These poems from Ollie Tong belong to a poetic tradition that recasts poetry as artful receiver, a way to channel sounds and signals; Tong also sends them awry. As each line segues into the next, sense is wrenched ninety degrees: verbs solidify into nouns, adverbs modify in both directions. The poems’ turning and tuning promises to get us somewhere, to transport us, while passing the time. But seeing around the bend proves difficult. Love songs and nursery rhymes are deflated myths that serve as placeholders for the future. Poised between the pun and the earworm, these poems are indebted to such genres of repetition only to squirm away. Both poems wrest unexpected meaning from a word or refrain only to have them collect in a cup that isn’t ours, leaving behind a poetry of the impersonal ephemeral, where we can hear things we cannot hold, are forced to make sense with the wrong tools. Tong, a Welsh poet currently living in Scotland, remixes, rehabs, revitalizes familiar folk vernaculars—his poems preview other exciting new work from the UK and Ireland to be published in our upcoming special issue on W. S. Graham. Stay tuned! – The Editors and Poetry Staff
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There has bin hardly
any one more would
not doe a deer
a muscular horse
and their life seemed
waning in the car
FM signal drops
of pear
Tape worms pulse
through ear canals
but heʼs afraid of
the quiet even
might he know
the cause
was his causing
His eyes
out of date
prunes
Unhung
shirts are
everything Could be
his devotion
to the
avenue
a pavement or
could be The
vehicles singing
like chickens
in the Aga Sound
is re: structuring a forest
far burns
from A
to B
our man
who wholed
his own hand
and twist
his body down
Nursery Rhyme
Some girls grow
out of beanstalks
with no inclination
to keep on
with this making
Infinite regression,
a quantity of strandings
compresses my outline
The automatic clay machine whirrs,
~ please baby
donʼt leave me
please baby
I didnʼt mean ~
Somewhere inside
the geld ewe is
the gelded bull
in gelderʼs palm
gilt organs
Beanstalk girls
around the maypole singing
~ soothing will
not be our cup
it never was
ever our cup ~
November 2018