April is not always the cruelest month. Sometimes it’s October, when jaundiced streetlamps glow in sooty fog, when soft yellow fog creeps in like a feral cat that licks the dark corners with its tongue, rubs its muzzle and back on grimy windows, leaps over blacked-out buildings full of anesthetized urbanites bleeding their lives away in mesmerized scrolling, and curls down for a long nap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
J. Alfred, Alfie to his acquaintances\u2014he has no real friends\u2014trudges reluctantly through dimly lit, half-empty, fog-shrouded streets, scuffing his feet through damp piles of withered leaves that no one has had the energy to gather up and pitch into a dustbin, past cheap hotels in which he has pulled out his wallet for shame-filled, unsatisfying half-hours of sham intimacy, past squalid hole-in-the-wall restaurants that specialize in aphrodisiac oysters, their sawdust floors littered with discarded shells, wondering, Do I dare? Am I one of the ones who may disrupt the universe?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As he prepares his face to greet the faces he will face, he dwells on how they see his face, how they smirk at his bald spot, his foppish clothes, his scrawny arms and legs, and decides to turn back, then reverses his decision, then reverses the reversal in an spiral of indecision, of unfocused decision and revision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Too soon, too soon, he’s at the door. He joins the usual crowd of second-raters aspiring to celebrity, like make-believing court-in-exile Jacobites, sycophantically basking in the faded glory of the Old Pretender, pretending to be in the service of the King of England. He spots Virginia Pound, despite the name definitely not a virgin, invited because she is the daughter of a once famous but now infamous poet, strolling arm in arm around the room with Joyce Lawrence, a failed novelist who lacks the talent to master either the simplicity or the complexity of modernism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 I do so admire Michelangelo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 The Sistine is magnificent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 There is no one like him now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 I do so admire artists who smash the old conventions to smithereens, creating art so compelling that all who come after them must\u2014must<\/strong>, on pain of irrelevance\u2014adapt<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He watches the women come and go in the overheated, stuffy, noisy, tedious room. The gathering is meant to emulate a Parisian literary salon, but he has been to Paris, where real art flourishes, bursts forth, blossoms, explodes in splendiferous works of art, real, true, overwhelming art that kept him awake all night in his garret, sleeplessly mesmerized by its magnificence, sleeplessly wondering why he felt so out of place in its presence. And he wonders idly how he ended up here, in this company of pale, sad aspirations-to-be-artists producing pale, sad aspirations-to-be-art, preening themselves in rooms that are pale, sad imitations of Paris. But he knows the answer to this overwhelming question. The room embodies the mood of their time, the zeitgeist he is desperately trying to grasp in his epic poem, entitled this week The Bleakness of Now, <\/em>in which, try as he might, he has failed to express his vision, despite endless rounds of revision and re-revision, of decision and indecision. Am I one with these untalented, aimless women and talentless, spineless men? Am I the unwitting incarnation of my own poem?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n He shuffles through the crowd to the next room, where a sanctimonious, self-righteous stringer for the Times Literary Supplement<\/em> is holding court. Alfie has heard that this failed poet was the anonymous critic who savaged his latest poem, writing for all the world to see that the fact that these things occurred to the mind of the poet “is surely not of the very smallest importance to anyone\u2014even to himself”. To Alfie, he is a James III, a poseur, a vandal, a pompous parasite, a predator who praises flawed poets to lure them, male and female, into his bed, a malignant narcissist who ruins worthy poets out of sheer toxic malice, a strutting goose surrounded by a fawning gaggle of hollow, straw-headed goslings who follow him thoughtlessly across stagnant, sewage-polluted sloughs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The critic slicks back his abundant hair as he surveys the room, seeking out his next target, his next victim, because all his targets inevitably became his victims. His reptilian eyes fix on Alfie and he sneers. The feckless goslings turn as one and echo the sneer. Alfie feels like a wriggling beetle being mounted by a pin in a shadow box in a museum display case, still alive, but soon to be an unremarkable specimen in an exhibition of mediocrity. He wants to scream, to grab the critic by the throat and punch him in the face, to bring forth an eruption of bubbling blood erupting like hot lava from a volcano, to blow the whole sneering face away like the side of Mount St. Helens. He wants to toss a grenade into the room to confront the goslings with death, and through that confrontation, restore them to life. If only he had the words, the words he would utter with a smile, words that would roll the universe into a ball, the words Lazarus would speak from beyond death. But do I dare? Do I dare presume to up-end the universe? And how do I begin?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n He knows these geese, knows them all, has stirred his coffee with their spoons, knows their inertia, their ennui, how they malinger in indolence. He knows what it would take to force the moment to a crisis. But if he speaks his mind, his head will be brought in upon a platter if even one of the goslings misses the point entirely, settles her head languidly against a pillow and turns to the gaggle and mutters, What does that even mean? That’s not what I was talking about. That’s not it at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A poem-seed erupts in the stony soil of his soul, an image of a grand canyon obscured by a shadow. He stands on one side of the chasm, crowded forward toward the edge by his ideas, his desires, his potential, his essence. He gazes yearningly at the realities, the responses, the actions, the creations calling him from the other side, but he is too afraid to leap off the precipice and launch himself into the void. The poem climaxes when he realizes that the shadow is his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He knows he would never write that poem. It would be too true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He sinks into despair at the thought that God snickers at his indecisiveness. Hamlet was indecisive, to be sure, but at least Hamlet tried to do something, however flawed. He feels less than Hamlet, not a Hamlet, but a support player, a mere foolish Polonius, hiding behind an arras and getting himself murdered by mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The moment passes. He feels himself growing old, rolling up the bottoms of his pant legs, dreaming of mermaids singing, though not to him. These rooms are like chambers in the sea, and he dreams of singing mermaids wreathed with seaweed, singing melodious tunes ’til human voices wake him, and his real world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a9 2026 Paul McLaughlin<\/p>\n\n\n\n This piece was an experiment for me. The homework was to write about a party. As I cast around looking for inspiration, my mind landed on my favorite TS Eliot poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock<\/em>, which, on some interpretations, happens at a party (or an afternoon tea, which is close enough). So I pulled up the poem, read and reread it a few times, did some light “research” on Google to get the mental juices flowing, then set about trying to recreate the essence of Prufrock<\/em>. To that end, I adopted the narrative arc of the poem and used many of its images and metaphors. I also brought in some language from other Eliot poems, such as The Hollow Men <\/em>andThe Waste Land<\/em>. Finally, I commandeered the image of withered leaves collecting underfoot from the musical Cats<\/em>, though in my research, I learned that Weber had in turn borrowed the image from another Eliot poem, Preludes.<\/em> I also added my own slants, such as the focus on creativity, poetry and art and the character of the critic. The quoted criticism of Alfie’s poem is actually, word-for-word, the comment of an anonymous critic writing in the Times Literary Supplement about Prufrock <\/em>immediately after it was first published. Boy, was that guy wrong!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also experimented with very long sentences in this piece. We are all familiar with the admonition to use short, sharp sentences to create a mood of urgency and action. It seemed to me that to recreate the somber tone and the psychological moodiness of Eliot’s poem, I needed to do the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, to preserve some of the soundscape of the poem, I let some of my poetic instincts loose, particularly in relation to repeated sounds (rhymes, alliterations, parallel phrases, repeated words), some of which come straight from the poem and others of which are mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I hope you enjoy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" April is not always the cruelest month. Sometimes it’s October, when jaundiced streetlamps glow in sooty fog, when soft yellow fog creeps in like a feral cat that licks the dark corners with its tongue, rubs its muzzle and back … Continue reading
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