Following Vicky Coren's investigation into How to be a Bohemian (BBC4, Monday), the subject suggested itself as a poem.This 'ripple' poem form can become all form and little content. Some might say it often fails to be poetry at all. Certainly the process of writing one is more like doing a crossword than writing 'poetry'. But, in the absence of any burning issue to write about, a title can lend itself to the form, in which the consonants in the title recur in any order as the last consonants in each line. My entry for this year's Portsmouth Poetry Society competition fell back on this last resort strategy when otherwise I wouldn't have written anything on the theme of 'Dreamtime'.
But, building backwards from combinations of consonants to make lines and then ordering those lines and joining them up into something like a coherent line of thought, you never know. I'm quite pleased with this effort. It might be as good as Summer from The Last of the Great Dancers, which also had claims to actually being a poem. But I readily accept that some more natural way of making poems is more desirable and I would do that if I could and will when I can.
No, I don't know what a 'casbah moon' is, either, but perhaps it evokes something apposite to the occasion. Form can generate something that would not otherwise have been found and so, if it ever does, we should be grateful for it.
Bohemian
It’s such a long time since I have been home
as I wander beneath a casbah moon.
So this is what it is to be human.
I see the vagabonds, know each by name
and wonder when will he or she be mine.
My poetry’s a brief placebo hymn
that you can hear any bourgeois snob hum
in an attempt at some louche bonhomie.
