(All poetry by Bruce Dale Wise)

Confucius Institutes

“Three things cannot be hidden long: the sun, the moon and truth.”
—paraphrase of a Buddhist quote

by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei

The Chinese Party-Communists use wily socialites,
constructing a network of spying, propaganda sites,
for outposts called evasively Confucian Institutes,
attempting to confuse and lie, to undermine the truth.
In private, they congratulate themselves on what they’ve done,
to use the gullibility of the American.
The former Politburo Chief Li Changchun says with joy,
Confucius Institutes are perfect propaganda ploys.
Tibet, Taiwan and Falun Gong won’t there disturb the mind,
nor human rights, Tiananmen Square, 1989.

Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is a poet of the Way. Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei should not be confused with Lu Wei, the corrupt architect of the Great Firewall of China.

 

In Spite

by Caud Sewer Bile

In spite of wiretaps, the FISA warrants using lies,
the Crossfire Hurricane op, sending out the campaign spies,
paid foreigners to set up peeing hooker anecdotes,
unmasking, leaking, using secret-type subpoena notes,
in spite of this, and more unshown, the former President
and cronies could not stop the Trump’s improbable ascent.
It seems that Watergate is but a spoof compared to this—
the deep-state Spygate coming out of the Swampland Abyss.
Of course, it is denied, with surreptitious mole-like shrug,
as Main Stream feeding frenzies sweep it under hearth and rug.

Caud Sewer Bile is a poet of the Swamp, who stalks the Creature from the Dark Lagoon.

 

The Imprisonment of Tommy Robinson

by Clide Abersuwe

The sea is rough tonight. The tide is full, the moon in doubt.
The European lights of liberty are going out.
I’m hearing some reports that Tommy Robinson is jailed,
for streaming news on Muslim sex slaves, jailed with no bail.

In just one day he was locked up, and secretly was tried;
he has been tossed into the slammer, thirteen months confined.
And no one in the British press could say a thing at all;
but everywhere the truth broke out, an info waterfall.

Why was he tried and jailed for reporting on the rapes?
Has Tommy Robinson been bitten by judicial hate?
Has England’s legal system, once the envy of the World,
declined so far its citizens are fodder for misrule?

Clide Abersuwe is a poet intrigued by Scotland. Among his favourite 18th and 19th century Scottish poets and prosaists are Colin MacClaurin (1698-1746), David Hume (1711-1776), Adam Smith (1723-1790), James Hutton (1726-1797), Joseph Black (1728-1799), James Watt (1736-1819), Robert Burns (1759-1796), Walter Scott (1771-1832), Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), William Thomson, Kelvin (1824-1907), James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Of deep influence in his early years was the fruit of the creation of Colin Macfarquhar, Bell, and others—the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

 

Grin and Bear It

by Rus Ciel Durbew

“He’s happy here, it’s we can’t smile.” Aleksandr Griboyedov, “Горе от ума”, “Woe from Wit.”

As Russia is the 2018 host of World Cup;
its citizens are being nudged to keep on looking up.
It seems that smiling is not part of Russian culture yet;
and smiling looks suspicious, it’s a noticeable nyet.
But over one-and-one-half million people plan to come;
and so to shed such coldness, they’re told laughing is not dumb.
Employees of the Moscow Metro now are trained to be
less uptight with some laughing-yoga classes—happily.
So workers will be practicing to be light-hearted more.
For visitors it looks like goofy Russians are in store.

Rus Ciel Durbew is a poet of Russia. The famous Romantic playwright Griboyedov (1795-1829) was Russia’s ambassador to Qajar Persia, where he and all the embassy staff were massacred by a murderous Persian mob. Of that incident, Alecsei Burdew, reminded of Lagrange’s comment on the beheading of Lavoisier, said of that Persian mob, “In its harpy-like frenzy, it destroyed that brilliant, comedic, poetic dramatist, Russia could not produce another like in two centuries or more.”


NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


CODEC Stories:

9 Responses

  1. Leo Yankevich

    I enjoyed these all, but I still feel cheated that you show no bravado in your use of long lines. A bad habit. Write rhymed tetrameters and grow a pair.

    Reply
    • Joe Tessitore

      This is the best comment I’ve ever read!
      The improbability of one poet telling another poet to grow a pair renders it truly hilarious!
      Congrats to Pseudonym Sam for having elicited it.

      Reply
  2. Sri Wele Cebuda

    I thank Mr. Mantyk for posting these four poems @ SCP. He is a very gracious editor; and I appreciate his willingness to publish poems that touch on topics that deal with violations of truth, compassion, and tolerance, along with humour. May he continue to be a light “in this dark world and wide”.

    Reply
  3. Bic Uwel "Erased"

    Mr. Tessitore brings up a peripheral topic of literature, which I “personally” find intriguing, and that is the pseudonym. In the New Millennium, of course, it is rampant because of the computer, gamer names, user names, etc. But pseudonyms historically have also been very popular.

    In the visual arts, some of the pseudonymous painters who have influenced my art, particularly in regard to the bilding [sic], include Masaccio, Donatello, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Parmigianino, El Greco, Caravaggio, Canaletto, Le Corbusier, Picasso, and Marc Chagall, among others.

    In literature, the pen name, i. e., the nom de plume, is quite common. The “real” pseudonym Sam, of course, is Samuel Clemens, America’s great humourist: Mark Twain.

    Other past pseudonymous figures, who have had the strongest influence on my writing, include Molière, Voltaire, and Novalis.

    One of my favourite American poets is Edgar Allan Poe. As I have been fond of puzzles from my youth, I have enjoyed Poe’s pseudonyms. That Poe himself liked puzzles is not a doubt in my mind, as in his short story “The Gold Bug”. He published his first volume of poems under the name “a Bostonian”. When he joined the US military, he enlisted under the name Edgar A. Perry. He even published what I regard as his best poem “The Raven” under the delightful name Quarles. In addition, he used similar sounding names to his own name in his fiction, as in his abrupt-ended novel “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” or in his fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin. I paid homage to him in this brief tennos published at Triggerfish:

    Message in a Tome
    by Waldeci Erebus

    I came upon an old chateau bathed in a moonlit gloom,
    and entered through its Gothic door into a lofty room.
    I came upon an oval portrait of a somber Age.
    The name recorded on the painting was Earl Dolan Page.
    The visage of the gentleman, dark and ethereal,
    was like the face of one’s interred, premature burial.
    Below the image on a table lay an ebon book,
    the Poet’s corpus whose dark countenance adorned that nook.
    I slowly opened it, and came upon what seemed to be
    a purloined letter hidden there. It was addressed to me.

    In the 19th century many women took nom de plumes, so as not to reveal their gender, like George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross), Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte), Ellis Bell (Emily Bronte), Amandine Aurora Lucile Dupin (George Sand), inter alia.

    Perhaps the most notable poet in the Modernist era who influenced my usage of charichords, that is, these anagrammatic heteronyms that I use, is the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. He used over 70 different names, though four or five dominated. I lost count after two hundred, and no longer even care how many I have or use, though, like Pessoa’s case, a certain number of charichords dominate.

    Other 20th century pseudonymous writers whose work has influenced my poetry and my prose include O. Henry, Guillaume Apollinaire, George Orwell, Masaoka Shiki, James Herriot, John le Carré, Joseph Conrad, Lu Xun, Natsume Sōseki, Pablo Neruda, Paul Celan, Q (in his anthologies), Saint-John Perse, Saki, Yukio Mishima, Ayn Rand, Blaise Cendrars, C. S. Forester, Dr. Seuss, Eric Maria Remarque, Gabriela Mistral, H. D., and Umberto Saba. In one of the strangest turns of fate in my life, it was a poem I wrote on Umberto Saba, which was the first poem of mine ever published, and that only at the beginning of the present decade: 2010.

    Outside of literature the pseudonym has also been quite popular, as for example, Buddha, Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, and so many others.

    One of my favourite areas of study is mathematics. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who found an expansive formula, which uses his own name (which he always used in mathematics), is perhaps better known by his literary pen name Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice in Wonderland”. Other mathematicians who used pen names include so many names I can’t pull them all together on this comment; but they include Paul Mongré (Felix Hausdorff), the polymathematical hydra Nicolas Bourbaki, and even Jehovah Sanctus Unus in his work on alchemy, otherwise known as Isaac Newton.

    But this has already turned into a microessay; and that is enough.

    Reply
  4. Leo Yankevich

    Hi, Bruce,

    Again, you prove that you are the greatest literary critic, at least the most the entertaining, but what I am compared to you?

    Reply
  5. Brice U. Lawseed

    Charles Krauthammer

    These past ten months he’d been uncharacteristic’lly mute,
    and thought that silence would be coming to an end quite soon.
    But, no, the cancer is acute and spreading rapidly,
    He only has a few weeks left to live it sadly seems.
    This is the final verdict, and his fight is nearly done,
    as is the role that he has played here in America.
    He thanked his doctors, readers, viewers, friends and colleagues who
    had made his life worth living in his long pursuit of truth.
    He leaves his life with no regrets, though he is sad to leave
    us here without his thoughtful talk and true nobility.

    Reply
  6. Brice U. Lawseed

    Update:

    How fast things change. The above poem will be published tomorrow elsewhere, but already it needs an update.

    Charles Krauthammer (1950-2017)

    These past ten months he’d been uncharacteristic’lly mute,
    and thought that silence would be coming to an end quite soon.
    But, no, the cancer was acute and spreading rapidly,
    He hadn’t any seconds left to live it sadly seems.
    This is the final verdict, and his fight for life is done,
    as is the role that he has played here in America.
    He thanked his doctors, readers, viewers, friends and colleagues too
    who made his life worth living in his long pursuit of truth.
    He left his life with no regrets, though he was sad to leave
    us here without his thoughtful talk and true nobility.

    Brice U. Lawseed is a poet of law, frequently focusing on the nation’s capital and its environs.

    Reply
  7. Clide Abersuwe

    Though, of course, this strand will be relegated to the ash heap of history and no one will read it, I just have to make a comment about the blithering hypocrisy that sits about these comments. I wrote a poem about the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, and no one gave a damn; several commenters insidiously slammed me, but hadn’t a suspicion about the artistry in my poem; and now those very same individuals swoon over a long-winded blathering poem on the same topic. If I thought there was any hope at any honest, intelligent literary criticism here, I could accept such judgments. But such is not the case. There is not the slightest doubt that I live in one of the most benighted eras of literary criticism.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Captcha loading...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.