No photo source for this one. No forethought. Started with a crayon skate it looked like the contour of a life model’s hip. Went with that.
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LOFTY aspiration
Liftoff! and bye-bye duress. A lovely Sky, a lack of Stress. Observe the Earth and smile and weep: on wings of Breeze your heart will keep. I find a spirit light if higher, for Altitude will slake Desire. A tidal current may well fit the stratosphere from where you sit. I yearn to ever upward go. You see a Glory freshly known.
The above paragraph is the prose form of my acrostic poem “LOFTY aspiration.” Sometimes at poetry events I will recite the words of my acrostic poem, then do a “reveal” of my page with the poem on it. So here is this post’s Reveal. Soar serenely, Friends!
Auld Time Sake
Artists need to push themselves, and push the boundaries of the possible, but it’s not always particularly exciting, controversial or wrenching to do so–sometimes it’s even mundane, as you see. I’ve got this genre niche, acrostic poetry with a graphic component, and today it was time to have another go at minimalism. The triple acrostic reads “Auld Time Sake.” There is one word per line.
Amateurs are people who devote time to doing something they love. Ultimata are declarations that things must happen a certain way or there will be dire consequences. Leemerik is an odd spelling of Limerick that is a near-anagram of Lee Remick. Demesnée is a woman’s name derived from Demesne, defined as land adjoining a mansion that is owned and enjoyed by the mansion’s owner. Demesne is pronounced dehMANE, phonetically similar to Domain, which I’m guessing isn’t a coincidence.
This all may seem random, and the word selection odd, but a sizable amount of deliberation went into the acrostic’s construction. “Auld Time Sake” is phonetically nearly identical to “old times’ sake,” but now the words are of equal length. Each line has two characters between “Auld” and “Time,” and three between “Time” and “Sake.” This is a more pure-acrostic approach than I usually take.
Of these seven words together like this, endless collage-like images may come to mind, and limitless storytelling along previously unexplored avenues is possible, just as a selection of three main ingredients and four subordinate ones might keep a chef busy for years.
I placed the sketchbook containing the page in front of an image of Emma Thompson and John Lithgow embracing as they perform in the recent release LATE NIGHT. Their tandem performance in this scene brought tears to the director’s eyes, and to mine. The addition of that frozen frame in the background somehow added a good context to my page.
Lynda! Barry! Two! Times!
My 2013 portrait of Lynda Barry has been my laptop screensaver for quite a while. She continues to blossom and thrive, and teaches creativity two-thirds of the way across the country from me. I would love to take that class. Some day I hope to.
This October 5th I will be an exhibitor and performer at Meet Your Literary Community, an event conducted by Jacob Friedman of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Jake suggested that I do caricatures for charity, so I am warming up, and this ten-minute sketch of Ms. Barry, its photo source found via Internet search of “lynda barry 2019 headshot,” is today’s first try. It is Conté crayon on Stonehenge paper.
If you are unfamiliar with Lynda Barry and her work, I urge you to seek out her images and image-rich publications. There is also a fine Facebook group aptly named Lynda! Barry! Rocks! The group name inspired the title of this post.
moonbeam embracer and friends
A special friend of mine seems to live by the Moon. At any given moment she knows its phase, and whether it is on the wax or on the wane. She inspired the card on the left.
A special friend of mine seems to draw energy from felines. She encourages them to congregate near her, and invests them with lavishments of love and exotic dining. She inspired the scrap on the right.
A special friend of mine fades out of view, then in. She seems to appear when I need a boost, then evaporate when I am on the up and up. I have sought and found her now and then, but hesitantly: I am afraid too much of a touch would attenuate the magic.
Words are left out of “moonbeam embracer,” yet the words displayed make sense of their own. I will show with ciphers how the missing words are placed, but revealing them would be too much of a touch. Also, there are many “solutions” to this “puzzle.” For you “solvers” out there, the poem is in trochaic tetrameter.
moonbeam embracer
maiden, 000 00000 000000 extreme
o how photons 00000 000 teem
omnipresent 00000 orb
never 000000 0 metaphor
beckon 000000 00 rca
endochronic 000 archaic
ah, 0000 000000000 guinevere
maiden, 00000000 00 000 sheer
Warp Wrap
The English language is dynamic, and some words and idiomatic phrases enjoy usage for which almost all English speakers have forgotten origins and even meanings. The phrase “sticks in my craw” means more to farmers and ornithologists than it does to millennials.
When I was thinking along these lines, somehow the acrostic “warp wrap” came to mind. “Warp” means both Distortion and Parallel Threads In Fabric (sort of), and “Wrap” means both Enshroud and Conclude.
We have the word Asea. Why not Aland? Because the English language is large, it contains multitudes, and so it has a way of Whitmanesquedly contradicting itself. It is a citizen in the Quantum Universe, which also contradicts itself, of necessity for existence.
The spot illustrations for this page border on the wretched. The worst is the “Top Drawer” illustration, with which I attempted to do a visual Bad Pun by sticking it in the word Craw. I tried to make it work, but it seems too distractive for the payoff.
Warp Wrap
What IS a craw?
And WHAT is [so desirable about] TOP DRAWER?
RAW sewage or COOKED? ASEA
Precludes ALAND’s GDP.
GDP is economese for Gross Domestic Product. It is a benchmark of how well a given land is doing. Sewage is one of the grosser domestic products. English is large; it contains multitudes. Why do we not wish to have our geese cooked?
CATastrophic CAT acrostics #41-B
Once upon a time there was a tabby cat who was peevish about being brought into existence merely to be a frontdrop for an array of nonsensical words. She put up a paw in protest and found that she had been manipulated to do so in order to make the composition more interesting. “This is a contrivance,” said the cat. “Does the world really need another one of these?”
“Well, you’re pretty, and people may want to see you,” said the Maker.
a song of departure
a song of departure
the staff eased
his passing with
gentle low voices
and therethere smiles. He emerged
from coma briefly and he & his wife
confessed & forgave. She held
his hand as he delicately slowed to a stop.
Imp Act Crater (DRAFT ONLY)
Eighteen years ago today, airplanes were weaponized by terrorists in an attack on my country, and the course of our history veered. Living in that history has been to some extent a nightmare. And so the metaphor that occurred to me is a crater formed by the act of an imp, a minion of Evil Incarnate: Imp Act Crater.
I want to do a much more polished and wordsmithed version of the page above, so I pseudo-rubber-stamped it “DRAFT.” (I hope I will find, acquire or make a real DRAFT rubber stamp soon; I can use it!) Meanwhile there is this.
Imp Act Crater (DRAFT)
It’s stake time now for Joan of Arc
Moloch’s malarkey leaves a scar
Pandemics are a panacea
As coup d’etat meets death by fiat
Catastrophe by rock & flare
Takes precedence o’er thought & prayer
Extractive Capitalism
This post owes its existence to my friend of many years, designer Terry Irwin. She pointed her Facebook readers to an article in The Nation about Wendell Berry, perhaps the closest thing to a latter-day Thoreau that these times have produced. The article included the phrase “extractive capitalism,” which I have used as the acrostic.
What is Extractive Capitalism? It is exploitation without reciprocity. It is taking advantage and not giving back. Clearcutting and fracking and unsafe offshore drilling are examples, but the practice does not limit itself to Earthly riches: during the housing crisis in the late 2000s, Extractive Capitalism extracted dollars from middle-classers and gave it to banking executives and stockbrokers.
Wendell Berry’s wisdom may be found in this passage from the article: “The time is past when it was enough merely to elect our officials,” [Berry] argued in 1972 concerning the fight against strip mining. “We will have to elect them and then go and watch them and keep our hands on them, the way the coal companies do.”
Another valuable phrase in the article sums this wisdom up: “Participatory democracy.”
In my country the concept of Socialism is being demonized by the current administration. It is painted as Big Government taking and doling out, with hordes of parasites with their hands out. But true, RESPONSIBLE Socialism, where each individual seeks the best fit of meaningful endeavor and fair exchange as a participating member of the state, will be what saves us from climate change, corruption and waste, I think.
Here is my poem, with the acrostic aspect disregarded for clarity, and a word or two changed because of the freedom from stricture:
Extractive Capitalism
ENGULF! Be meteoric
Extend hegemony
A trawler-drag historic
Uproots anemone
I acey-deucey dare ya
It cash-enriches molders
A test run of malaria
Will Instashare the holders
I venture we’ll do Chasms
Enable Cash Orgasms
One with Clay, Image and Text 