Cows And The Carnivalesque Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Perhaps it would have been different
If I had started earlier in becoming a writer
But then I couldn't.

My early life was a mess, a predicament
Torn between horny-handed toil,
Scholasticism and a paucity of acceptance and belonging.

And I chose survival rather than poetry,
Seeing the way forward in being
Adventurous, industrious and likably banal.

Ironic then that I find myself in New Zealand
Where the characteristics that I chose
Predominate -

But the top poets are markedly post-modern
Being versed in improbable punctuation,
Line slippages in their rondeaus, rondels and villanelles

& a marked preference for ampersands.

Such poetry we read is often a bricolage:

‘characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche,
irony, the return of ornament and historical reference,

... magical realism

& the referencing of popular media embracing
pop art, architectural deconstructivism,
maximalism, and neo-romanticism'.

Or what our premier laureate terms the 'carnivalesque':

Where more often what's enjoyable
is when a poem veers off,

carried along by a momentum that's not quite mine
towards a solution that neither I nor the poem's reader
is anticipating in ways in which language

can be our conspirator in subverting the too predictable
meeting of the sign with its meaning or referent,
encouraging our scepticism of the over-confident
Mot Juste.

That's all very well.

Those buggers never had to milk cows
And then write essays about Keats.