Homeopathic Poetry
Everybody likes it:
one part poetry
to ten of prose
and then dilute again.
It’s easy to swallow
and it can’t do any harm.
Dilute. Dilute
it again
Drip it
down the
left-hand
side of the page.
You mustn’t let it rhyme:
that would be a transgression.
Don’t let the thing scan either if
you can possibly avoid doing so.
Shove it on a high shelf in one of
those coloured pharmaceutical
jars with a glass stopper
and let the dust
accrete.
And then accrete some more.
© John Stevens 2014
Just for fun!
Viewed on a smart phone app you see half the bottle; if you read the poem on the website you see the full shape.
Poetry from John Looker 
Message in a bottle 🙂
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By: Bart Wolffe on 13 May, 2014
at 17:27
Decanted! 🙂
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By: John Stevens on 13 May, 2014
at 21:34
This is just wonderful! You are too modest. I shared it on FB. 🙂
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By: Bennison Books on 13 May, 2014
at 18:01
Oh that’s brilliant! I’m honoured. Many thanks.
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By: John Stevens on 13 May, 2014
at 21:36
Love it! Great! 😄
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By: Alice on 13 May, 2014
at 18:43
Hi Alice! Thank you. 🙂
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By: John Stevens on 13 May, 2014
at 21:37
Delightful! Why not add irony with “center/it…”,
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By: Tom D'Evelyn on 13 May, 2014
at 18:58
I like that – good idea Tom!
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By: John Stevens on 13 May, 2014
at 21:38
This is absolutely fun, John! Wow! At the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin that I attended a couple of weeks back, a commentary from the judge of a competition about chapbooks was read, probably to enlighten the poets in attendance about how to win such a competition. What I got out of it was that the judge did not approve of traditional poetic forms at all. They are tired and not innovative, I guess, the provenance of dead men with long, white beards and old ladies who live only in their back yards. The winner of the competition wrote very long poems that sounded like prose, although I think she probably was a pretty good writer. I took my medicine, realizing that the work I do is really not going to do well in that competition with that judge at all. “Homeopathic Poetry,” stoppered up in a medicine bottle, strikes me as the perfect container for the boiled down instances that are much of contemporary poetry. I enjoy much of it, but regret that the poetry I labor over, and the poetry of a John Stevens, Nick Moore, and Cynthia Jobin, among others, that I love is not really competitive in a contest judged by too many judges. Difficult as manipulating words into a concrete shape may be, the skill just is not relevant to the contemporary world. Oh, this is a clever, delightful, chortling poem. O, yes, it is! Thank you for it. It lifts my spirits after the poetry conference.
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By: Thomas Davis on 13 May, 2014
at 20:14
Many thanks for sharing these thoughts Thomas. Like you, and unlike the judge you mention, I can enjoy old forms and new – it’s how people use them that matters, isn’t it?
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By: John Stevens on 13 May, 2014
at 21:47
To Thomas….As one old lady pretty much restricted to my back yard, I would counter the fatuousness of that judge with the proposition that it may be the apotheosis of mediocrity in our time which really precludes the kind of mental, imaginative skills necessary to the good use of traditional forms.
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By: Cynthia Jobin on 14 May, 2014
at 15:42
Here I am again, just browsing through favorite sites and compelled to congratulate you on two poems I really enjoyed reading: Where Lost Things Are and Homeopathic Poetry. The one, though not winning the competition you mention, is a beautiful composition, and the other a perfectly executed example of concrete poetry. Thank you for sharing them with the world.
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By: chucky0629 on 23 August, 2014
at 04:52
That’s very generous of you Charles – thank you. I hope all goes well with you.
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By: John Stevens on 23 August, 2014
at 09:01
John, I am editing a magazine for SpeedPoets (an open mic meeting event).
Can I publish this in the May ‘zine’ please? 27 May deadline. Please send a file to speedpoetszine@gmail.com
http://speedpoets.com/
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By: JdUb on 13 May, 2014
at 21:42
I’d be delighted John. Many thanks. I’ll email.
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By: John Stevens on 14 May, 2014
at 09:24
Dear Doctor Stevens,
What are you, a quack?
I’ve tried your oceanic potion
and it doesn’t work for quirky
patients just like me
whose malady
requires an instance
of aesthetic distance
or for those for whom a fluff
of schmooze is not enough.
For real, I think you are a quack.
Your potion pleases
an emotion but it does not heal.
Herewith, I send it back. 🙂
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By: Cynthia Jobin on 13 May, 2014
at 22:11
Your complaint is fair and properly made,
but the mountebank has fled –
over the state border
with your dollars under his saddle!
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By: John Stevens on 14 May, 2014
at 09:28
Sacré bleu! (Anyway, it’s a nifty poem.)
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By: Cynthia Jobin on 15 May, 2014
at 21:40
small
waves
say
small
things
to
the
shore
..
anon
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By: petebowes on 14 May, 2014
at 06:40
Oh touché Pete! But that is not homeopathic poetry – it imprisons a genie in a small phial.
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By: John Stevens on 14 May, 2014
at 09:34
Hi John, this is wonderful, the shape and the content. Love it. 🙂
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By: Ina on 14 May, 2014
at 07:17
Thank you Ina!
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By: John Stevens on 14 May, 2014
at 09:35
[…] have it set in stone that sensible men read this. On that note, I direct you to John Stevens’ Homeopathic Poetry and the comment accreting further down By: JdUb on May 13, 2014. I believe that one comment points […]
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By: On Used Poetry | Maekitso's Café on 14 May, 2014
at 09:28
I’ve followed the links, Brad, and read the post on your blog and also the one by Jim Murphy. You make a watertight case.
Thank you for mentioning this poem of mine and JdUb’s invitation to me above. You are right: this does illustrate how the internet can promote poems in new ways. But, as you say, there remain unresolved issues about ‘publication’ and permanence.
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By: John Stevens on 14 May, 2014
at 14:30
Your brilliant poem
captures the essence,
sassafras bark infused,
of why I find so much
poetry blah…actually incomprehensible.
Callous and obtuse I am
to the soul who bottled its copious tears
distilled from weeping over its angst
as the moonlight glistens
off the shark’s teeth in his/her hair.
I weep for the sharks–
not properly defined after all
but thrown in, it seems, for colour.
and a few teeth.
I grow dizzy watching their wild circles
as they search for their cartilage
amidst the scattered words
and find it not.
Crushed
barley green won’t soothe the poet’s
suffering, nor will sunny Vitamin D cheer them
as their angst reaches up
to the top shelf to deposit
a miniature replica of itself
amongst the plethora of empty jars.
I may pick it up; I may sniff, but all too soon
back it goes, curing nothing in me.
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By: christineevelynvance on 14 May, 2014
at 15:14
It’s good of you to respond in verse Christine – thank you! I suppose my poem has opened the door to all our thoughts about how poetry works – not just about form but about imagery (I’m keeping a wary eye on your sharks!), content, purpose etc. Thanks for responding with immediacy and feeling.
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By: John Stevens on 15 May, 2014
at 06:36
The shape! and the words, too, and the light heart of this one. I just received a letter from my husband, Phil, who is away at the Banff Centre for an artist residency and he mentioned the process of “distilling” images for his paintings and related this process to writing as well…and then this poem — the timing makes me smile!
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By: Anna Mark on 14 May, 2014
at 20:51
I think you, and your husband, are on to something Anna: distilling, yes, an essential process, and partly obscure. We can allow time, and provide the oak barrels, but something in the process occurs out of view doesn’t it?
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By: John Stevens on 15 May, 2014
at 06:54
My apologies–I was ranting in my poem above. I’ve been going through some books of poetry lately and trying hard to understand what’s being said, or felt, by the writer and letting out some frustrations.
I do like those old fashioned rhyming poems that read easy — and I did enjoy yours, too, esp the shape.
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By: christineevelynvance on 15 May, 2014
at 04:22
Hello Christine. No apology needed or accepted! 🙂
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By: John Stevens on 15 May, 2014
at 06:37
John, it seems you’ve tapped into a secret well of appreciation for…well, for what? First of all it’s a wonderfully clever poem with a serious point to make, lightly made and all more forceful for the making. This is good—and I should think it should be appreciated by anyone. Imagine Johnathon Swift remarking on ‘A Modest Proposal’, ‘Oh just for fun’. You can’t kid us, John, this is serious fun. Thomas Davis, as usual raises an important point about the state we find poetry in today. Traditional meter and—god help us—rhymes don’t seem to be appreciated—which your poem uses as content but does not use in making the poem. Tired and worn out? No, hardly. But I confess I don’t want poetry to be all written in heroic couplets either. Now, my own poetry has been dancing around the sonnet form for some time now. And, modesty aside, this is how I think poetry should be attending to the ‘tradition’. Henri Cole has been something of a model here —in his use of the sonnet anyway. I don’t know if I buy into his overall vision. [if you can do one without the other, is a subject for another time.] I should also mention ‘Space in Chains’ Laura Kasischke’s brilliant book of poetry—for those of you who think traditional poetry is the only way to do it. In the end, though, I think Emerson got it right with his call for meter making argument.
Now as a general rule of thumb, I hate concrete poetry. It shouldn’t be any big deal. The placing of lines in a poem has always been in part visual. And the beauty of type is obvious. The problem is that practitioners often get over cute with it. [I can’t decide whether you are being over cute here or not. It’s awfully clever. And not easy to do.]
Now the thing about homeopathic medicine is that it doesn’t work. Yet it is strangely like vaccination—which does work. And what are we being treated for? Shades of Maryanne Moore [I too dislike it] it must be poetry—
Poetry as a disease.
I will end with a little Tennyson:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
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By: extrasimile on 24 May, 2014
at 01:13
Free verse or traditional forms? A concrete shape for this poem meant I could avoid choosing. I enjoy both, and all manner of variations and explorations – such as your own Jim. The French expression “le fond et la forme” is a pointer to what I had in mind: not the form of poems but substance, their depth if you will, or lack of it. The opposite of homeopathic poetry is the concentrated poem, whatever shaped container it is poured into.
Something like that, anyway. Just for fun! And many thanks for your considered comment Jim.
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By: John Stevens on 24 May, 2014
at 09:19
Perhaps people like it because they’ve come to expect it. Keep tinkering! Also, I have to say the shape of this poem is just genius. =)
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By: redgladiola on 16 July, 2014
at 15:25
You could be right. There’s a lot of it around. 🙂
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By: John Stevens on 16 July, 2014
at 17:55
Missed this in the past – love it! (The title caught my eye over on your sidebar. 🙂 )
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By: Betty Hayes Albright on 30 November, 2014
at 21:58
Hello Betty – thank you! It was a bit of fun, but fun with a bit of a bite I suppose.
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By: John Stevens on 1 December, 2014
at 12:03