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r o u n d a b o u t

June 7, 2020
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Stringing letters together with the English language in mind sometimes creates multiple pathways. Thus r o u n d a b o u t can be variously agglutinated to Ro und Abou T or Round Ab Out or R ou NDA B ou T, etc. And l a v a l a m p may become Lava Lamp or Lav Al Amp or or Laval AMP, and so on. Our thoughts might be otherwise diverted if we’d ever heard the band Yes sing :Roundabout,” or if we’re old enough to remember a lava lamp in a coffeehouse.

Any or all of this, or something else, might modify the flavor of those two strings of words. But if you SEE a Lava Lamp, or you are DRIVING THROUGH a Roundabout, your experience becomes not strings of letters but tangibility.

2020 0607 roundabout

r o u n d a b o u t

reminders like the tick and flea
obsess us with the honeyed b
upend the lava lamp and goo
now set the font in bold urdu
deliver us, o passe-partout

Minted Caress (detail from Acrostikon)

June 3, 2020
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Friends, I’ve been hacking away at this drawing for days, and it’s still unfinished but at the same time teetering on the edge of Overworked. It is ambitious, and doing it stretched me some, and the next one will be better, and the young couple savoring a moment provides a bailout in that the conceit is that they are imagining these fantastical surroundings, and they deliberately leave their conceptualization incomplete, so that it will last until they finish it, which they won’t, so Forever.

There will either be a remake or a similar-themed image in the future. This time round it was make-it-up-as-you-go-along, but next time I’ll write all the acrostics first, calligraph them straightforwardly, print them, and THEN position them in space. You see in the drawing that some of the 3Difications are more convincing than others. The next one(s) will be better.

The full drawing will follow, but this detail is the heart of the matter…

20200603_161848

 

 

kitchens sync

May 26, 2020
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There’s a sort of warning in the background of this image, a sampleresque homily which has been, to my knowledge, as yet unwritten. It says “Ambiguity S O C K S.” it is sort of self-demonstrating.

I got ambitious, and my have overreached my ability –I KNOW the viewer needs all the help she or he can get, yet there’s a lot of chaos here. The double acrostic poem, “Kitchens Sync,” gives another clue as to why. A lot is thrown in.

2020 0526 kitchens sync ii

kitchens sync

kundalini yoga sends
intimation to yr friends
take a ride on grammerly
challenge all yr fammerly
help a sea or gutter urchin
end a quest 4 what yr surchin
need of job r wife r clinic
seeds yr future megacynic

When Kitchens Sync, i.e. become synchronous or achieve synchronicity, the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink” expands to become “everything INCLUDING the sinks of more than one kitchen.” I hope and trust that some enjoyment of this poem/image may be derived by looking for patterns. One example that may be missed if I don’t mention it is that the poem has one instance of the shorthand word “yr” (for “your”) in every other line of the poem. That wasn’t done gratuitously. It’s intended to reinforce the connection between the reader and the poem’s arc.  Whether it works or not is a matter of opinion–YOUR opinion.

The center figure seemed to me to look a bit like the late Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson once ran for public office, and used a symbol of his own design for the political party he was trying to get off the ground, of a two-thumbed hand gripping a peyote button. My guy doesn’t have two thumbs on his hand, but including the thumb there are six fingers. I think I owe the whimsy of that to Marc Chagall, who once gave one of his figures a seven-fingered hand. After I post this page I’ll see if Chagall had any other reason for doing that other than the sheer anarchic joy of it. If not, that was plenty–doing a little time in the Anarchic Circle is good for an artist’s refreshment. 🙂

n.e.s. #128 of 480

May 19, 2020
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Many of us begin or continue our day with a form of the stimulant Caffeine. In the United States of America, it is so rife as to be hard to avoid.

Caffeine Depender

Cop a cup so hotly brewed
Additives to be less rude
Find your Center with a sip
Feel that shield against the Grippe
Even-temperedness we reckon
In the first cup then the second
Need a third? the pot’s still here
Existential Warmth & Cheer

2020 0519 nes128

 

Sing O Muse

May 6, 2020
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This was a good idea, a tribute to four deserving women with lovely singing voices who also happened to inspire, and thus be Muses. The execution isn’t so hot, but that’s what I get for using the Unforgiving Pen for this one.

Mama Cass Elliot was compared by Graham Nash to Gertrude Stein, that patron of the arts of yesteryear. Joni Mitchell inspired Nash to write “Our House,” one of the loveliest songs ever written in the service of describing the bliss of ordinary life. Linda Ronstadt inspired Jerry Brown, called by some “Governor Moonbeam.” She also showed up in one of Paul Simon’s songs in his classic “Graceland.” And Carole King inspired an entire generation in general, and James Taylor in particular.

Brava, sweet-sounding Ladies. I hope some day to do you better justice.

2020 0506 muse

Sing O Muse

Saintly Mama Cass had donned a muu-muu with some room
Innocence in Joni Mitchell fed her aperçu
Next came Linda Ronstadt with a songbird’s light caress
Go-to gals like Carole King rule airways with finesse

Here Are the Elsewheres

April 21, 2020
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I was hoping to get this piece done by midnight. I am eleven hours early, having rushed its completion, just as I said I DIDN’T want to do (see my previous post, “Throes of Creation”). But that’s a good thing, as I will explain.

20200421_124255

Behind the “finished” page is the copy on which I thrashed out the penultimate draft. The missing lines of the acrostic are written wraparound-style outside the right and top page borders.
****
Here Are the Elsewheres

HOPEWARD bound, on wings of raging Flame
Endless Void the Heaven, Sol the Hell
Righteousnesses seem like voodoo games
Empathy the Childe of Beast & Belle
Angst, Begone. Come Progress swift AND slow
RENT from shackling History’s catarrh
Emphasis on Health from head to toe
Then comes TRAVEL meaning-full and far
HOPE is Blissful Silence–just ask these
Everlasting Peacefulness agrees
****
So here, Friends, is a poem in Trochaic Pentameter, ababcdcdee rhyme scheme, all but one pair of lines perfect rhymes, and that one pair of lines varying merely by the difference between Singular and Plural. I am proud. It is a sort of sequel to the decades-old song “After the Gold Rush” by proud “Canarican” (as of January of this year!) Neil Young, which includes the last stanza

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceship flying
In the yellow haze of the sun.
There were children crying and colours flying
All around the chosen one
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun…
Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed
To a new home in the sun.
Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed
To a new home…

Tomorrow, April 22, 2020, is the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. Neil’s song, and his album of the same name (the lovely word eponymous means “of the same name”) were recorded that same year. So here’s to Neil Young, and also to Dennis Hopper, whose movie The Last Movie (a “follow-up to Easy Rider” according to rock historian Nick Hasted) inspired Mr. Young to write “After the Gold Rush.”

So–why the rush job? I promised an explanation. See, if you look at the drawing/illustration, the middle lines of the poem seem most hastily placed. They are. Two reasons. A, the faster you skate across the (Stonehenge White, thick, super-absorbent) paper with a (Pilot PRECISE V5 Ultra Fine Rolling Ball) pen, the fainter the penstroke appears to the eye, and I wanted to have my cake and eat it too as far as shape-repetition of the floating rectangle-with-cutout was concerned. B) This drawing is a Qualifier, meaning that I deem it worthy of the time and trouble it will take to use it as the basis of a large-scale painting.

Now it’s time to talk, briefly and glowingly, about my ex-wife, Joni.

A couple of months ago Joni was cleaning house, and she had decided that it was a shame that the art supplies she’d acquired during her time of journaling and other creative expression were going fallow. She asked me if I knew of someone who could put them to good use. I nominated myself. And Joni, bless her sweet soul, not only gave me a boatload of art supplies, including a COMPLETE, UNUSED set of acrylic paints, and a FIVE-DRAWER CABINET containing all manner of other media, but she also HELPED ME PUT THEM IN MY APARTMENT. She has not let the dissolution of our marriage interfere with the kindness and compassion she extends to a fellow Creative. But since my acquisition of these fine supplies, I have made sparse use of them–some sculptural enhancement here, some sketching on a pad there. Now–and I will devote Earth Day (and probably beyond) to this endeavor–I will use the paints and brushes she endowed me with to make a more fully realized version of this page.

 

Throes of Creation

April 21, 2020
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I’ve been working on a page in sporadic fits. There are still a thousand ways it can go, yet it’s “mostly” done. What I did this morning is take a black&white copy of it, and use that copy to explore, freed from the stricture of “ink is forever.” Here’s a pic, with the original on the left, and the worked-on copy on the right:

20200421_101243

Notice the final couplet was already done. Like many murder mysteries, this poem started with a theme (the double acrostic HERE ARE THE ELSEWHERES) and the “reveal” (the final couplet “Hope is Blissful Silence–just ask these/Everlasting Peacefulness agrees”). The bestselling mystery author Mickey Spillane once said cheerfully in an interview that he wrote all his books backwards, starting with an ending and then figuring out how to get there. And, Friends, speaking from the experience of the construction of, no kidding, more than a thousand acrostic poems, starting with the first line is the rare exception, not the usual way to succeed.

With my copy I composed a draft of the first four lines, but did it beyond the page border, using white Conté crayon. This is out of a concern that if I fill in the acrostic on the page itself, it might spoil the visual effect enjoyed by the similarity between the letters and words already on the page and the floating, flexing rectangle-with-cutout in the foreground. Also, the lines are a draft, and so subject to change. (I’m not sure, for instance, that it’s such a good idea to have a “Beauty and the Beast” reference in a poem addressing more eternal issues. But maybe it will be more relatable this way. SO many ways this thing can go!)

I filled in the letters for HERE on the left acrostic column and the HERE of the ELSEWHERES in the right column. Trying the resulting motif-tension on for size. I like it–it seems to work. The final version will include that.

I did a few other things too, and the reader is welcome to look for them. But this post is all about the anatomy of the creative process, and I felt it valuable to preserve this one step. There will be many more decisions to make, and more lines to compose. I hope to be done by midnight, but one BAD decision that has afflicted much of my work is to rush things. Don’t want to ruin this one by rushing it!

To V. S. G. (NAPoWriMo day 20)

April 19, 2020
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  1. My friend and former classmate Vicki makes COVID-19 masks, and she sent me one a couple of weeks ago. It fits great, and it survived machine washing. I am doubly lucky, because the Day 20 prompt for National Poetry Writing Month is “write a poem about a handmade gift.”

20200419_220852

To V. S. G.

now i take me out to shop

the mask that Vicki made WILL STOP

the dreaded Cee Oh Vee Eye Dee

19–just stay six feet from me!

THANKS, Vicki!!!

Lite Nice Ness (NaPoWriMo, day 18)

April 18, 2020
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Today our prompt is to write a poem celebrating the little nice things that get us through a day, a year, a life.

2020 0418 lite nice ness

Lite Nice Ness

Let’s look at the things that give a day a bit o’ gain
It’s as small as landing safely when you’re on a plane
T‘would be mush less saucy had we not War Chest or Shires
E‘er the wee! sweet! lovelinesses spiking our desires

One of the little nicenesses that get me through a day is Bad Puns. I love making them up, and I love when other people make them up and I read them. The third line of this poem is straight out of Badpunsville. “mush less saucy” is doubly punnish. Mush could also be Much, but Mush is edible. Saucy could be either attitude or condimental. And then “War Chest or Shires” is a wretchedification of Worcestershire, which is a sauce pronounced variously as “wurrshurr” or “woostisure” or “watery brown stuff.” I won’t apologize that “War Chest or Shires” matches no known pronunciation. It is closer to the actual spelling as anything I’ve heard.

Lastly, the whole poem is a setup for a Bad Pun. Notice that the first word of every line is a contraction. “Why, Gary??” I hear you asking. SO glad you asked, Friend! (Or “Friends,” if there is still more than one of you still reading.) (Or “Is there an echo in here?” if in fact no one is left reading.) The reason every first word is festooned with an apostrophe is answerable in two words. Here they come. Don’t hate me.

“Contractual obligations.” [Bdumph/Shhhuhh] (Rimshot.)

Ah, Apostrophes!! Don’t you just love the Little Things that Get You Through Life?