Ironed Orchids

The Ten Commandments of Slam Poetry: a list! with commentary and footnotes

1. Thou shalt adhere to the time limit
You’d think this one would be easy,
but some people just don’t seem to care.
Or they get caught in the moment,
or trapped in the glare-
like a rabbit
in headlights.

2. Thou shalt perform… something.
Something like a poem.[1]

(Whether swaggering, staggering, strutting your stuff,
owning the stage, your
staccato statements splintering ears, shouting
Proclamations! Declarations! Declamation!

..or mumbling, unsure what to do with the mic
thinking, isn’t it bright up here,
and wishing
wishing you had something, maybe a notebook,
anything
instead of this flimsy piece of paper that everyone can see
is shaking
is betraying you
while you try to perform something,
something like a poem.)

3. Thou Shalt Not bring us your confessional poetry
I mean seriously, what do you think
this is? Your new group therapy session?

(Unless, of course, you’re telling us about
that time with that girl,
you know, the one with the breasts.)

4. Thou Shalt Perform an Original Work
But don’t get too caught up on the concept
of originality, all it means
is that you didn’t steal it from the internet

And remember,
my darlings,
remember that poetry is made of words
(and not ideas) [2]
and that words have been around,
and the things they’ve heard;
and the stories they can tell
if you just listen.

(And remember,
that what poets know best is poems;
and that late at night, when we’re sleeping,
poems will speak to one another
across time.
Echoing through those dusty hallways
and thus, our minds. [3]
Repeating their patterns, their phrases, their rhythms
and their rhymes.)

And remember,
you can drop in a line
and call it pastiche,
no one will think less of you

I know this to be true,
for I have heard the mermaids singing,
each to each; [4]
(and they sing “Swim to me. Swim to me.”
“Let me enfold you.”) [5]

5. Thou Shalt Not Show Any Knowledge of pre-20th Century Poetry
Except Shakespeare, but you know, that dude was universal

6. Thou Shalt Not Perform a Love Poem
Cos no one wants to hear that soppy shit
about how her lips are as red as coral, [6]
or of that medicine, love, which
cures all sorrow [7]

(But speak, instead, about that bitch
the one who left you
or disregarded you, or just plain
failed to notice you.

Or tell us about that whore
who couldn’t see that your feelings for
her were special, quite unlike anyone
else’s feelings ever were.

Or tell us about that cunt
you know, the one who decided
that her self-esteem was worth more
to her than you were.)

You can tell us stories,
of loss, heartbreak, and betrayal
tell us of break ups, mix ups, and of divorce,
But don’t speak to us of love.

7, Thou Shalt listen to Tom Waits
And as you listen
you’ll feel a sort of nostalgia
for a life you’ve never led.

It’s life where you’ll sit in the all night diner
playing cards with criminals
who have names like cartoon characters
And you’ll fall in love with the waitress
with the dishwater blonde hair, and the tattooed tear. [8]

(And you walk through the alleys
of some not-yet-gentrified inner city, [9]
with a swagger in your step,
And see that the moon is a cold chiselled dagger [10]
and it’s rising just for you
over those rooftops and wires, and mobile phone towers.
And you’ll see it all
Yes, you’ll see it all
Through the windows of the down town train. [11]

And you’ll listen to Tom Waits
and you say “Man! He really knows, man. I mean,
that guy, he knows some shit.”
But even as you listen to Tom Waits,
and you think about the shit he knows,
it won’t ever occur to you to stop drinking.)

8, Eight.
Eight! I forget what eight was. [12]

9. Thou Shalt Listen and Applaud
I think [the MC] covered this bit

10. Thou Shalt Accept the Judges Score as Final
(Because you know
that even if the score isn’t great
that it doesn’t matter.
That LIFE is more important than this.
That YOU are more important than this.
And that poetry is the real winner.) [13]

Because you’ll know, in your secret heart,
that they just didn’t understand
and maybe that if they had got
that pop culture reference
and how well you worked it in,
then they would have laughed,
and given you a ten.

——-

Note: the sections in brackets are the bits I leave out when performing in a slam in order to adhere to to the time limit. [See section 1.]

Footnotes:
1. Michael Madodox – “Something like a lizard” which probably has a completely different name
2. Stéphane Mallarmé, to Degas [This quote is sometimes (mis)attributed to Paul Valéry]
3. T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
4. T. S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock [which, in turn, is referencing John Donne’s “Song”]
5. Tim Buckley, Song to the Siren [but the best version is by This Mortal Coil]
6. Shakespeare, Sonnet 130
7. John Donne, Love’s Growth
8.Tom Waits, Downtown train
9. I can’t remember, but I think I stole this line from someone who performed at bad!slam!no!biscuit in late 2011
10. Tom Waits, Black Wings
11. Tom Waits, Downtown train
12. Violent Femmes, Kiss Off
13. Citation Needed

What the Dragon Said: A Love Story, by Catherynne M. Valente

“What the Dragon Said: A Love Story”

So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair
and he says
why the long tale?
HAR HAR BUDDY
says the dragon
FUCK YOU.

The dragon’s a classic
the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats
take in those Christmas colors, those
impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath,
comes standard with a heap of rubylust
goldhuddled treasure.
Go ahead.
Kick the tires, boy.
See how she rides.

Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds
roll off her back like dandruff.

Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin?
I’d rather be a unicorn.
Always thought that
was the better gig. Everyone thinks
you’re innocent. Everyone calls you
pure. And the girls aren’t afraid
they come right up with their little hands out
for you to sniff
like you’re a puppy
and they’re gonna take you home.
They let you put your head right
in their laps.
But nobody on this earth
ever got what they wanted. Now

I know what you came for. You want
my body. To hang it up on a nail
over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica
who lays her head in your lap
look how much it takes
to make me feel like a man.
We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal
shit right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been
called up. This is the big game. You don’t have
to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers
like your monkey bravado
can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet
and lose. You’ve
got nothing I want.

Here’s something I bet you don’t know:
every time someone writes a story about a dragon
a real dragon dies.
Something about seeing
and being seen
something about mirrors
that old tune about how a photograph
can take your whole soul. At the end
of this poem
I’m going to go out like electricity
in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.
That last blockbuster took out a whole family
of Bhutan thunder dragons
living in Latvia
the fumes of their cleargas hoard
hanging on their beards like blue ghosts.

A dragon’s gotta get zen
with ephemerality.

You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather
with butcher’s chalk:
cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue,
chuck, chops, brisket, roast.
I dig it, I do.
I want to eat everything, too.

When I look at the world
I see a table.
All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales,
bankers and Buddha statues
the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins
if you let me swallow you whole
I’ll call you whatever you want.
Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down
at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea
Don’t they know they’d be safer
inside me?

I could be big for them
I could hold them all
My belly could be a city
where everyone was so loved
they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be
the hyperreal
post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.
I could eat them
and feed them
and eat them
and feed them.

This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn.
Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood
and they don’t burn up like comets
with love that tastes like starving to death.
And you, with your standup comedy knightliness,
covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo,
you can’t begin to think through
what it takes to fill up a body like this.
It takes everything pretty
and everything true
and you stick yourself in a cave because
your want is bigger than you.

I just want to be
the size of a galaxy
so I can eat all the stars and gas giants
without them noticing
and getting upset.
Is that so bad?
Isn’t that
what love looks like?
Isn’t that
what you want, too?

I’ll make you a deal.
Come close up
stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself
the goldpile of my body
Close enough to smell
everything you’ll never be.

Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing
is it a snake
that eats her tail
and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth
anyway? Everyone knows
poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel
like you’re just
a story someone is telling
about someone like you?
I get that. I get you. You and me
we could fit
inside each other. It’s not nihilism
if there’s really no point to anything.

I have a secret
down in the deep of my dark.
All those other kids who wanted me
to call them paladins,
warriors, saints, whose swords had names,
whose bodies were perfect
as moonlight
they’ve set up a township near my liver
had babies with the maidens they didn’t save
invented electric lightbulbs
thought up new holidays.
You can have my body
just like you wanted.
Or you can keep on fighting dragons
writing dragons
fighting dragons
re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch
you mammals
always win.
But hey, hush, come on.
Quit now.
You’ll never fix
that line.
I have a forgiveness in me
the size of eons
and if a dragon’s body is big enough
it just looks like the world.

Did you know
the earth used to have two moons?

“What the Dragon Said: A Love Story” copyright © Catherynne M. Valente

Tumblr has stripped out all the neat formatting, to see it with the layout intact, read the original on Tor.com

What Lot’s Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn’t A Pillar of Salt), By Karen Finneyfrock

Do you remember when we met
in Gomorrah? When you were still beardless,
and I would oil my hair in the lamp light before seeing
you, when we were young, and blushed with youth
like bruised fruit. Did we care then
what our neighbors did
in the dark?

When our first daughter was born
on the River Jordan, when our second
cracked her pink head from my body
like a promise, did we worry
what our friends might be
doing with their tongues?

What new crevices they found
to lick love into or strange flesh
to push pleasure from, when we
called them Sodomites then,
all we meant by it
was neighbor.

When the angels told us to run
from the city, I went with you,
but even the angels knew
that women always look back.
Let me describe for you, Lot,
what your city looked like burning
since you never turned around to see it.

Sulfur ran its sticky fingers over the skin
of our countrymen. It smelled like burning hair
and rancid eggs. I watched as our friends pulled
chunks of brimstone from their faces. Is any form
of loving this indecent?

Cover your eyes tight,
husband, until you see stars, convince
yourself you are looking at Heaven.

Because any man weak enough to hide his eyes while his neighbors
are punished for the way they love deserves a vengeful god.

I would say these things to you now, Lot,
but an ocean has dried itself on my tongue.
So instead I will stand here, while my body blows itself
grain by grain back over the Land of Canaan.
I will stand here
and I will watch you
run.

via Marina

The Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot

Burnt Norton
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                                   But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                                   Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The thrilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                                    Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

      Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movememnt; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

      The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

The Jumblies - Edward Lear

I

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

II

They sailed away in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil
Tied with a riband by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast;
And every one said, who saw them go,
‘O won’t they be soon upset, you know!
For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long,
And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong
In a Sieve to sail so fast!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

III

The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, ‘How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

IV

And all night long they sailed away;
And when the sun went down,
They whistled and warbled a moony song
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,
In the shade of the mountains brown.
‘O Timballo! How happy we are,
When we live in a Sieve and a crockery-jar,
And all night long in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail,
In the shade of the mountains brown!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

V

They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees,
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

VI

And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, ‘How tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore!’
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And every one said, ‘If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,—-
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Infant Sorrow - William Blake

My mother groan’d! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swadling bands,
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.