petalridge.com
the website of
Derek Kannemeyer
POETRY
Available Now
POETRY: my aesthetic map
Mostly, however many of the creative arts I practice, I'm a writer.
Mostly, I write and publish POETRY. Free verse; formal verse; hybrid half-forms; prose poems; lyrical narrative vignettes. At times, there's an overlap with low-key microfictions, or bits of creative non-fiction. There are a lot of monologues; I could file some under "playwriting." Do the labels matter? Show me an aesthetic map, and I'll want to write all over it.
HERE
Under the POETRY tab, you'll find poems from my 2018 Blue Nib chapbook, my 2021 collection Mutt Spirituals, my 2023 collection You Go In By The Gate That Isn't There, and my 2025 works Found Voices and Scattershots. For A Betabestiary and other light verse, try the Playpen tab. (NB: these are teasers. Get hold of the books!)
CLICK ON THE FOLDERS:
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POETRY ELSEWHERE ON THE SITE: LIGHT STUFF, HYBRID WORK, OLD STUFF
While I've chosen to file Scattershots: a lighter verse collection right here, at the POETRY tab, A Betabestiary can be found over with the uncollected light verse at the PLAYPEN tab, under PARTY PIECES. Why? Because it's as much an animal factoids browsing book as it is a book of verse? Maybe! Listen, labels are just labels, and genres overlap. Other HYBRID work pairing poems with photography is posted under PIC LIT. And I'll risk posting some OLD STUFF at the PAST GLORIES tab. As a sample and a preview, and in honor of that stash of juvenilia, here's one from the pile which I can't remember tinkering with at all over the decades. Yet in its poetic stance, style, tone, tune, even taste, I still recognize myself. Weird.
LOOK AT ME! (circa 1972, 1973)
Skipping across a tightrope; falling off—
learning, skipping back, and staying on—
who could look at him and shrug, or cough?
Who keep on that hat we wear to doff?
Sadly, it seems almost everyone.
Dispersing, they ask, What does he achieve,
tripping so boldly three feet off the ground?
Okay, the wire's thin, but so what? We've
no terror, no suspense—we yawn, and leave—
we know he won't be dashed to bits or drowned.
Personally, though, I don't see the thrill,
defying death—who'll get us anyhow—
when it's reduced to taking failure ill,
mistaking nerve for truth and swank for skill,
and giving death the chance to get us now.
I'll take my own risks. Though I'll gladly pay,
the point of them is never the expense.
I hope that everything I want to say
flies out the throat of one, one day.
Meanwhile, I'll fall, and join the audience.