Corners turned & fates revised–so balances the beam
A splayed delay, then RICOCHET as CHAOS slings the schema
Reveal: A plinth–a LABYRINTH–a HINGE-so creaky door
Outside a bride who’s stir’d & fried her veggies with a spork
Macabre or humdrum? All relies on THIS; the wine uncorks
[or: Macabre or humdrum? All relies on THIS, the road that forks]
Ipse dixit, I hope. [smiles]
One of the great shames of my 21st Century life is that in this century I have never been less than 200 pounds. I’ve been working hard this year to make that untrue, but I am a glutton whose appetite often becomes a runaway train. This page hints at my struggle.
Here are the words to the triple acrostic:
When hunger strikes at three o’clock and cravings grow and grow
I STRIVE to minimize the want–I Strive to stem the flow–I
Strive: austerity with grace: a Winner’s tale to tell
Potential TRIUMPH wrestles with a SWEET TOOTH hard to quell
This one will neither go away nor allow itself to be finished, so here it is in draft, with hopes that its growth proceeds.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
He had his genius charm–his diamond rough
Or flawed, though hard–a fear of such as flu
Was long self-exiled, shy of folk & bug
And yet of Flight he never got enough
Romantic leading ladies knew largesse
Detractors harried up a Hellish mess
You’ll find the circumflex right above the 6 on your keyboard. By itself, it’s called a caret. I mention that only because in posting, entertaining, or teaching, getting your point across is often due to a good mix of caret and schtick.
(Sorry…)
The circumflex is used in French for words that used to have an S. Thus forêt means Forest. The Latin words circum (around) and flectere (to bend) mashed up to make circumflexus. This made me think of Dance, which is a lot of bending around, and also the life-journey step of turning a corner. Thus my image is of an introspective dancer. The Jackson Browne song works with her well.
Here are the words:
Chuckleheads deride & scoff
In their forêt of felafel
Ridicule a Dance de Luxe
Cacophonic at its crux
Understatement will cohere
May observers stand & cheer
…NOT Continuing Sex Education, as you may have extrapolated. CSE is Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow, possibly the heiress to the mantle of Dorothy Parker, but more likely first of her by-her-bootstraps kind. The poetry of hers that I have read is quasi-conversational, but you’ll catch your metaphorical toe on a phrase and find it sprawls you elsewhere…
An alternate title to this post might be “Well, She Asked For It…” The image/poem came to be when Cynthia challenged me on Facebook to triple-acrosticize her name. An early draft of this page was produced and Facebook-posted within an hour of my reading Cynthia’s challenge, which just goes to show what a liberating force severe limitations can be. Had she challenged me to “write a poem in less than an hour” I’m not at all sure I could have done it. (“It takes a fillip in the flanks for my mare to dance,” Rex Stout once had Nero Wolfe say…)
Anyway, I’m glad to know Cynthia, who is vivacious and witchily wise. She’s also won a boatload of awards for her poetry and has been published in more different poetry journals than I’ve ever read. She’s findable all over the Internet, and poetry lovers could do worse than to look for her…
SYNOPSIS: Your narrator began composing a sonnet that had the further restriction of the double acrostic QUINTESSENTIAL BREATHLESSNESS. Four lines into the sonnet he questioned the wisdom of continuing, citing “wonkiness.”
Fourteen lines into the sonnet, it is finished, and I am glad I saw it through, though seeing it through involved a partial de-wonkitization of the fourth line. Nor am I at all certain that this is the final version; but there is enough good in it as is to make me proud and happy: it makes ultimate sense, it all ties together with the final couplet, and it tells my peculiar truth.
Again and again I learn that to see an attempt through to a state of completion is valuable and important. Why do I keep UNlearning it? Probably because it is so often easier to quit than to continue. “Who needs THIS [stuff]?” we are so prone to ask, and it is important to ask; but this time the answer was, “I do.”
Here is a transcription of the words:
Quick learner, thou art never long a newb
Upscaler, we must bid thee au revoir
Inamorata, neither time nor tube
Needs mention when you meet a partner’s Ma
There’s more to life than having needs be met
Encyclicals have ne’er made turmoil smooth
Strife’s ruled the rooster; Inquisition, shtetl
Some hurts may take a Miracle to soothe
Ephemeral events may carve out basins
NOW is YOUR time, you whose desire grows
The chest of hope has room, so put your lace in
It’s HEART that puts the Romance in the rose
As Living teaches, we’re conferred degrees
Lush vistas will reward the one who Sees
Night before last I was astonished to realize that I probably hadn’t written a sonnet in over a year. “Better write one then.” So I took an index card and drew a rectanguloid and subdivided it to accommodate the fourteen lines I’d be composing. I compounded the challenge of producing fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with the Shakespearean rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg by bookending the linegrid with two fourteen-letter words, choosing “breathlessness” for both its punchliny romance and its end-rhyme-friendly superfluity of ees and esses. In short, I created a puzzle for myself that my sonneteer’s training, begun in earnest in 2007, would enable me alone among the citizens of Earth to solve.
Four lines into the sonnet’s composition I was brought up short by the absurdity of the endeavor. To lie in the Procrustean bed I’d made was possible, but what kind of coherence would there be, given the wonkiness of the first four lines? Was it worth finishing?
We’ll find out in Part Two, friends…
This image began with an exercise: look through a newspaper supplement and draw all the faces. The faces turned out to be mostly smiling, so the suggestion was that joy was in the air, and that it was jumbly–Jumble of Joy. Unfortunately, J as an end-letter doesn’t fly much outside the Mideast. Fortunately, J as an end-SOUND is all over the English language, so a little spelling-flexibility–nowhere near what is seen in much of hip-hop–took care of the J issue.
Here are the words:
Jurassick sparks won’t tree-fly if you vej
Umbrellas willn’t get you through a hej
Metropolises bulge & overflo
But Sparseville FREEZES: forty-2 belo
LIFT HIGH your Heart, for THIS will be the day
Enchantment rocks–IF you come out 2 play
More of the same platitudinous crap I’ve been ladling for years, granted. My only defense is it’s true…
A belated (or be-earlied, if you celebrate the Chinese New Year) to you all.
Here are the words to the pseudo-haiku:
cleanslateku
january first
(reboot opportunity)
two thousand fourteen
Here are the words to the threefold acrostic:
THE EARTH & THE SPOON
The local SPACE & TIME become a sheathe
Enamel writhes & metal base enwreathes
A surface vessels & en-Abels slurp
Recall of stirs & Dempsey vs. Firpo
The mother & umbilicus part so
Here thrive a sun & son & song: très bon
Note two important corrections made on the last line. Shame on me for disagreement of subject and verb, and more shame for not having used accent grave originally…
And yes, dear readers & viewers: I am still stuck on spoon. [wry smile]
Today is someone’s birthday. That’s always true; but today is the birthday, not only of my sister-in-law, not only of one of the friendliest residents of the retirement community where I work, but also of the woman who was my high school and college sweetheart. And since the page above, done near the end of the year, refers to her, and I’m thinking of her, now seems a good time to post this page.
Here are the words to the treble acrostic:
Caught in the rectangle seven now wait
One sop on Time couldn’t wait for the eighth
Syllogized vector sums wither inchoate
Inching tangentially wouldn’t you know it
Nillie alongside her Porche wears a bra
Even if doffable next Mardi Gras
It has been more than thirty-five years since I was an engineering student, and the meager knowledge I gathered then, about trigonometric functions and analytic geometry and integral equations and other such arcana, mostly withered. But the language of the mathematics stayed with me as a sort of circumstantial evidence that I am better off manipulating word arrays than differentials. Still, since I never punched through the walls between me-then and a master’s degree in systems and industrial engineering, there’s a dim yearning to get back to it and finish what I started. Alas, life is probably too short for me to do so.
One with Clay, Image and Text 