Ian McMillan Football First Poet In Residence

Ian_McMillan

Ian McMillan is an English poet, journalist, playwright, and broadcaster. He is known for his strong and distinctive Barnsley-area accent and his characteristic manner of speech. He lives in Darfield, the place of his birth
He is styled “poet in residence” to his hometown football club Barnsley FC. His play Sister Josephine Kicks the Habit, based on the work of fellow Yorkshireman Jake Thackray premiered in 2005. In June 2010 McMillan was appointed poet-in-residence at the English National Opera.
In 2007, McMillan published a book named Collins Chelp and Chunter: a Guide to the Tyke Tongue. This was a compilation of words that are used in the Yorkshire dialect as well as a few pieces of Yorkshire humour and illustrations. Many words are pinned down to specific areas of Yorkshire or specific towns or villages; one word, lenerky, that means “soft or floppy”, is even ascribed to Grange Moor, a very small village in Kirklees, West Yorkshire near Wakefield between the towns of Barnsley and Huddersfield.

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Hotdish – A Poem About Food

HOTDISH

by Ron Olsen

God bless hotdish
It kept us alive
But first we’d pray
Our Sunday morning ritual
Praying
To get through it all
For just one more day

We meant it too
We were so unworthy
The Vicar told us
And vile
And ungrateful
Not worthy to “gather up the crumbs” under His table
Which we really didn’t need
Truth be told

We had hotdish

Plenty of it
Stronger than theology
And tasty too

Tuna
Noodles
And sour cream
Pimentos
Olives
A splash of milk with a can of soup
Mix it together
Crush some potato chips on top
A sprinkle of paprika for an exotic edge
Throw it in the oven
And there you go

Salt and pepper
To give it taste
Bracing your blood to stand up
To the demon weather
Wailing outside
Begging you to come out
So it could try and kill you one more time

But we had hotdish
Made by the Ladies of the Ladies Aid
Who knew what they were doing

Big, strong German and Scandinavian farm ladies
With secrets they brought over from the old country
Arriving with only their bibles, babies and the family jewels
Bending over stoves
In the Episcopal Guild Hall basement
The heat flooding out to envelop the entire room

Making heavy, hearty, homemade hotdish in
Big Pyrex glass baking dishes
Doing their part
To keep the kids and the cardiologists going

And just as you were about to burst with joy
Unworthy as you were
There was even more to come
Through the passthrough and out into the main hall

Giant bowls of green and yellow Jell-O, wiggling and jiggling with life
Bits of cottage cheese suspended inside
And green olives
Molded in the shape of pinwheels
Or Christmas trees
Or peculiar giant half-moon shaped fish with big scales

And the old men would watch
Mumbling under their breath
“Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it…”

So we prayed to be forgiven
And were mindful of the need to be always alert
If the weather didn’t kill you some crazy old man might
Or you could fall through the ice and drown a horrible death in the lake

And all the while the wind screamed
Threatening to take your soul

And it might have
Except for the hotdish

Neither the north wind
Nor the crazy old men dared cross
The ladies of the Ladies Aid
Who knew exactly what they were doing

                © Ron Olsen – all rights reserved

 

malibu

Ron Olsen is a semi-retired journalist who lives in Los Angeles

and writes essays and an occasional poem.   He drew upon his

youth in Minnesota, for “Hotdish,” which he says, he no longer

has the courage to eat.   You can see more of his poetry here at

Artvilla, or at his website at http://workingreporter.com/poetry.html

Bon appetit


Protactinium, poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series, (#91, Pa) from the Chicago poet Janet Kuypers

Protactinium

Janet Kuypers

from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series (#91, Pa)
7/1/14

Wanted to talk about P A,
element ninety one,
but gotta keep this brief,
because the first people
who discovered an isotope
of element ninety one
found it had had an
insanely short half life,
so they wanted
to name it “brevium”.

Than again,
after a German scientist
found another isotope
with a much longer
half life,
they figured that maybe
they’d try “protoactinium”,
because this element
is the progenitor of element 89,
Actinium, because
when element ninety one decays
and loses and alpha particle,
Actinium (element 89) is created.

But proto-actinium?
That still sounds
a little long,
maybe we can remember
that brevity
of the one isotope’s
short half life
and call it
Protactinium
instead.

But really,
this stuff’s radioactive
and highly toxic,
and no one has found
a single use for this element
besides maybe scientific research.
But right now they’ve discovered
when measuring the ratios
of Protactinium and Thorium isotopes
in ocean sediments, they can
reconstruct the movements
of bodies of North Atlantic water
during the melting of the last ice age.

Kind of cool.
But an ice age can take
millions of years.
Hardly brief,
like the first isotope
discovered of Protactinium.

But who knows,
maybe if Protactinium
is only good to us humans
for scientific research,
maybe we will
start to learn some cool stuff
about Earth’s past —
and maybe Earth’s future —
thanks to a brief little element
we otherwise have no use for…

Connecting to Infinity Poem by Marilyn McIntyre

connecting to infinity….

possibilities, outcomes
floating weightlessly
irridescent, intangible
mapped in stars
touching down
as pixie dust
and flirts of angel hair
choices to the right
paths to the left
someone has stolen the fork
in the road
moon cast wrinkles
characters “˜cross the lawn
where oh where
has my little mind gone
garrulous cotton candy clouds
griping frenzy
whisps of knowledge
ancestral crones
weeping, moaning heart in tears
annoint myself in
dandelion down
roll my head
in passing nimbus
connecting to infinity
again and again and again and again……..

connecting to infinity….

possibilities, outcomes
floating weightlessly
irridescent, intangible
mapped in stars
touching down
as pixie dust
and flirts of angel hair
choices to the right
paths to the left
someone has stolen the fork
in the road
moon cast wrinkles
characters “˜cross the lawn
where oh where
has my little mind gone
garrulous cotton candy clouds
griping frenzy
whisps of knowledge
ancestral crones
weeping, moaning heart in tears
annoint myself in
dandelion down
roll my head
in passing nimbus
connecting to infinity
again and again and again and again……..

Posted on January 6, 2005

Potassium Chloride, bonus poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series, ( based on Potassium, #19, K) from the Chicago poet Janet Kuypers

Potassium Chloride

Janet Kuypers

(bonus poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series, based on Potassium, #19, K)
10/25/14

Once worked for a company
who stopped selling their drugs
to state correctional facilities

who used them in cocktails
to kill their prisoners. The company
didn’t have the moral issue —

but religious and political
groups did, and companies
couldn’t justify selling drugs

as sedatives to hospitals
when those same drugs
were used to kill people.

Then I learned that in the cocktail,
pentobarbital was the sedative,
pavulon was the paralytic agent,

and Potassium Chloride killed them.
So I instantly remembered
that us humans need Potassium,

but nobody will sell supplements
because too much Potassium
could easily kill a person.

So, too much of an element
that we need for life
can kill us. Fascinating.

But it’s not straight Potassium
that they use in lethal injections,
it’s Potassium Chloride —

so I wondered, but why
is it not just straight Potassium?
That’s when I heard

that if you take Potassium straight
it would burn, so they use this
metal halide of Potassium with chlorine.

How nice of them, because it would
be cruel if prisoners were in pain
before we killed them. That would be

cruel of us.

#

More than a decade after my state
imposed a moratorium on executions,
then the death penalty was abolished.

And I know the death penalty
costs us taxpayers much more money
than keeping prisoners alive for life.

The death penalty’s not a deterrent,
and the death penalty does take
innocent lives from wrongful convictions.

But all that’s stuck in my head
right now is the Potassium Chloride,
things our body needs, to kills us.

I reflect on the late-night leg cramps
because we don’t get enough Potassium.
Chloride’s needed for metabolism,

and Potassium’s one of the most
important electrolytes in our body.
Still, too much of it can kill us.

It must, somehow, makes sense
that we humans take these elements
and use them as an instrument of death.

I’m afraid I know how us humans think,
so,
of course. It makes perfect sense.

Poem: I Had A Friend, A Sniper

sniper
photo: U.S. Marine Corps (public domain)

I Had A Friend
by Ron Olsen

I had a friend
A sniper
Not a movie
A sniper
Who came back unable to live with us

When we went shooting
He never missed

He was in the jungle
Tied to a tree
Until he nearly died from
Some vile amoebic rot
Put him in a hospital in Japan

He came back
Married a woman
Kept a big spider
And a snake
Kept them in aquariums on shelves
With a giant hookah in the middle of the room

He’d let the spider out
Let it crawl around
And the snake
Inside your shirt
If you weren’t careful
He still needed some hazard
Some threat
Some kind of edge

We smoked
And then his young wife
Would coax him into bed
Where he slept with a 45
And the dreams
Of what had passed

Still uncomfortable without his back to the wall
He’d seen too much
I guess
Felt too much
Perhaps
Done too much
The marriage did not last
So he left to build sailboats

He was my friend
But I let him go
Threw him away like so much trash
I was unsure
Afraid of what he might do
You can’t be too careful
Around people who play with spiders

I had a friend
He was a sniper
He came back from the war
And died young
I could have done more
But maybe not
I’m sorry

I no longer knew who you were

Reality
Or a story
To make money
For some Hollywood producer
To glorify war
And reassure ourselves of who we are
How strong we are
How deadly we are
How right we are
How decent we are
That killing can be justified

I had a friend
He was a sniper
Now he’s dead
Died young from jungle rot
There’s no movie about his life
Just reality

I’m so damn sorry

© Ron Olsen – All rights reserved