Excuse the heading. A schoolfriend’s birthday was 19th August, and his surname in English sounded the same as the Russian for nine. It’s always made me laugh. Right, that’s over with. Poems. My own, about umami has, as expected, sunk without trace. That is not so dispiriting as it might be because it was designed to do so, but alas my competition with Keith requires that it receives a public response to win. It has been tweeted out twice now and I fear for it, given that our rules require that we can do nothing to promote our work.
Today, Keith’s is released. And as you will see below, his is truly bad but in a way that mine isn’t – his at least promises to be a poem, But it is grandiose and pretentious, as if a confident idiot wrote it, believing he was saying something important and profound. Yes, he has captured something of the amateur poet that I did not. He begins with the grand narrative statement of the epic, like Kubla Khan https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan, then quickly pulls back on epic length, though still in the realm of the exotic, taking us more in the direction of Ozymandias https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias. From there he links the Ink Spots’, ‘I like coffee, I like tea’ to his extended metaphor of a night out in Manhattan, with which he takes us through to the end of the poem – the great lava flows from Krakatoa representing the flow of bodies around the nightspots of New York, looking for adventure. For craic. And thus to the heart of his poem for it is simply littered with dreadful puns and rhymes, of which craic is the worst. Then somehow, despite leading us into the expectation of a flowing rhyming ending, he slowly descends into doggerel from where he delivers his final abrupt pun which is the point and punchline of the poem. It’s so half-bad that I think he’s perhaps having a laugh at my expense, but I haven’t worked out how yet.
Here it is. You may support him here @Anthony74522708
Dickie White's Diary 
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