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Cover Story: Three Covers, Forty Years

November 15, 2014
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Recently my e-mail included an attachment of the cover of SANDCUTTERS, the quarterly publication of the Arizona State Poetry Society. The cover design is by Carol Hogan, and features a ceramic work of mine on the front cover, and a journal page of mine on the back. It looks like this:

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Naturally I’m thrilled about this. I’m no stranger to literary publication covers, but there have been so few in my artist’s checkered career that I am at most a casual acquaintance. I have designed the covers of two out of three of the chapbooks I’ve self-published. (My old and truest friend Steve Boyle designed the cover of SAVAGE SONNETS AND OTHER WHYS, and I here reward him by not featuring that cover on this post. I am a Stinker.) Here is the cover of my first chapbook:

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Behind The Bird are thumbnails of some of the 600-odd journal pages I’d done, scanned and posted to the now-defunct website Eons.

To see the one other cover I’d done before then, we have to set the Way-Back Machine all the way to 1973, when I was an 18-year-old pup attending Glendale Community College. That year’s GCC literary magazine, The Traveler, featured my white-on-black portrait of my then-girlfriend. There’s awful clumsiness in the drawing, but there is also love. Here it is, courtesy of GCC’s Memory Project:

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Bob Dylan’s line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes to mind: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” Forty years of covers and I STILL am on the day shift. [smiles] C’est La Vie–that covers it!

Pencil Pencil Sketch Sketch

November 13, 2014
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A movie called GONE GIRL featured a bar called “The Bar.” Mention was made of the name of the bar being “meta,” which means self-referential in a self-aware sort of way, sort of. Meta’s been around for a while, as witness this first verse to the theme of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”:

This is the theme to Garry’s Show,
The theme to Garry’s show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry’s Show.

So this is a pencil sketch featuring an acrostic of “Pencil Sketch.” It features Imogene Coca, who as a player in Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” performed in many a sketch. Apologies to the memory of Ms. Coca for such a sketchy description of such an outstanding comedic mind. Apologies, too, for an indecent attempt at caricature without reference to a photo source. This time round I elected to fly by the seat of my mind’s-eye pants and draw without looking at anything except the page.

Here are the words to the acrostic. Each line describes a sketch to be found on the page. Near the lower right-hand corner is a sketch of a pencil, which illustrates the double acrostic in heavy meta.

Party hats seen through refractive glass
Elephant sniffs at a whiskey flask
Nightstick next to an alley’s grate
Cat all tie-dyed per the dyer’s trait
Imogene Coca as a bumbling narc
Lastly–a profile of a matriarch

My own take on Meta is that being self-referential has its place, but self-REVerential–not so much.

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KIL(planet)TER, or A Planet Out of Kilter

November 11, 2014
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Equilibrium-seeking is in our DNA, and also in the admonitions of those grade-school teachers who told us to Sit Up Straight. We don’t have an opposite of the word dizzy, do we? And, misogynites that we are, we never refer to a dizzy dude, although “he’s a half bubble off level” is some places’ parlance for “he’s crazy.”

So I came to Kilter today. I doodled some rounded-sided triangles, which seem to me to be benign, friendly, balanced shapes. But I played them off each other and cut holes in them to see if they would jangle. They still seem pleasant, if a bit spicy.

Keep upright
In balance
Lose teeter

Wanting simplicity, I wrote the acrostic with a minimum of words. I didn’t plan “planet;” it just popped out. Irony was introduced via the upside-down signature/date, and by tilting the sketchpad on the scanner. It’s fun, but is it Art? Tell me, please…

The Non-Awaited Sequel to “Poodle Noodle Doodle Strudel”

November 8, 2014
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On December 17, 2012, “Poodle Noodle Doodle Strudel” became the 15th post on this blog. The stats say it’s been viewed far more often than the average post–perhaps the title intrigues people, or perhaps it invites repeated viewing. Who knows?

What is known is last night I was thinking of words that rhyme with “channel,” and when my garbage-can brain stumbled on “Dan’l” I knew it was time for a similar post to “”Poodle Noodle Doodle Strudel.” I give you “Channel Panel Dan’l Flannel.”

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Channel Panel Dan’l Flannel

Comedies have players with fedoras fit to doff
HAppenstances vary: “I can handle this” to Awful
Narrow straits aren’t passed without a charted course and plan
Napless kilts have patterns that DON’T disregard one’s clan
Enigmatic trailblazer’s life’s a villanelle
Let us with a rectangle REVEAL the tale we tell

Note that the drawings are the acrostic in counterclockwise order, and lines 3, 4, 5 and 6 directly or obliquely describe the drawings in their clockwise order. That’s just whim on a psychic gyroscope.

Here’s to the Village Gallery of Local Artists

November 7, 2014
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Last Friday was my last official day at the Village Gallery, though I’d taken my display down the day before, after my last scheduled shift. It was a tough decision to make, to leave. Just have too much going on right now to be able to sustain my space with fresh merchandise. I will miss the Gallery, I know, because I already do.

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Verde Valley boasts a space ideal for artful browsing
Varicolored works await delightful and arousing
It’s a pleasure forty-fold to stroll through this arena
Innovative form and function green as spirulina
Let’s behold batik as painting–speckling up a wall
Look nearby and wooden masks may sing a siren’s call
And percussionists may bang propane tanks if they dare
Gaze into kaleidoscopic-vistaed light and air
Everyone may look to heart’s content–you need not buy
Even so–such bargains! Guaranteed–give them a try

Full Deck/Fool Deck

November 6, 2014
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Once, long ago, Arthur C. Clarke was challenged to write an entire science fiction story on a postcard. He succeeded with his usual panache. I won’t spoil the story for you–I’ll just invite you to read what I was delighted to find online: http://www.postcardshorts.com/Quarantine_Arthur_C_Clarke.html

There’s a lady who lives where I work who is encouraging me to learn how to play contract bridge, simply because I saw her and her friends at it and mentioned that I wished I had learned. She showed up at the desk with a volume by the Master, Charles Goren, as thick as the metro Phoenix phone book we had in the kitchen when I was a kid. After a couple of weeks I got up to page 8 in Mr. Goren’s book. Perhaps it is not meant to be.

Here are the words to the quadruple acrostic:

For Brother Mordfael’s timeless road
Uncounted Eons may implode
Less fictive cohorts’ bric-a-brac
Lets crackling cards run in a pack

into each life

November 5, 2014
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“Into each life a little rain must fall.” Thank Goodness for such unparched earth as results.

The triple acrostic was tricky when I added the stricture of keeping the total word count under 25. It comes in at 23 when you include the acrostic words. Rhyming L and I didn’t happen, though it could’ve if I could’ve worked in Bain de Soleil and Feng Shui. Didn’t, because a) I’d already done that with another acrostic and b) the far more important fact that it would’ve been nonsensical.

Here’s the four-line, triple, 23-total-words, only-one-of-the-couplets-rhymes-well acrostic:

invigorate your wherewithal
now add a dash of calamari
to generate a cleft motif
of mr. bosch and ms. o’keeffe

Conceptual Help Asked For and Received

November 4, 2014
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Yesterday I wrote a poem called “second understanding,” thus:

second understanding

he understood her ONCE
she was not available
but not coy
not hard to get
(paradoxically it was hard to get that she was not being hard to get)

subsequently they meshed
loved
fought
yearned
cried
and
(both feeling misunderstood and both feeling dissatisfied)
separated

now they circle, wary noncombatants
and he realizes
if he could understand her a second time
if he could get her motives and heart’s desire
and the key to her easy-smile lockbox
they would be safe to shore
second understanding
to get her to really get her
to get her again
to get her again

together again

It was posted in my Notes in Facebook. My talented painter friend Rachelle commented favorably, and there was this exchange in the thread:

Me: Thank you so much, dear Rachelle! Wondering if and how to illustrate it. What do you think?
Rachelle: Ooo! Seriously? I’m honored you’d ask me. Give me a couple hours-I’m at work now, but I’ll give it my full attention this evening. Cool beans

True to her word, Rachelle later instant-messaged me. Our exchange is reprinted here with her kindly permission.

Rachelle: Here are my thoughts…
An image of a rubiks cube-
You figured out how to solve it once, but now.. you can only get one side solved. You could take it apart- but it will never work right after that. The joints will be loose and the colored stickers askew.
To solve it again takes an uncomfortable amount of effort but ultimately satisfying result-IF you can ever do it.
I dont know. Prob not helpful but thats the image I got. And burnt orange houndstooth check pattern/feel.
Other than that-I got nuthin

Me: That’s GOOD! I’ll try a sketch. Thanks!!

Rachelle: Really? I was cringing after i hit send lol

This shows two things about Rachelle. She is generous with time and help, and she doesn’t know her own strength. She and I belong to a Facebook arts group where we all create and share what we’re working on. She is unfailingly encouraging and kind in her comments. She’s also great about describing her own works in progress and what she goes through stage by stage from conception to completion.

I liked the idea of a Rubik’s Cube of Love, so close to perfect but impossibly far at the same time. Here’s what I ended up doing, with the thanks to Rachelle built in.

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