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The Prestige of the Puppet-Master

To be deceived must bring some satisfaction,
For all are well aware of the illusion
Yet most will play the dupe quite willingly;
Indeed, they’ll pay good coin for cheap distraction,
Preferring the excitements of confusion
To the drab wasteland of sobriety.
But let them spy the subtle sleight of hand
And how they howl! Deny them their delusion
And watch them claw their eyes so desperately
Lest they admit the light they cannot stand to see.

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How to Talk to a Journalist

Don’t ever argue with a seasoned liar
For he has no concern for reputation
Or truth, but simply lies for love of lying
So one is bound to ever play denier,
And thus caught up in endless refutation,
Forever falsifying, falsifying,
You’ll soon forget what’s really real and weep
For truth will never stand upon negation.
Violence, though oft a sin, is satisfying
And sometimes, sadly, all you have to keep from crying.

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St. Antony of the Strip Mall

“To contemplate the social scene is as effective a
purification as to withdraw from the world.”

—Simone Weil

I saw a gleaming city ground to sand
By friction of rank fantasy at riot
Against a plague of nameless, gnawing fears,
And thus my heart was made a barren land,
Offering naught save bitter stones for diet;
But soon upon that sullen plain appears
A Stranger swathed in brittle skin and bone,
Who seeks within its waste some scrap of quiet,
Some place where moments might become as years,
To drag from out their dust a garden grown of tears.

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Poet’s Note

The curtal sonnet was invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins and used in three of his poems, “Pied Beauty” probably being the most famous:

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Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
__Praise him.

.

This poem comprises 11 lines rhyming abcabcdbcdc with the final line being little more than a single foot, though a “foot” is something of a subjective term when it comes to Hopkins’ metrics. I decided to condense my own experiments with this form typographically, presenting them in 10 lines with the last becoming an alexandrine featuring an internal d rhyme at the penultimate foot. I chose to avoid Hopkins’ sprung rhythm because, frankly, I find it difficult to write, but also because I feel its heaviness tends toward abstractions and histrionics which, although something of a relief from the prevailing modernist voice Dr. Salemi has brilliantly characterized as “portentous hush,” just doesn’t suit my style at the end of the day.

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Shaun C. Duncan is a picture framer and fine art printer who lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

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12 Responses

  1. Joseph S. Salemi

    I too have problems with the sprung rhythm of Hopkins, and find his poems sometimes difficult to read even when they are quite beautiful in their language.

    These three curtal sonnets are quite good, and the final alexandrine ties each one up neatly. “St. Antony of the Strip Mall” is especially impressive, since it fuses a ruined city, personal emotional desolation, and then that mysterious “Stranger” of brittle skin and bone. Here is St. Antony of Egypt — not in a remote desert, but in some modern city that has been “ground to sand,” as if he were coming there to find a new hermitage. The epigraph from Simone Weil seems to confirm this — one does not need the isolation of a cave to seek out penitential remorse and purification, since the social scene provides plenty of occasions for them.

    Reply
    • Shaun C. Duncan

      Thank you, Joe. I like much of Hopkins work but it often seems to me that his heaviness of tone is inappropriate to his choice of subject matter.

      I’m glad you think the St Antony poem works. I worried that the subject was more suited to a more expansive form but I was determined to cram it into 10 lines. That your interpretation of it mirrors my intention perfectly is a great relief.

      Reply
  2. Mary Gardner

    These poems resonate more each time I read them. “St. Antony at the Strip Mall” calls to mind “The Second Coming” and “Ozymandias” in their depiction of desert desolation and foreboding. A dry and gaunt Saint appears, who through his repentance will rebalance the city.

    Reply
    • Shaun C. Duncan

      Thank you for taking the time to read my work and for the generous comment, Mary. My poem can only suffer by comparison to Yeats and Shelley but it’s still an honour to be mentioned in the same sentence!

      Reply
  3. Margaret Coats

    Good use of a short form, Shaun, to convey in another way the profundity you usually stretch out into a long narrative or description. I would prefer to keep that one-foot eleventh line, in order to make your art of form clear. There are many reasons for ending a sonnet or other short poem with an alexandrine, but this somewhat familiar practice suggests that you do the same here, and thus obscures the rhyme of lines 7 and 10. I see no advantage anywhere here in the appearance of a rhyming couplet to conclude. Especially in the first poem, “to see” is an important idea that deserves to stand out.

    Reply
    • Shaun C. Duncan

      Thank you once again for the comments, Margaret. I’m trying to embrace shorter forms, partly as an exercise in brevity but also because I’ve been pressed for time in recent months which makes it hard to focus on longer pieces. I take your point about preserving the eleventh line and I had in fact done so up until the final draft. My bias is mainly a typographical one – I just don’t like the way that final foot looks, hanging there all on its own. I’m also a sucker for an Alexandrine.

      Reply
    • Shaun C. Duncan

      Now that I think about it, Margaret, the Puppetmaster poem was my first attempt at this form and I was very conscious of that eleventh line as a discrete unit. Although I originally wrote the other two as eleven lines also, I approached them as if they ended with an Alexandrine. I’m impressed that you could immediately spot the difference.

      Reply
  4. Mike Bryant

    “Try as much as possible to rhyme on concrete nouns like root, barn, stone and salt. Therein is the alchemy of poetry.” – Leo Yankevich

    Shaun, your end rhymes remind me of Leo’s advice.

    In “St. Antony of the Strip Mall,” you’ve ended with a line of iambic hexameter like Hopkins did, but unlike him, you have made the previous line hexameter too, which makes a perfect final couplet. The bone/grown rhymes pair well in pentameter and the poem makes a point that I would have never considered. The decisions you’ve made in your adaptations work very well.

    Is there a reason why the first poem retains the pentameter on the first line of the final couplet?

    I enjoyed reading all of them. This form is striking… perhaps we should have a Duncan Curtal Sonnet Challenge!

    Reply
    • Shaun C. Duncan

      Encountering Mr Yankevich’s work about a decade ago is the reason I started writing poetry in the first place so I’m honoured that my own reminded you of something he said. I do try to end my lines on solid nouns wherever possible and I also like them to play off one another conceptually if I can make that work. I often determine the rhymes first and then work backwards from that because I find if you can nail down good rhymes in the first draft the editing process becomes much easier.

      The penultimate lines of each poem should all be pentameters but I must confess I haven’t gone back and counted them so if there’s an extra foot in there somewhere it’s either an oversight or a happy accident, depending on whether you think it works!

      The curtal sonnet is a great form and deserves to be explored more than it has been. If these experiments inspire anyone else to try it out I’d be honoured.

      Reply
  5. James Sale

    Excellent work: I like these a lot and am also a great admirer of Hopkins (whom I meet in Canto 7 of my Paradiso in the constellation of the great poets, the 9 stars of Aquila, the Eagle!). There is a certain concentration in your lines which the syntax propels forward and so you masterfully say ‘something’. Well done – contemporary poetry, of course, says virtually nothing.

    Reply
  6. Cynthia Erlandson

    I enjoyed both the form and the content of these. And I admit I was amused by the title of the third one as soon as I saw it. Thank you for these, Shaun.

    Reply
  7. C.B. Anderson

    Brevity is good if it is possible. These poems are elegant and pithy, and the successions of ideas contained therein are as taut as an E-string on a mandolin.

    Reply

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