The double acrostic for this one is a single word, PHOEBE. Though Pho and EBE are standalones–Pho is a Vietnamese food, and EBE is Extraterrestrial Biological Entity–let’s ignore the halves and let them be Phoebe. And within this most minimal poem, snow nay be found.
Phoebe
Poet songstress was set free
Heaven knows her F.O.B
O the afterhaps we’ll see
One fateful day in the mid-1970s I had the extraordinary privilege of being in the same room with both Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe. They were in Tucson, where I was a student at the University of Arizona, for the opening of the U of A’s Center for Creative Photography. And they were attending a meet&greet in the lobby of the campus’s Museum of Art, right next door to the Art Building, where I spent a lot of time toiling at Painting and Life Drawing and Printmaking and such.
Ansel Adams was cheerful and accessible, a sort of out-of-uniform Santa Claus. Georgia O’Keeffe was different. Dresed in a floor-length black dress, she leaned tripodally on her blackcane, her deep-set eyes wide and glittering, not saying a word. She was tiny and looked quite frail.
But she did not SEEM frail. She radiated Power. Her gaze was like a wide-beam laser. The vibe was of her being all-seeing and all-knowing.
I was there about half an hour and in all that time the dozens of people in the room respected Ms. O’Keeffe’s space and silence. They made up for that soundless proximal vortex by flocking around Adams and peppering him with questions. He held forth jovially, magnificently. Nicest guy on Earth, in his element and in his moment.
Ms. O’Keeffe was in her element as well, in her realm of observation and contemplation. She reigned.
Not So Frail
Needles point to skin and coif. Omnipresence throws them off. For Truth is Power and talent Soars. A sense of Place is Boat and Oars. I owe this Georgia Peach some Soul.
About fifty years ago I read Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce. I was a teenager in Glendale, Arizona. I may have been trying out for the track team at the time. (Alas, I had no talent, but they let me “compete” anyway.) A phrase from that fine, gut-slamming book stuck in my head from that time to this, and I invoke it every time I try to turn over a new leaf and be healthy.
Luke had made a bet that he could eat fifty eggs. Sometime between the time he made that bet and he (spoiler alert) won the bet, he drank water when everyone thought he was going to do something else, specifically vomit. “Instead he drank water…” So when I’m tempted to eat a bag of cookies or a Philly Cheesesteak, I stave off temptation by being, briefly, Cool Hand Luke himself, and have some water instead.
The acrosticist’s problem, though, is that “instead” has seven letters, as does “hedrank”, but “water” has only five. So to fulfill an outlandish acrostic requirement my drinker is drinking “whatter.” I was forced to conceive a backstory about a sports drink called “Whatter You Waiting For?” rich in electrolytes and laced with a psychotropic substance that enables focus and intensity.
instead he drank whatter
it pays to hydrate–ask athletic people in the know
needs include an anaesthetic dream of sandra oh
suck down that nutriented drink that you may be grade a
then find a righteous probiotic product like yoplait
ecclesiastes says to eat and drink as if au fait
and merriment is on the menu lest the tempers flare
delicious drink and kitchen sink make such a lovely pair
Apologies to Yoplait and to Sandra Oh. I am a big fan of both but consulted neither. Yoplait helped restore my digestic tract’s “good bacteria” after I was bombed with antibiotics. Sandra Oh was a huge reason I got such a kick out of the movie Sideways. Also she had a minor but unforgettable role in the pornstar-funeral episode of Six Feet Under. She is gifted indeed. –So my hope is that both parties consider my reference to them respectful and admiring. (Realistically, though, this post will overwhelmingly likely be unnoticed by both.)
This was hard enough to do in itself, but there is more rough road to bump over, because this is just one acrostic, yet the acrostic is “Catastrophic Cat Acrostics”–plural. So at least one more is forthcoming.
The other issue is “Catastrophic.” Where is the catastrophe? Well, the default will be that Cats have a reputation for living on the edge They are rumored to require nine lives because of their endangering curiosity. In this version of the poem, the third line reads “Tomcats who leap off a roof so often land intact.” But in an early draft the line read “Toss Tomcats off a roof and they so often land intact.” Catastrophic scenario, but what a horrible thing to do!
CATastrophic CAT acrostics #1
Collectors know that Kitties go beyond mere bric-a-brac • And soothsayers regard the Black-Furred key to the Arcana • Tomcats who leap off a roof so often land intact • And Prowling after Plummeting becomes a tom’s Nirvana • Successful integration of a cat in story’s arc • Takes understanding of the Cat as Empress/Angel/Boor • Rejuvenator/Savior yet a l o o f when you embark–O • Oui is Yes & Non is No & Always is Toujours • Peut-être is Perhaps and fot Eat Well Bon Appetît • Here almost endeth our leçon for Boredom is Ennui • It suits a Cat as does most French for there Cats are très chic • Comprenez-vous Lautrec, Toulouse un chat avec précis
Another three arguments for the Catastrophe of this acrostic is the degenerative use of the French language, the clumsy sometimes-iambic-sometimes-trochaic septameter, and the stifling crowdedness of the text. As to the first, French is useful when an endword must end on a certain letter AND rhyme.
The good news is the next one can’t help but be better.
Modern music of the Hip-Hop variety will often see one artist enhancing another, as for instance “Eminem feat. Rihanna.” “Feat.” is of course short for Featuring. Since this page is one acrostic enhanced by another, and all the acrostic words rhyme with “feat.”, it was irresistible to use “feat.” in my title. There’s also the tendency in poetry events to “feature” one or more poets, with or without “open mic,” which is of course short for “open microphone,” though often there isn’t a microphone.
The stereotype of Canadian speech is to end a sentence with “eh.” Comic book legend John Byrne, himself a Canadian, once quoted another Canadian who scorned that stereotype, but he said, “We don’t talk that way, eh.” Canadians also have a perhaps deserved reputation for being quite nice and quite polite.
There is a Canadian whiskey called Fireball, laced with cinnamon and like the alcoholic version of Red Hots, a hard candy popular when I was growing up. So a subfeature of this page might be called “heat neat feat. Fireball.” When a drink is ordered “neat” it means don’t add ice nor water nor a mixer to it.
“Cafe au lait” is French for “coffee enhanced with milk.” On the page I made circumflexes and accent marks, but writing in English we often do without. “Santa Fe” is sometimes written with an accent mark over the e–Aldous Huxley did so in Brave New World–but overwhelmingly its written form dispenses with the accent mark. It would have stuck out like a sore thumb on the acrostic.
The Seine is a river running through Paris, France. Once upon a time “the Left Bank” referred to creative types, because they tended to congregate on the left bank of the Seine.
A lot of people from France ended up in Canada. There is a ghost of a chance that “eh” is a direct descendant of “n’est-ce pas?”–French for “Is this not so?”
.
neat heat
nylon in Toronto, eh
eagle feathered Santa Fe
ash on 56th and Shea
time for some cafe au lait
heat neat
h i j k l m n
eventide upon the Seine
a b c d c b a
taken with cafe au lait
copse cycle
city life seems imbecilic
once you’ve had country
pastures and glades so idyllic
soaked in balm so biblical
each rustic one free
Chaos Floss
Cameled Millie tends to scoff
Heavily into felafel
And her Office Box is boffo
Owing to her mishegoss
She’s the undisputed Boss
Doing a Chaos-themed work is like having a Get Out of Jail Free card. Any issue the viewer might have may be dismissed or resolved with “Well, it’s not SUPPOSED to make sense/be coherent/be consistent/be a well-balanced composition/rhyme perfectly/scan perfectly. It is a demonstration of Chaos, which is Randomness, or Disorder.”
But I don’t want nor need a Get Out of Jail Free card. Just as James Joyce cheerfully explained any passage of his landmark yet extremely dense Magnum Opus, Finnegans Wake, so too I am eager to demonstrate that there is a method to my chaos.
The title is “Chaos Floss.” What does that mean? It might mean Random Inconsequence, and I think it does, a bit, in this case. At left is a seeming agitated figure holding his head. He appears to be enclosed in an oval or sphere but is in fact enclosed in the negative space created by the two leftmost panels of a four-panel sequence. There are spheres, increasingly small, upward and to the right, which when viewed with the negative space of the figure’s enclosure might be remindful of a series of photos of a planet in orbital motion. The gravitational pull creating the orbit appears to be the “2019” of the signature/date slugline. Did the artist do that on purpose? Does it matter? Does it work with the rest of the page? (Note from the artist: I THINK it does, just as the rug in Jeffrey Lebowski’s front room “really tied the room together,” but I am not the best judge, being partial to my own efforts. YOU are the best judge.)
“Chaos Floss” may also mean the equivalent of Dental Floss, which is a stringlike product intended to improve dentition by extricating unwanted material from the gums and teeth. Chaos Floss in that case would be some means of demystifying the apparently chaotic and revealing the underlying order and-or purpose of the subject at hand.
In the second panel, there’s a guy in a chair, seeming to reach up to touch the underjaw of a giant bird. If you do an Internet search on “Jack Kirby Metron,” you’ll find a similar character, but one a great deal more sophisticated. Metron pops in and out of places using his dimensionally-transportive chair, and he is so hungry for knowledge that Orion of New Genesis claimed that he would “sell the universe into slavery” to get some. The bird I have drawn, that this Bizarro-Metron is reaching for, greatly resembles a creation of mine that I called “The Tutti-Frutti Bird of Benign Insanity.” So in my own private universe, this panel symbolizes the desirability of getting in touch with Benign Insanity. Even the most avid student of my oeuvre (and there are none such that I know of, avid or otherwise) would be hard put to have interpreted that panel without the help that I have just provided.
But I am not trying to be obscure. I would not expect anybody to struggle with the meaning of my image. I hope that, stripped of whatever meaning there may be, my images are visually engaging, and might lend themselves to storytelling that the viewer her/himself may provide. I try to make them so.
Friends, I could go on and on, but it is time, or past time, to wrap up. The poem has a bad and possibly meaningless pun in it, “Cameled Millie” (chamomile), and a lot of f-sounds and s-sounds and soft-o sounds. (“Asinine Alliteration and Upped Assonance?” he asked playfully, vulgarly.) The dark patterned bananas are a visual pun on “going bananas,” which is 1970s American slang for acting crazy. Even more than Chaos, Craziness seems to be the theme of this page. I trust and hope that it is benign craziness.
I would love comments and questions, as always, Friends. Thank you for your attention!
A few days ago I had a dozen index cards, a pen, and an hour till the Sun would damage flesh in the Valley not so much. So I spent that hour, maybe a bit more, putting the bare beginnings of acrostic poems on those cards. This is one of them.
“Agnostic Acrostic.” This poem does not claim any insight into the nature of God-if-any. Its author does not think of himself as an Agnostic, nor a Gnostic, nor an Atheist. I once wrote “why i am not an anything” and believed it were so. Now I think of myself as a Glimmer, i.e. “one who glims.” I hope to fully explore–and explain–what that means before my time ends.
This page would not exist if not for my former classmate and lifelong friend Terry Irwin. It was she who told me about “Slow Knowledge,” which if my recollection serves is the projection of the effect on an action taken by a tribe on descendants up to the 7th generation. If the action was deemed of probable detriment to those descendants, the action was not taken, no matter what immediate good came from it. My phrase “slow wisdom” in this poem derives from this, and my poem cannot do without it.
So, Terry, many thanks. This blog post is dedicated to you and the fine work done by you and your design collaborators.
This page also owes something to Rachel Carson, who warned us of what happens when we fool with Mother Nature. For more details, please see “Rachel Carson, Speaker for the Silent” elsewhere in this blog.
Agnostic Acrostic
Arming ourselves against bedbug & flea
Could lead to Brave New World‘s Streptocock-G
Ringing a change from peut-être to mais NON
Ogles the boggles and ROCKS Status Quo
Slowing our roll and our role in this mess
Takes the Slow Wisdom approach–we’d be blest
If God-notions don’t squeeze us dry–o terrific–I
Could harbor hope if we DON’T wax Deific
So–what does Agnosticism have to do with “this mess”? Relying less on “thoughts and prayers” and more on the wisdom of forethought can both ease future messes and help heal current ones. That’s this humble Glimmer’s opinion, anyway.
One more acknowledgment: Thank you to the quite youthful, peach-fuzzed Bob Dylan who wrote “With God On Our Side.” Bobby, you were wise beyond your years.
It seems ironic that we would use manufacturing processes to replicate something that is richly rewarding to plant and nurture to maturity. Musing on that, “false flora” came quickly to mind. I leave it to my own AI replicant to construct and execute “false fauna.” Something tells me it will do a better job than I possibly can.
false flora
faking nature’s cold n stiff
and contrived as cultured pearl
laminate & plastics riff. o
some synthetics tilt & whirl or
even worse, REPLACE us–AAAa
Jack was the driven King of Comics. Roz was his inspirational wife. They fell in love and married in the 1940s, and remained devoted to each other and to their children until Jack’s death.
Jack n Roz
Joined: a Superhero Woman
And an awesome Penciler
CRACKING GOOD Love Story–Lo
Kirby crackle–Roz pizzazz
One with Clay, Image and Text 