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Monthly Archives: November 2014

robert tiger h. cosby, jr.

November 19, 2014
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a gift from scotland
from my daughter:
the complete poetical works of robert burns
plaid-jacketed
with lavish color plates

quoth the second paragraph of the introduction:
“By Jean Armour he had nine children,
but he fathered bairns
on Elizabeth Paton,
Jenny Chow,
Ann Park,
and Helen Armstrong.
Margaret ‘Highland Mary’ Campbell may have died in childbirth,
while Margaret ‘May’ Cameron took out a paternity suit against him
(though this was dropped after she aborted or miscarried).
In the context of his time, however, such behaviour
(and its consequences)
were by no means uncommon.”

can i get a holy moly?

monuments aplenty were raised bearing the name of robert burns.

tiger woods is paying for his profligacy
to the tune of many lifetime incomes in the middle-class range.
his swing is off and many think he is washed up.

as for william h. cosby, jr.,
i mourn the man i thought he was
who i now think doesn’t exist.

Jack Being Nimble

November 18, 2014
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Five years ago Thursday I was watching Jack Evans, “the Godfather of Phoenix poetry” according to Phoenix New Times, co-host and perform in the Caffeine Corridor series, and I was fortunate enough to have pencil and scrap paper on hand and a ringside seat, so I did a sketch. That that was five years ago attests to the longevity of Caffeine Corridor, and of Jack.

Today I was delighted to see that Jack had made that long-ago sketch his Facebook avatar, probably in acknowledgment of the five-year anniversary of my sketch. Jack, you REALLY MADE MY DAY, doing this! Thanks so much!

jack 112009

done places, gone things

November 17, 2014
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001

done places, gone things

[Satan, to a newly arrived Chicagoan]
The trouble with you Chicago people is,
that you think you are the best people down here;
whereas you are merely the most numerous.
Mark Twain (“Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”)

in our language of euphemism and shorthand,
first we get older and then we get old.
we go there and do that and get the t-shirt.
if we like it enough we go and do and get again.

when you’ve already been older and are heading for old,
life’s increasing limitations elbow their way in,
so you stroll along the strand rather than running tirelessly through it
on the way to something else,

or get quietly smashed instead of raising hell.
you turn in your young-person card
and start referring to young adults as “kids.”
in our language of euphemism and shorthand,

we “slow down” as we “get on”
though we tell ourselves “fifty is the new thirty”
and other nonsense,
and some of us take desperate measures:

doctors saw at the skin of our faces
or inject paralyzing toxin into it, or both,
and sometimes the masquerade works,
and sometimes it doesn’t.

we get offered “rewards” that are enticements
for the dispensation of our disposable and not-so-disposable cash.
we get mail about cremations and cruises
and we get fading music.

the cradle rocks and the grave is still.
in between, the speed limit will go from 75 to 15
and there’ll be a wiggly pointed line on a yellow background.
it is then that we find out what we’re made of.

rats/tsar/star/arts

November 16, 2014
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Here quadruple acrosticism is pushed to its limit. Nineteen words are arrayed in four lines that yield four more words. Each row summons an image; each acrostical column is illustrated by contrapuntal images. Talismans is to Arcana as Secretariat is to Racecar. The two middle acrostics are the bookends of those four words, and the first word in every row ends in the same letter of the acrostic column next to it, and the last phrase of each row begins with the same letter of the acrostical column to its immediate left. Why all these strictures? My guess is I do it for the same reason Henri Matisse painted a green stripe down the middle of the face of his portrait of Madame Matisse. We’re pushing on something, seeing if we can get away with it, and seeing if it matters.

Curiosity may be satisfied by doing an Internet search on “matisse green stripe.” Meanwhile, here’s mine:

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Some fine day I may push the envelope further with “spot/opts/pots/stop.” I’d be overjoyed if someone beat me to it, though. [rueful smile]

Cover Story: Three Covers, Forty Years

November 15, 2014
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Recently my e-mail included an attachment of the cover of SANDCUTTERS, the quarterly publication of the Arizona State Poetry Society. The cover design is by Carol Hogan, and features a ceramic work of mine on the front cover, and a journal page of mine on the back. It looks like this:

sandcutter cover 111514

Naturally I’m thrilled about this. I’m no stranger to literary publication covers, but there have been so few in my artist’s checkered career that I am at most a casual acquaintance. I have designed the covers of two out of three of the chapbooks I’ve self-published. (My old and truest friend Steve Boyle designed the cover of SAVAGE SONNETS AND OTHER WHYS, and I here reward him by not featuring that cover on this post. I am a Stinker.) Here is the cover of my first chapbook:

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Behind The Bird are thumbnails of some of the 600-odd journal pages I’d done, scanned and posted to the now-defunct website Eons.

To see the one other cover I’d done before then, we have to set the Way-Back Machine all the way to 1973, when I was an 18-year-old pup attending Glendale Community College. That year’s GCC literary magazine, The Traveler, featured my white-on-black portrait of my then-girlfriend. There’s awful clumsiness in the drawing, but there is also love. Here it is, courtesy of GCC’s Memory Project:

traveler cover 111514

Bob Dylan’s line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes to mind: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” Forty years of covers and I STILL am on the day shift. [smiles] C’est La Vie–that covers it!

Pencil Pencil Sketch Sketch

November 13, 2014
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A movie called GONE GIRL featured a bar called “The Bar.” Mention was made of the name of the bar being “meta,” which means self-referential in a self-aware sort of way, sort of. Meta’s been around for a while, as witness this first verse to the theme of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”:

This is the theme to Garry’s Show,
The theme to Garry’s show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry’s Show.

So this is a pencil sketch featuring an acrostic of “Pencil Sketch.” It features Imogene Coca, who as a player in Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” performed in many a sketch. Apologies to the memory of Ms. Coca for such a sketchy description of such an outstanding comedic mind. Apologies, too, for an indecent attempt at caricature without reference to a photo source. This time round I elected to fly by the seat of my mind’s-eye pants and draw without looking at anything except the page.

Here are the words to the acrostic. Each line describes a sketch to be found on the page. Near the lower right-hand corner is a sketch of a pencil, which illustrates the double acrostic in heavy meta.

Party hats seen through refractive glass
Elephant sniffs at a whiskey flask
Nightstick next to an alley’s grate
Cat all tie-dyed per the dyer’s trait
Imogene Coca as a bumbling narc
Lastly–a profile of a matriarch

My own take on Meta is that being self-referential has its place, but self-REVerential–not so much.

001

timely whiplash/snidely tidings

November 12, 2014
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whoa be tide
when the frictional coefficient of the atmosphere
efficiently stops rotation

but no worries
we’ll be crispy critters long before that
when the sun gets its red-giant midriff bulge

erstwhile beyond jupiter
our whiplashed space probe sent us saturn’s hexagonal miracle
giving us a ringside seat

now we claim
residency on and of a comet
maybe interstellar isn’t all that farly fetched

*****

Notes:

The title derives from rearrangement of “Snidely Whiplash,” archenemy of Dudley Do-Right of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and “Timely Tidings.” Yesterday’s poetry prompt invited use of either “timely” or “timeless.”

The atmosphere is indeed slowing down Earth’s rotation, and the sun will indeed bulge during its transition to red-giantism, eventually achieving a radius in excess of the orbit of Earth. I owe my knowledge of these two things to having read Larry Niven’s A WORLD OUT OF TIME some thirty-odd years ago.

The trajectories of space probes often use planet gravity for a “slingshot” effect, which I trust is relatable to “whiplash.” I owe my knowledge of this to having read Arthur Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey some forty-odd years ago.

On Saturn, storm activity unimpeded by landscape has resulted in a perfect hexagon at at least one of its poles. Spectacular photography is available courtesy of the Cassini probe.

We, the citizens of planet Earth, have just landed on Comet Rosetta. Read all about it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/the-rosetta-comet…/ Meanwhile, the movie INTERSTELLAR is playing at local theaters.

KIL(planet)TER, or A Planet Out of Kilter

November 11, 2014
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002

Equilibrium-seeking is in our DNA, and also in the admonitions of those grade-school teachers who told us to Sit Up Straight. We don’t have an opposite of the word dizzy, do we? And, misogynites that we are, we never refer to a dizzy dude, although “he’s a half bubble off level” is some places’ parlance for “he’s crazy.”

So I came to Kilter today. I doodled some rounded-sided triangles, which seem to me to be benign, friendly, balanced shapes. But I played them off each other and cut holes in them to see if they would jangle. They still seem pleasant, if a bit spicy.

Keep upright
In balance
Lose teeter

Wanting simplicity, I wrote the acrostic with a minimum of words. I didn’t plan “planet;” it just popped out. Irony was introduced via the upside-down signature/date, and by tilting the sketchpad on the scanner. It’s fun, but is it Art? Tell me, please…

Parameterized Parameter Eyes

November 11, 2014
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001

This acrostic distinguishes itself by a few instances of line-jumping: Line 1 on the left ends up being Line 2 on the right, for instance. Just more seeing if it can be done. It can, but untranscribed it’s unreadable, just as, for me, non-English opera requires subtitles or a libretto.

Here is the start of the libretto to the double crossover acrostic:

Preparation doesn’t stop
At the starting line. To pop