In a previous post I did a poem intertwining Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath. “Kip Poe Syl” lent itself to an acrostic, but I did not do one. Now I do.
Kip Poe Syl
Khartoum beckons. Reaper reckons. Lass
Keeps fiendish company as love takes pass
Into Manhood-proving fateful fray
IF NEVERMORE & Daddy go away
Pip Pip hooray Bedeviled eggs go well
Parboiled plenteously here in HELL
Day Fourteen, and here is a paste of the prompt:
“Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/people that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.”
So I thought of the poets, and there are too many. Then my inner acrosticist took three cards out of the Rolodex: Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sylvia Plath. All left their mark. All were driven and bedeviled and haunted. And they haunt me. I know the opening lines of “The Raven” and “Daddy” and I know all of “IF-” And Kip, Poe and Syl uniquely identify them with three letters. So there may be an Acrostic in the future…but I’m not feeling Acrosticky right now. But let’s see what happens.
Kip Poe Syl
Rudyard and Edgar and Sylvia Plath
Let us be shaped by this odd Threefold Path.
Let us get Kip for the blood and the bone,
Firmly embed in Testosterone Zone.
Poe is for Passion so darkly uncomic,
Endlessly rhymed with a beat metronomic.
Syl’s so unsilly, such willies she gives,
Pouring her hope into such porous sieves.
Put them together, you get KipPoeSyl,
Mournful and frantic as Hank’s Whippoorwill.
“Hear the lonesome Whippoorwill.
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Hiram “Hank” Williams, Sr.
purple orange yellow
pick your colors carefully
up the saturation — be
rainbow-ravished– glad and grateful
paint your canvas Joy-innateful
like a manger or gazebo
effluorescence furthers, we know
Moron Mooon
Marigolds are made to bloom
Mission phantoms bank & zoom
Orbits arc & s a g a s too
Retrograde goes to & fro
Riyadh then Kalamazoo
Overhead that so & so
OMG Behold & Lo
Needle-tufted seeds are sown
Nestling in the Great Unknown
Here, Friends, is a tiny triptych that includes this card.
The answer may change over time. Did I say MAY? Tsk tsk.
I post this image/poem despite huge worry about being misunderstood. It seems obvious to me that it is meant as anti-Trump political commentary, and meant to raise awareness of the criminally misleading messages Trump had for the citizens of the United States in the first crucial weeks of the US outbreak–but people are sick and dying EVERYWHERE, and this may seem insensitive. I regret that I find it necessary.
A friend my age has a nephew who informed him some days ago that the COVID-19 was referred to among millennials as “Boomer remover.” Since I was born in 1954, right in the thicket of Boomer births, that struck a nerve, then a chord, and this poem/image happened.
Heaven knows I wish this pandemic weren’t happening. Since it is, though, I’m determined to a) live through it, and b) not cause anyone to NOT live through it. Raising awareness via this card is a (howbeit remote) chance to help “flatten the curve.”
THIN That Herd
Typhus strep and tetanus all tend to dine & dash
Hepatitis C may choose to have much less panache
Influenza scleroderma–and a touch of choler
Nestles in our systems like an evil Michael Pollard
Last ironic note: The United States of America has been grappling with another issue of epidemic proportions: that of rampant obesity. A healthy and non-fatal way to “thin that herd” is with controlled, sensible weight loss. Tighten Your Belts,. Friends!!
About twenty minutes ago I was Saving a study of a trumpet player I was working on when I noticed that the screen on my laptop, with its thumbnails of my drawings and other miscellany, was more than just a way to select a file. It is a record of what I’ve been up to and when, due to my naming convention of date before description. I also noticed that I had preserved stages of some drawings, so there is some preservation of the creative process.
Here is a tiny slice, preserved via screen capture, of what I was up to during two or so months of last year.
33 snapshots in monochrome. Enough to see the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of what I do.
Newer Opera Where Phenomenon Stone
NOW & later AMs & PMs
EPHemeral turns a PropHET
WEEkends meeken strips to RENO
ERRing earrings fall aNON
RAE‘ll rail on one phONE
This is one of a handful of what I think of as a Hyper-Acrostic. Not only do the columns of letters spell meaningful words (or half-words in the case of PHENO MENON), but the letter groupings are meaningful words as well (to alchemize the one possible non-word, EPH, think of it as a variant spelling of the word Ef, which means the letter F, which often signifies Failure, and, this being an Ef that fails the spelling test, it’s suddenly all good.)
The gap between the column triads is filled with wordplay. Sometimes I think of myself as the shirt-tail heir to the wordsmithing mantle of James Joyce. If his spirit is still around and sentient, I hope that forays like these entertain him, or at least prove to him that his influence is still heavily felt by some. (Friend, if you’re confused and/or unfamiliar, please take a peek at any two pages of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.)
I’m sometimes arrogant enough to imagine a poet AI of the future being entertained as well, seeing these “hyperacrostics” as feeble baby steps toward TRUE Poetry. (I will stake my wobbly poet’s reputation on the notion that sufficiently developed AI will be able to write poetry that makes anything ever theretofore written look crude and shabby. Humbling!)
The page-image is meant to be evocative both of the celestial and of the subatomic realm. In both aspects of Reality there are attraction, repulsion, and other interaction. There’s also a slight suggestion of Egg and Sperm, a visual pun of the word Conception.
You and I, Friend, are interacting right now, even if I’ve died before you read this. Isn’t that amazing?
Some time ago I had a try at capturing my admirable co-worker Amanda M. (Feel free to peruse the other 1500 entries in this blog to find it.) As the months passed my portrait attempt looked more and more like a misfire. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more and asked Amanda if I might try again. She was kind; I took another pic of her; I tried again with the result above, which is an attempt at Making Amanda Amends for that last botched effort.
I wouldn’t call this one successful, but it is less unsuccessful. The lighting is less harsh. The likeness is a half bubble off, but that is because I tried TOO hard and overworked it, so the heart is there.
Making Amanda Amends
Meet her & gain a fine sense of euphoria
Add Work-Commingling in with your Sensorium
Know a Professional Waldorf-Astoroia–be
Into the work tho the noise is stentorian
Nothing wrong with admiration if you understand
Gaining a new friend–a happy supplement to plans
These are two birds I sculpted yesterday.
And here are some lines sculpted by Neil Young long ago, for his song “Birds”:
Lover, there will be another one
Who’ll hover over you beneath the Sun
Tomorrow, see the things that never come
Today…
It is an oblique, haunting song about separation. In the subtext is the notion that the one being abandoned will be, ultimately, better off. The phrase “It’s over” occurs four times.
I wasn’t thinking of “Birds” when I did these, but it occurs to me that these two may be best off as friends.
One with Clay, Image and Text 