2015 MELITA HUME POETRY PRIZE SHORTLIST FOCUS: MICHAEL NAGHTEN SHANKS

EDITOR OF THE BOHEMYTH

Michael Naghten Shanks is a poet and the editor of The Bohemyth. His writing has featured in various journals and anthologies, including gorse, The Quietus and elsewhere. In May 2015 he will read as part of the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series during the International Literature Festival Dublin.

I AM YOUR REFRIGERATOR AT 3 A.M. WHEN YOU ARE HUNGRY

I could not consume the stars above the beach in Enniscrone
or stop the soot of London mixing with Camden coke.
In different seasons, love is ice-cream: we want to lick
our favourite flavour all year, even if it makes us sick.
I give you a call and you come over. We watch
a Werner Herzog documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams,
about simple drawings of extinct animals. One of us says:
Do you think the artist ate the art or the art ate the artist?
We know the beginning and the end before we press play.
We consume designer drugs not designed for us; our bodies
separated by a punnet of mixed berries the colour of our bruises.
You sprinkle sugar over everything; the clumps of sugar on my sheets
remind me of the stars above the beach. We both have our flaws
to share. We eat the air’s empathy-flavoured existence.
In the morning, you’ll say: I just ate a special K cereal breakfast bar
when what I really wanted to eat was pepperoni pizza. I’ll say:
I want to be ten years older eating dauphinoise potatoes for dinner
and apple pie with cream for dessert. In a month, you’ll confess
your sins over Sunday lunch, across the table in a café,
croissant crumbs will stick to our forearms. Tonight, you stroke
the scar on my thigh inscribed by a firework. You touch my scar
to touch my past. You comfort my past when you fear you cannot
comfort my present. You comfort me to comfort yourself.
When we wake, you say: I spilled the sugar.
I say: I know, I could taste it on your elbows.

POEM COPYRIGHT OF THE AUTHOR 2015

Comments

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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