The new Write Out Loud Poem of the Week is ‘When The Future Came’ by John F Keane, a commentary on contemporary events. Responding to a new set of interview questions John said: “If poetry doesn’t come as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. However, a tree also needs pruning to look its best and joining a poetry group can certainly help with that. Removing repeated words, uninspired lines and stale metaphors is vital; but editing must never compromise the inspired ‘soul’ of the poem." John, who is the co-ordinator of Write Out Loud Stockport, has been awarded Poem of the Week for the second time. 

 

How has your poetry changed since you began posting and sharing your work?

Posting and sharing poetry online exposes it to many critical perspectives, helping to refine its technical and stylistic elements. At the same time, certain lines or themes can have an unexpected impact on readers, leading to a poem being developed in novel and perpendicular ways. Therefore, posting and sharing my work has both honed its technical elements and made it more original.

 

What advice would you give to an aspiring young poet?

If poetry doesn’t come as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. However, a tree also needs pruning to look its best and joining a poetry group can certainly help with that. Removing repeated words, uninspired lines and stale metaphors is vital; but editing must never compromise the inspired ‘soul’ of the poem. All this is easier said than done, of course. And young poets should enter every free competition available to them – if you don’t shoot, you don’t score.

 

What do you consider to be your best poem to date, and why?

A poem entitled ‘To a Fly in Amber’ is probably my best single poem to date. This is a rather heavyweight piece inspired by Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, wherein a fly fossilised in a piece of ancient amber inspires poetic meditations on time, eternity and other riddles of human existence. The fly exists in time yet is also immortal; and this insoluble paradox informs the poem’s passionate questionings.

 

 Which of your poems has received the best response either at an open mic or on Write Out Loud?

‘The Chaviad’, a blank verse epic about hooligans in Manchester, has received a lot of positive feedback on WOL. It is available as an MP3 on my personal profile. I recorded it with lots of reverb to sound like a bard reciting the poem to assembled lords and ladies in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall. I don’t often attend open mic events, but a piece entitled ‘101 Uses for a Liberal Arts Degree’ went down quite well at an open mic held in Didsbury. The poem itself is a silence lasting a minute or more. Clearly, humour works.

 

You can have four people around your dinner table (living or dead). Who would they be and why?

I would invite Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell to argue the atheist position, with Immanuel Kant and Albert Einstein presenting the case for faith. Four such brilliant minds would be sure to reach a decisive conclusion, one way or the other. At the very least, it would make for an entertaining fight. If I were feeling more recreational and less cerebral, I would invite Helen of Troy, Scarlett Johansson, Raquel Welch and Jayne Mansfield, all dressed as cave girls.

 

 

WHEN THE FUTURE CAME 

by John F Keane 

 

In frozen lights the future came

Displacing all we knew and when

Its secret ambush seized the world

In truth, the future happened then

 

On silent wings the future came

The lightning-stroke before a storm

Of texts and tweets and online apps

That gave our world another form

  

The nineties toiled towards an end

With dim confusion in their eyes

The past at rest, a Cold War won,

The future still a wild surmise

 

No one saw the future come

On stealthy feet too swift to see

As pyrite steals from fossil bone

Replacing the hegemony

  

The television held its ground

With dated soaps and stilted news

A rash of habits now outworn

By sharper thoughts and blunter views

 

The tap room and the concert hall

And other scenes of common cause

Began to vanish, one by one,

Extinguished by a greater force

 

The yellow press refused to change

But sang as one the same refrain –

‘Reality must be denied!’

And withered when the future came

 

The boutiques, book and record stores

That once defined our modes of life

Were cut to shadows, then were gone –

All victims of the future’s knife

 

The silver screen began to fade

Our popcorn turned to ashes cold

When the future stole away

The Technicolor dreams of old

 

And all that was and now is gone

Will stand remembered in its day

But vanished things will not return –

The future only moves one way

 

Now strange elections every week

The masses lurch from blame to blame

The centre yawns, a hollow space

And all because the future came.