Swift's Juvenilia

Friday 21 December 2012

Eyes

EYES

Spar of the eye, rocket of the plaything

The curve of white dandelions releasing

Blue a winter pleasing

Curl of the queer soft twist

Spoke of the gentle swing of my soft eye

All is in the swirl of my eye arcing

The wrist of the old man swiftly

The burr of sharp girls in the city quickly

The red of the red lights frankly

Onto the spindle of my lid

Onto the spoor of my sight

In among the tractable fold of the retina

Look from the side and see clearer than frontwise

All is all in the halfway sprawl of my sideways eyes.

St-Lambert, circa 1983.

Limbs From The Broken Trees

LIMBS FROM THE BROKEN TREES

Limbs from the broken trees are my god’s hair.

Autumn pages are his turning waifs.

Thrones from the throaty earth bow his rule.

Yet the silver juggler is his favourite fool

and red pangs of his startle care

so the blood red shame of him carves him safe.

In the burning flock of cold falls his ash.

Pauper is he, beggar in the streeting frost.

Drunk in the bowery of his blacking frame.

My god in the mouth of a searivering blame.

Accipiter hair is his dying flash

for the winking Abraham Men are always lost.

St-Lambert, 1982.

Chores

CHORES

Bitches! Bastards! Everything to them

is the lawn cut and the bursting dog walked,

and I without money for a lifestyle

they give me the pay equivalent of an hour

of a workman’s salary

and I, squandering and literary,

prone to pursue deprecating luxury

beg off to the dopefiends and millionaires

nervepinched beside me.

A genuine genius in the house

suffering parental gruelling generosity

O they treat me like their child to be proud

But I am turbaned in the shroud

they leave the unsound and poverty-dead in

with, to offset the pallor, the penniless grin:

the platinum fixture of the cloud.

The rest of my life will be spent

siphoning off my benefactors

and benefactresses’ graces.

The precocious and talented are not meant

ever, under God, to earn a cent.

St-Lambert, circa 1982.

Tiger

TIGER

One’s got to be a tiger

to outlive this conflagration.

I should like to make a wager:

man’s changed to spots from celebration and oration.

In the fire I drew my love

she could only make an apparition.

She was pretty white in the flesh

though she was in bad condition.

In the gold and fire up above

two things happened to transpire:

I gave up my wool blazer for tiger teeth

and turned in my love for underneath.

St-Lambert, circa 1984.

Introduction

I am a published poet, university teacher, critic, and editor/publisher of poetry. Welcome. Although I have had eight full collections published, since 1999, and numerous pamphlets and chapbooks published since 1990, little of my juvenilia is widely available to the reading public (as of yet).

However, between 1981 and 1986, I wrote hundreds of poems, while living on the South Shore, across from Montreal, in the city of St-Lambert, Quebec, on Putney Avenue. At this time I attended Chambly County High School; and then Marianopolis College. While few if any of these poems written before my 20th birthday seemed right for my early collections, at the time, in retrospect, there seems no good reason to suppress them now, especially as many feature similar themes and styles to my later work, though in general they are more directly in thrall to the styles of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Auden, and Dylan Thomas, than my later work. However, as these poets have always been some of my key inspirers (along with Shakespeare, Donne, Swinburne, Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, WC Williams, Wallace Stevens, and FT Prince), it seemed no harm was being done by publishing them online.

It may be that in time I produce a book of these. I make no claims for their inferiority or indeed superiority, when compared to my mature work. In some ways, I love these early poems more; in 1987, after travelling to Belfast, my work changed - it became public, and gained a wider sense of the contemporary.

Since Withers, hundreds of years ago, poets have been compiling their juvenilia, and publishing it, perhaps most famously, Byron's Fugitive Pieces.

A note on these versions: I have made few if any revisions, though silently correcting typos or grammatical anomalies that no longer seem to make sense to me; as well as any diction that is glaringly off - though the idea is to present, in the main, the poetry as it was when first typed up in what were my "final" versions; most of these poems went through between five and ten drafts. The drafts I am using here were the ones meant to be sent out to editors of magazines (I began having work published seriously in recognised journals in my late teens). I have also tended to allow each line to commence with a lower case letter unless it begins a new "sentence" or seems required by the form of the poem.

All poems copyright Todd Swift, 2012. No reprinting or reuse of these poems is permitted without express written permission of the author.