New Verse Satire

 

My latest verse satire is now available post-free from www.rackpress.blogspot.com. It is a satire on cultural populism and tells the story – with humour I hope – of Rupert Vane, would-be progressive cultural critic who thinks he knows best what the folks want in the arts. But he meets his match in a showdown at the Bootle Litfest with Smith-Johnson, author of Dumbing Down, who thinks that actually those patronised folks are capable of making their own cultural choices. Watch out for the Liverpool dockers quoting Shakespeare while they work!

The poem is written in a variant of “the Pushkin stanza” used by Pushkin for his Eugene Onegin and very successfully by Vikram Seth in The Golden Gate and John Fuller in The Illusionists. They both adhere strictly to the Pushkin rules but I am freer in the rhymes, not choosing to deploy the strict pattern of what are still called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ rhymes. I do, however, deploy the 14 line rhymed tetrameter stanza.

You can read more about the poem and my views on satire on my Substack page “Free Range Writing" [nicholasmurray.substack.com].

By the way, I have two new poems published recently on the Wild Court site.