Poetry, Comedy and Irony

Palin, Letterman and the Outrage of Moral Shysters

Martyn Richard Jones — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:31:00 GMT

WORK IN PROGRESS

David Letterman, a US chat show host, made some completely naff comments - called jokes - about a daughter of the US Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. I agree that they were in very poor taste, but my overall comment about the affair was placed in the overall context of its importance relative to everything else. As any sane and balanced person should try and do. So, when this item was discussed on The Guardian's Comment is Free blog, my comment was a simple: "It was a small error of judgement, no big deal". Of course, then some Palin loving Republican dick jumps in all calls me a "Hypocrite", and so it went on.

Me: Would you care to explain yourself?

Just to qualify the comment. Compared to killing hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children based on duff intelligence and lies, it was a very small error of judgement.

Now go back to your shapes, colours, sounds, lights .....

ContedeQuincy: Look at your past posts and you'll soon find out why. I really would not like to add "selective amnesia" to the list.

Me: Ok, so let's assume I have "selective amnesia". Just what are you referring to? Can you pony up some evidence or am I just being targeted with simplistic trolling bullshit?

Rapid Response Team Replies to Peter Tatchell and Fellow Travellers

Martyn Richard Jones — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:39:00 GMT

The Righwing Rapid Response Team Replies to Peter Tatchell and His Fellow Travellers

You just couldn't make it up! The following is a statement issued by The Righwing Rapid Response Team in response to an alarming and malicious article published by known leftwing green guardianista Peter Tatchell, who goes by the name of "Peter Tatchell", and which was published today (or yesterday) in The Guardian. And which has been supported by a number of treasonous and traitorous Britain hating, minority supporting, LGBT loving, race denying, feminazi gits!

Today, we call upon every upstanding British white male and not male to join us in condemning this "political correctness", which has gone from mad to stark raving bonkers on the Political Wrister scale! We are sure that you, like us, will appreciate all too well the urgency of our call, and the need for action (bank account details to be supplied later).

1.a : Fair votes, fair votes is it? So, you want to hang on to Old Mother Brown, that Sugar Honey Honey and your Not Now Darling … you want to have them re-elected without an election. You are taking away our historic rights! This is not British justice! This is Scotch Corner! We want Cameroon for PM now! No! No Welshman or woman is going to tell me what to do. We, the great Britons, we, together, don't want a foreign clown as PM, we want our own. Our own!

1.b : Representative parliament – you lot of socialist layabouts just want your Labour to be in power, forever. Just like the Stalinists, and your Mao and your Fidel. Why do you hate our freedoms, why do you betray your jeans? You want to be able to hand pick MPs? We don't want your New Labour rubbish! Just say no to Ali G, Mark Steel, Mark Thomas and Georgina Galloway. Just say NO to RESPECT! "No room for respect", that's our battle cry.

1.c : Scottish electoral system – Ah! Bloody marvellous isn't it. Here we go again! The Celtic Mafia! As our great Professor Snodpod Smith - who rests in The Scrubs - said "You'll want to force the pasty faced, blue haired, and fair eyed British indigenous male to wear plaid skirts, as the ultimate, last and final act of the humiliating humiliation of a once proud nation of ethnically and genetically and similarly indigenous equivalence".

2.a : A written constitution – you want to complicate things, so you can steal our native British rights, and give them to ethnic minorities. Look sunshines, we've got a constitution, and a Margot Charter, rewritten by your great Henry the Eighth - I am, I am, and nurtured with care, and handed down from blue-blooded generation to blue-blooded generation, and now to this very day, where it resides in the careful hands of your majesty, the Queen. God bless her! Anyway, if we had a constitution that was written down, on paper that is, your bloody Prescott would probably use it as toilet paper, and put it on expenses.

2.b : Bill of rights – Named after your liberal President who couldn't keep his privates under control. This is just to allow the illegal government to issue even more taxing and spending rights – to mosques and 7th day Advertists. And we, the white oppressed, pick up the tab, we pay for Gay Pride marches, just because you don't want to offend LGBT rights and feminists. Bollocks to that! More rights for the scuffers, less rights for the liberal-socialist scroungers and their rubbish causes!

3. Replace the monarchy – How dare you! How dare them! They want to outlaw the memory of the old Queen Mom, her elegant hats on Ascot day, the Royal tipple – it's a bloody outrage! - their evil people who want to kill The Queen of Hearts – again! Smash up her wonderful fountain, yes, that's right, the fountain that flows with the tragic romantic river of sobbing children's tears! … Then, for President of the UK, they'll want Branson Pickle, Mother BlIar, Obarak bin Laden or Alexei Sayle. You're all fookin mad!

4. An elected second chamber – No! The Lords is the only thing what works! We know why, don't we? We know what's behind all this elected lords nonsense, don't we? People only want second chamber election bollocks because the House of Lords, with all that is fine and righteous in British pomp, circumstance and empire, might upset the Pakistanis and the filthy Paediatricians. We educated and civilised the world, taught the French to cook, the Germans to think and the Italians to make cars, and THIS is the THANKS we get? Have you ever stopped to wonder why Nicked Griff is so poplar? NO! Anyway, people are daft. You can't replace the Lords, it's a job that's passed down, from father to son, in the blood.

5. The right to recall MPs – you want to pick on the BNP even before they are elected, just because they are honest to goodness British racists and homophobes, not your foreign decadent, same sex marriage, "Oh! My vicar is a lesbian" … "would you like another vol au vent", rubbish.

6. Abolition of the royal prerogative – you want to surrender the country to foreign terrorists, give up the commonwealth and give all our money to lost causes. And ban Her Majesty … the Queen! So, who is going to run the country then, Mister and Misses Funny Clogs? Where will the knowledge and experience come from, if you take away the Royal Prerogative? Eh?

7.a Strengthen the powers of select committees – that's just an invitation for more select jobs for the select boys. Why do we have to have gay and other privileges rammed down our throats, championed on our streets and up our alleyways? We don't want selection we want inheritance, and maybe an election. When do we want it? NOW! Or, whenever it is convenient for Her Majesty.

7.b It would also involve sufficient staff to service the committees – Oh yes, "room service", Typical liberal-left scroungers, Hanging around in bed all day, being waited on hand, foot and finger. You just want bigger government and multiculturalism and the EU banning our conkers and beef and bangers and bananas and taking away our right to the great traditional cooked - COOKED - English breakfast.

8. Abolition of unelected QUANGOs – Here we bloody go again! If it doesn't pour it pisses down! Removing our last connections to the commonwealth. What did Australia ever do to you??? You just want to ban smoking and drinking and Christmas, because it upsets the Jews, Muslims and Baptists. Eat your greens and shut up! Haha! haha!

9. Creation of a federal Britain – you just want to make the country weak and divided, and give money to economic migrants, and their seven kids per household – all paid by us, yes us, the great British taxpayer!

10. Greater powers for backbench MPs – You don't fool us! You just want to make sure that New Labour carries on as the worst dictatorship since Stalin, Mao and Paul Pot created the axis of evil and declared war on our values. If you want to live in that type of society, then you can jolly well go and live in Cuba, or Cardiff!

For Cod, Queens, Club and Country!

Signed on behalf of the Rapid Response Team:

Dick Headley, Chairman
Major Pratt, retired-Army
Ben Dover, MD
Jenna Tolls MP
Ura Hogg, QC
Chief Inspector Hugh Jass
Teflonda Slick, JP

Music Update : Series 1 : Number 1

Martyn Richard Jones — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:46:00 GMT

Ok, so here's My Muse. I wrote this little ditty some time ago. It was supposed to be like a short song from a modern operetta - theatrical in mood and style. Anyway, see how it suits you.

New Labour Lords Prayer

Martyn Richard Jones — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:55:00 GMT

Lettuce spray ..

Our Tony, who are't inflatable
Holloway be thy name
Thy prison come
Though should be done
In Den Haag as in the Old Bailey
Give us back this day the good old Labour party
And forgive you not your Iraq trespassing
As we will not forgive you piss taking against us
And lead us no more, not even in cheating on the exes
But deliver us from your Third Way
For thine is the Scrubs
The ego and the gory
Forever and ever
Sod orf!
Amen

Mario Benedetti, 1920 To 2009

Martyn Richard Jones — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:30:00 GMT

Mario Benedetti, 1920 To 2009

The Uruguayan writer Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti Farugia, better known as Mario Benedetti, is no longer with us. Born in the small town of Paso de los Toros in the department of Tacuarembó, on the 14th of September 1920, he died in his home in the city of Montevideo, this last Sunday (17/5/2009), at the age of 88.

Although relatively little known in the English-speaking world, Benedetti was widely appreciated in the Spanish-speaking world. He was the author of over eighty books of poetry, novels, short stories and essays, as well as screenplays, and was awarded the Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana (1999), the Premio Iberoamericano José Martí (2001) and the Premio Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (2005).

Following a succession of jobs, Benedetti started his literary life in 1945, when he joined the staff of Marcha, a Uruguayan magazine, and worked alongside Juan Carlos Onetti and Carlos Quijano, both well known writers in their own right in Latin America and Spain. The following year he married Luz López Alegre, his companion and the great love of his life.

Following the Military Coup in Uruguay in 1973, Benedetti was forced into exile, which was to last for 10 years, up until his return to his native country in March of 1983. In that time in exile he lived in various places, including Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and Spain. Two years later, the popular Catalan singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat recorded the ground-breaking album El Sur También Existe (The south also exists), a collection of Benedetti's poems set to music, in which the poet personally collaborated in its making.

Of his literary output perhaps the work that really stands out are his early titles, such as Montevideanos (1959), which describes the life of civil servants in the Uruguayan capital, with their sense of hierarchy and morals. In his novels La Tregua (1960), which was adapted for theater, radio and television, and made into a film in 1974, Gracias por el Fuego (1963), also adapted for film. In 1971 he published El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel ( 1971), a novel in verse, the critical purpose of which is to reveal characters and state of affairs thatwould expose the mediocrity of bourgeois values in an urban context.

In parallel, Benedetti developed a reputation for his outstanding work as a poet, and collected, expanded and edited an anthology of poetry under the title "Inventory", a collection that consists of representative titles such as " Poemas de la oficina " (1956), " Próximo prójimo " (1965) and " A ras de sueño ", published in 1967. In 1981 he wrote " Geografías ", a book inspired by the motivation behind exile, which brough together stories and poems in one single masterful work of literature.

In 1975, Benedetti's novel La Tregua (The Truce) was later made into a film, which was subsequently nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Film. He also later collaborated Daniel Viglietti, a Uruguayan singer-songwriter , in the making of the album A Dos Voces.

Benedetti had always been politically aware, and in January 2006, he was to join other distinguished figures such as Gabriel García Márquez, Eduardo Galeano, Carlos Monsiváis, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Pablo Milanés, Mayra Montero, and Ana Lydia Vega, to demand sovereignty for Puerto Rico .

As for myself, I had the good fortune to meet Benedetti several times when I lived in Spain during the eighties and early nineties. After 1983, Benedetti was to divide his time between Montevideo and Madrid. He was a generous, warm and modest person, who loved to share time with his readers. Many people have contributed his widespread literary success to his discreteness and his straightforward manner and the direct way he had of connecting and communicating with his readers.

From his literature, and from talking with the man himself, it was very easy to understand why he became considered to be one of the most representative of Latin American writers of a generation that was politically committed to the Cuban Revolution and Latin America, and which also lead to his recognition by the Latin American left.

José Saramago, in praising the literary excellence and humanity of Benedetti, and his ability to communicate with many people, also lamented the loss of a friend and a brother: "He always held the ingenuous idea that you can postpone the inevitable, but we cannot, and when the inevitable arrives, as with Mario Benedetti, it's very hard". Saramago also praised the diversity of the works of Benedetti: "He wrote everything, he had an extraordinary capacity for work and, with his genius, his talent and courage, and we can say that it has been very beautiful work".

On hearing the news of Benedetti's death, the Spanish poet José Manuel Caballero Bonald declared that Benedetti had "united poetry and history in a very skilful and intelligent form" and that an outstanding aspect of his work was that of social critique, powerfully underscored by its intelligence.

His last published work was a book of poems, Testigo de Uno Mismo (One's Own Witness), which came out last August. Immediately prior to his death, Benedetti had been working on a new book of poetry whose working title was Biografía Para Encontrarme (Biography to find myself).

To paraphrase the words of Saramago, perhaps the greatest thing about Benedetti, as a writer, is that he was the poet who best represented the genuine voice of his own people. He was a person for whom all language and all of its words were poetic. He strove to tirelessly and persistently search for a meaning, a purpose and a sense of life, in the human condition, on the planet, in the country, in the towns and villages, at home or simply in collective and popular action. In other words, Benedetti was a universal poet, a poet for all humanity, and a truly extraordinary human being.

Mario Benedetti : 14 de septiembre de 1920, Paso de los Toros - 17 de mayo de 2009

Are we there yet? Poem to Carol Ann Duffy

Martyn Richard Jones — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Are we there yet?

Carol Ann Duffy, Carol Ann Duffy

The pen
The port
The paper

In between the pensive thinking
Random verbs
And bartered drinking
Settled now in nature's haven
From the breeze
The constant maven
Seeking patterns and a rhythm
Time to think
Transcribing reason

Are we there yet?

Carol Ann Duffy, Carol Ann Duffy

Glasgow
Stafford
Manchester

She stoops to conquer, all surveying
River Sow
The Clyde banks breaking
A second chance, fate has ordained
A lesson
Inside out insane
Salvage the honour of the country
Red on black
A Poet's Casino

Are we there yet?

Carol Ann Duffy, Carol Ann Dufy

Dylan
Larkin
Rossetti

Do not come meekly to that mazed role
Flee! fly! rise!
Forge words in fire
In between the leisured classes
The boy's clubs
The stupid asses
Use poetry to speak to power
Catch, hold, charm
Return the favour

Au chapeau! And, now to relish.

Are we there yet?

Me, 2009, innit!

On hearing complaints about the new poet laurate - Part 1

Martyn Richard Jones — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Misogynists and awkward geezers
Homophobes, misanthropic wheezers
Lesbian hating little fops
Sunday drivers, bloated chops
Tiny blokes with little clue
Upside down and sniffing poo
Not much chance that we'll get through
Well, feck 'em all, eh Father Ted?

More on the Poet Laureate complaints

Martyn Richard Jones — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

MartynInEurope

03 May 09, 1:57am (1 minute ago)

Poetry?
Feck orf!
I don't like poems.
I hate poems.
I can't abide poems.
As for words, words you say?
Words?!?!?!?!
Sod 'em!
I hate words more than I hate life itself!
I hate words more than I hate Hazel Blears!
Sod 'em, that's what I say!
And as for letters? Show me a letter
Any letter you like
That has a good character?
I dare you, I dare, dare, dare you!
Letters!
Screw 'em!
I have had more letters than the Welsh have had hot dinners.
I'm British you hear!
British!
British speech for British people!
We don't do poetry ..
Poetry is rubbish I tell ya, Marxist, Pinko, Communist inspired, IRA, rubbish!
It's for homos, lesbians and foreigners.
Haha! Haha! Haha! Haha!
We will rise again, like lions …..
Now go away!
I have more complaining to do!

Betjeman Rejection

Martyn Richard Jones — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

The following poem, in continuation, was written as a comment for a CiF blog article.

Eliot's damning verdict on Orwell

TS Eliot rejected Orwell's Animal Farm for being 'unconvincing'. Which books would you send back to the author? The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2009 16.30 BST

Betjeman Rejection

Dear Johnny,
Betjemanly,
Thank you for your poetry.
We reviewed it, Sunday stewed it,
Load of cobblers, Cuppa tea?

Undulating, gently waiting,
Past the chip shop,
Down the way.
Early bath of purple Prozac,
Fills the pages , quite parfait.

Boring Sundays, maiden Aunties,
Another day, another shag.
Up from Chiswick, like the snow clouds
Shopping trolley, your dad's jag.

Samey verses, full of hearses
Little girls, on naughty boys,
He knows a bloke , in Camden cutting
With a penchant for these joys.

If you want to get this published
I suggest you call 'em up,
Twilight singing, sodding birdies!
Fills the air, with your mixed luck.

Time to get the wet warm pints in,
In that boozer by Edgware,
Off his trolley, Hello Dolly!
Derek, Clive and Byron's bear.

See you later , prevaricator,
At the bendy bit of road,
Where the words of puerile posies
Get run down by Highway code.

Martyn Richard Jones