NaPoWriMo 2023, day 5: Trio

April 6, 2023
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I have just finished Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. It is one of the finest novels I have ever read. It succeeds as a mystery novel, as a period piece, as a commentary on social stratification, and as a complex and magnificent love story. It is the third tale in the saga of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, Strong Poison and Have His Carcase being the first two. All three are superb, but Gaudy Night is the capstone.

The three acrostic poems on this page were inspired by the story of Harriet and Peter. The strictures of the acrostic forms I use and of brevity make them analogous to Plato’s Myth of the Cave in terms of reflecting the actuality of the love story, but those who have read any of the three books will hear an echo.

Downfall

Deliver a roman à clef
Designed to cure the blind & deaf

Of incomplete sensoria

Which then restores euphoria

Now Knowledge, that most bitter pill
Necessitates a lonely hill


Free Pass

Fret & weep
Fall asleep

Rouse the area
Raise hysteria

Enter Bliss

Extra kiss


High Time

Heavens! We’ll be late for T
If, though, you’ve the dough-re-mi
Glean & dawdle; twinkle; gleam
Hasten not! It spoils the scheme

NaPoWriMo 2023, day 3: A-G

April 3, 2023
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A poem that acrosticizes the alphabet is known as an abecedarian. The first three syllables are pronounced A B C. Then say the name Darian, and you’re home.

Aay Bee Cee Dee Eee Eff Gee

Abracadabra, a cadre of dreamers! Whoopee! OMG

Antedeluvian essences wheedle the Infinite

Yes, let us feed wildebeests ending strife in our Noble Cause spree

Since each line has a related-but-different meter, I make bold to suggest that April 3, 2023 is the day Slant Meter was invented. There will probably be zero seismic upheaval in the world of poetry, but not bad for a chubby old guy with a bent heart, eh? 🙂

NaPoWriMo 2023, day 2: Tap

April 2, 2023
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“Tap” is one of those marvelous itty-bitty words that can mean any of a number of things. You may be tapped for a promotion. You may hear gentle rain on your window. There may be a Raven ready to repeat a maddening word, wanting you to let her in. Or you may be out of funds–tapped out. (I just tapped that on my laptop.)

So I have drawn the master of tap dancing, Sammy Davis Jr., doing what he did superbly. Next to him is a tableau vivant of a man walking, and the tap on his shoulder by a lady who is about to change his life. Next to them is the prosaic and eminently useful Water Tap, based on my bathroom-sink faucet.

Tap TapTapTap Tap

The door goes rat-a-tat-a-tat
To tell a Caller’s on the mat
They may complain about your cat

A dancer taps into nostalgia
And then he has fibromyalgia
As always, Entropy will gouge ya

Penultimately we may gasp
Plead if we hear a gravelled rasp
Perhaps we feel the REAPER’S grasp

National Poetry Writing Month 2023, day 1: A Fool Aloof

April 1, 2023
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A Fool Aloof

All of us love Cinderell A

Few of us a spitting came L
One of us makes turnip jell O
Overactive as Othell O
Let us grade this wayward fellow… F

Cinderella, of course, is the classic Rags-to-Riches story. Camels do spit and most of us find that disagreeable. Turnip Jello does not exist, except here; so there is only one maker. (Fun fact: my middle name, Wright, means “maker.) And Othello had an overactive imagination, an overactive murderous urge, and an overactive tendency to believe what he was told.

In my country, the letter F denotes more than one thing. In the case of a grade, F stands for Failure, Failing, or Fail. Since the last line didn’t rhyme one the last word, the acrostic literally gets an F.

Happy April Fool’s Day, Friends!

Time Marches On. March Marches Off.

March 31, 2023
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Friends, technical difficulties have kept me from posting anything at all this March. My “Media Library” has reached its gigabyte limit despite my efforts to free up space. But as long as I don’t try to upload an image I can still make a post. I didn’t want a full month to go by without one, so here we are.

Some good things are happening. Donald Trump has at long last been indicted, and though the Republican party is making shameful noise about “political persecution,” it seems that the only person who claims he’s innocent is Trump himself, and he is as usual lying. He wishes that something will distract the public from this indictment, and I hope he’ll get his wish–in the form of OTHER, MORE SERIOUS indictments. As Bob Woodward says, he is a threat to Democracy. Let us try him. May he find the Justice he deserves, and may it be swift and thorough.

My personal life has taken an interesting turn. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I will be reporting for an apprenticeship program for prep cooks, come the 10th of April. I bought a chef’s knife today to get some practice in. Three carrots, eight radishes, a navel orange and a white onion have already laid down their lives for the sake of my training.

School shootings are still rife in this so-called Land of the Free. Yet wrong-minded folks still post “guns don’t kill people” propaganda, largely under the influence of the disgraced NRA. Our civilization is tainted with barbarism.

Friends, I’ll be back in April. Stay safe, please, and seek happiness!

Vase the Nations

February 15, 2023
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Last time I was here at PIP Coffee & Clay I left my rain jacket. I found when I came to retrieve it this afternoon that these two vases of mine had survived the glaze firing. And since this blog ig called “One with Clay, Image and Text” I thought it behooving to post this Clay Image and backstop it with Text. Since it will be seen worldwide, you could call this an elegant way to Vase the Nations. 🙂

Acrostic Portrait of Kathryn Petroff

February 5, 2023
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Some of us have Jobs, some Careers. A lucky few have Callings. Here is one such, the vivacious, acerbic Kathryn Petroff, who, so much like my late, great friend Karen Wilkinson, used her legal skills as a criminal-law attorney, defending the downtrodden and the scorned. And when her career took her beyond criminal defense, to judicial review, she became a force for the public interest, her work instrumental in unseating not one, but two bad judges. (Yes, Virginia, there are all kinds of Bad Judges out there!!)

She is also a courageous cancer survivor. When I asked her for photos to use for her portrait, the first one she sent me looked like she’d done battler with Smaug the Dragon himself, yet she had a tiny brave smile on her face. “What a brave smile,” I texted, and her reply was “Radiation makes me sleepy.” Is she a Trouper, or what?

And she has a fondness for Dorothy Sayers and her hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. (Kat, there is no H in Wimsey. I checked.) And her son Toby followed her legal footsteps, going to Harvard Law, and was a prosecutor, then went civil, and now finds his bliss in bond transactions–I think. Being an ignoramus of both law and bonds I may have gotten that muddled.

But mostly Kathryn Petroff is a keenly intelligent, incandescent human being, and I’m glad to know her.

Here are the words to the acrostic:

Kathryn Petroff

Kick/start a life with labor pains and soap
And Independence ready to say Nope
To surface-y success’s col de Mort
Half Frog-marched down Life’s dusty corridor
RIGHT WRONGS became her conjurable Stuff. O
Yes and Sure, Adversity does scuff
NYET Evil DA to Battle–call their bluff

NOTE: a Col de Mort is a way to weaponize an epee, turning a harmless fencing instrument into a deadly weapon via its sharp-pointed “collar of death.”

Acrostic Portrait of David “Croz” Crosby

January 29, 2023
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He was Stardust. And Golden. And he has returned to the Golden Stardust whence he came. But in between his pre-assembled Stardust and his current celestial state, he took himself on a wild ride, acquiring and losing bandmates, habits, dignity and freedom. One story of his extremism, recounted Graham Nash in his memoir, was so beyond the pale that Nash heard from the Legal department of his publisher. They demanded confirmation of the story that Crosby had sold his Porsche for crack, and upon his crack dealer’s death by overdose, Crosby sneaked back to the dealer’s abode and stole back the pink slip. So Nash called Crosby, and Croz told him that not only was it true, but in a scenario reminiscent of the CSN classic “Deja Vu,” Crosby later again sold the Porsche–for crack.

But he also pushed the limits of music, elevating millions with his jazz influence and harmonic entwinings in CSN and CSNY. And he cleaned up, and he got a new liver, and he outlived his old liver by decades, and he showed us oldsters that the best way to go out is in a blaze of creative glory.

As often happens, I choked a little on my portraiture with this image, wanting to convey his careening, pyrotechnic soul, remaining undecided about how old to make him and what expression to put on his face. I’ve overworked it to the point I had to say “to hell with it” and quit before I made it worse. But the words paint a fuller picture.

David CROZ Crosby

Dude was SCRAGGLY, PsychedeliC
And his HARMONIES pure WondeR
As a liquor–like F r a n g e l i c O
Velvet SMOOTH as distant thunderS
Irascibly zappish, a son of a B
Despite aural daZzle and all honestY


multigranularity

January 22, 2023
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(First published in Facebook)

multigranularity
(to Cynthia)

a bowl of multigrain cheerios
made me think of my friend
Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow
because a couple years back
she asked us all the question
what were our 5 favorite words?
i only remember one of mine
and that was “molybdenum”
but the noticer part of my brain
is sharper than the rememberer
and what i noticed in this bowl
of cheerios was the difference
in multigranularity between the
multigrain cheerios and other
multigrain products like bread;
the grains are mixed in the bread
but each cheerio is singular and
so the multigranularity derives
from a mix of individuals and not
from any homogenization but
the reason I thought of cynthia
and her question was when i
looked, the cheerios in the bowl
differed from regular cheerios
insofar as appearance goes: they
had an unmonotoneity to them.

And like Euclid running naked
up and down the streets of
Athens shouting “Eureka!”
(that means “I have it!”)
a fun-fact Eureka moment
happened to word-obsessed me:
the word “monotonous” is less
monotonous as the word
“unmonotonous” and
“unmonotonousness” is
more monotonous yet making
it my new favorite word.

There are three stanzas here.
The first is a big block of cheese.
The second stanza breathes.
This one’s shortnsweet. ❤