I've been writing poetry for a very long time. My first English teacher discovered it was about the only way to make me write anything, and for years I just wrote random line-break pastoral poetry, transmuting into appalling self-conscious Sixth-Form Goth Poetry when I'd reached the appropriate age. I have a sea chest full of exercise books full of really bad poetry. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the prettier tip.

On The Occasion Of Dining With My Father

From an exercise in my university poetry class, and therefore the first sestina I've ever written.

A Quick Lesson in the Use of the English Language

There's not particular form to this one, it's just something I scribbled during poetry class in an attempt to vent some of my frustration at not being allowed to correct people's appalling English during the workshop. Mostly because last time I'd tried to correct their punctuation I got an earful about cramping people's creative flow and how it is tantamount to murder.

Killing Time

The title is taken from the Simon Armitage poem, the poem itself was in response to a brief to write something about "Any number NOT from one to ten" which involved the number in its form as well as its content. I'm not sure how well I fulfilled it.

Personal Judas

A villanelle. I love these, I'm just not very good at them; yes, the title is a hilarious reference to the Depeche Mode song Personal Jesus, before someone anxiously emails me to tell me I'm in danger of committing plagiarism. The epigram is of course from Full Metal Jacket.

Subconscious London

My second-ever sestina, which was going join with the first in creating a cycle of "Freudian Sestinas" until I realised it was going to be a lot of work for not much reward, and stopped. I am quite proud of this, though.

Siamese

This was a serious re-write of something I wrote several years ago, which retained very little from the original besides the line "Side by side in formaldehyde" and the general concept of two spooky little twins in specimen jars. I prefer the revised version as the former was messy and not quite so economical.

Sodium

I suppose this might be considered a song, even, as it has a chorus (or a refrain, whichever), and given the reference to Eurydice, famously married to Orpheous, that's quite a pleasing allusion, even though I don't think the rhythm is strict enough for that. As it's not necessarily clear from the poem itself, our nameless heroine is walking through a multi-story carpark late at night.

On Congenital Syphilis

I have absolutely no excuse for this, I just thought it was funny.

The Omelette

This was written as part of the same exercise that produced Breaking Eggs in the original fiction section of this website, a writing workshop centering on Quelan Foo Yung's exhibition "The Rape of Nanking". We were asked to write something that used the image of broken eggs that appeared so often in her artwork, and as I'd recently had an argument about war that contained the phrase "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" this was the result.

© Derek Des Anges (unless stated otherwise)