Here is a shameful false start on the verses. The meter is fine, the rhyme is good, but each line is self-contained platitudinous nonsense that does not advance story, symbolism nor truth. I have stacks and stacks of such in my seven-year history of acrostic poetry.
It’s time for research: history of Latvia, significance of the ankh, anklet styles then and now. Stay tuned!
The title for this series owes its colonscape to the Miller Analogies Test, Interested parties may quickly find a website that has the lowdown on the MAT, and free sample tests to boot, but all you need to know here is that ” : ” means ” is to ” and ” :: ” means ” as “.
:: you may recall, the double-acroticist looked at his (my) ANK LET beginning, and quickly epiphanied opportunity toappend aitch and tee, yielding ANKH LETT and enabling a DOUBLE Double Acrostic, which is not to be confused with a Quadruple Acrostic. The twin-twin challenges remaining were to 1) finish the acrostic a) so it would makes sense either way; and 2) do the illustration, which must b) incorporate the acrosticization in a single image. The above study is a possible serving suggestion, imagining a Lett woman (identified through her choice of having the flag of Latvia on her ankle) wearing an anklet that bears amongst its links an Ankh. What about LET? some astute observer may ask. Well, my Sweet Girfriend, who shall go named–Denise–LET me take a photo of her lower leg, and I based my drawing on the photo.
Two parts down, five to go. See you fine folks in a couple of days!
Index cards, four inches by six, ruled on one side and blank on the other, are the antibane of my existence. A few dozen of those babies and a couple of sharp Ticonderoga Black pencils and I can fly intercontinentally and be kept engaged and amused throughout the flight. Get a hundred-pack at any office supply and for less than four cents each you have the ideal unthreatening Idea Playground. Bad ideas can be tossed, good ones added to the uncut-diamond pile.
Today I have the acorn of what I hope will sprout into the oak of an exemplary journal page. I started with ANK LET, perhaps a next-in-the-series to my previously posted GOB LET. As I was working out end words ANK and LET were staring me in the face and ANK started hankering for an aitch at the end: ANKH. Ankh: powerful life-symbol from ancient Egypt. “Spirits of ancient Egypt..,” Paul McCartney sang once.
But what about LET? Well, add a tee and you get Lett, which means Latvian. This can go any number of good ways.
End of Part One
Often a creative person feels the urge to create yet no inspiration at all. They stand or sit paralyzed by their keyboards or canvases or clay and nothing sparks ignition. That is tough to go through. This image full of thought balloons is an example of what might occur to a creative mind in the desperate search for a hook to hang a creation on.
Ansel Adams once said that were he confined to his house for the rest of his life, he’d still find rich and endless subject matter for his photography. Your humble narrator says that were he confined to the subject matter Spoon, Water, Glass, he’d find endless ways to beat a dead horse to the ground and beyond with those three elements alone. Luckily, this need never be put to the test, and shall not; and this day’s Evocation of the Three has a special guest with the reflectivity of glass, the fluidity of water and the wieldiness of a spoon.
Words, which may make more and more sense on successive rereadings:
Sipping’s an S-WORD that ends with a G
Parsing BANANAs divests them of peel
Ousting a despot brings more from the sea
Owning that Ownership has its rewards
Note that our s-words may morph into swords
Today I was looking for an unfinished page I’d undone-edly done on Sally Ride. The Science Channel just showed a terrific movie about Richard Feynman’s involvement in the commission investigating the Challenger disaster, and watching it I learned that Sally Ride was the one who’d indirectly pointed Feynman to the O-Rings as the probable cause.
Alas, I’ve thus far not found the Sally Ride page. What I did find was a boatload of abandoned works. Either my enthusiasm for the idea had dimmed, or it was worthy but a lot of work to finish, or I was stumped for a rhyme or an image completion, or the drawing had gone sour, or Other. But all of the ones I’m posting here make me wish I could devote more time to them.
Addled Wit Sharpener
Some day there’ll be a pharmacological solution to addled wits. Were this the day, I’d be a customer.
Poetry As Motion
This is well started, but the figure depicted is the last of what would be several poetically posed–and moving–figures.
Ultimate Gargoyle
I want to sculpt some imposing gargoyles before I die. (I have other plans for after I die. [smiles]) Here is a try at gargoyle design.
3Deified
Intended as a quasi-discussion on the trend toward 3d in movies. But ulteriorly I wanted to immortalize yet another bad pun.
Sixto Rodriguez/Sugarman Finder
This would have been a love song to the film SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN and its subject. I put it off because I would need a lot of time to do it right.
Revolver Resolved
Earlier this year I was invited to participate in an art show entitled “Children and Guns.” I got this far with my would-have-been contribution before the pain of the subject compelled me to stop.
(End of Part One)
Here is a work in progress. It is Stuck, has been for over a month, but it is a good Stuck. There’s a book by the brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson called Weapons and Hope, now dated in a way but still vital and worth reading, that spoke of Stuckness. He also wrote Disturbing the Universe, which rocks autobiographically.
One hand Gives, the other Takes. What is Given is a blank check. It may represent indefinite wealth or unlimited potential. (To further digress, the awesome meteor-logical Stephanie Abrams, viewable in the wee hours, is often partnered with Al Roker. I wonder if she’s ever deconstructed the word POTENTIAL to POTENT-I-AL. She well could.)
A woman torques and cracks a bone in her foot. That Hurts. She then goes to an Urgent Care center and gets support-booted and caned in the nicest possible way. That Heals. (That’s based on the real event in the real life of my real girlfriend, who rocks every bit as much as does Freeman Dyson, inventor of the Dyson Sphere.)
This is catch-circling and confusing, so it perfectly fits what Cyndi Lauper sang, once upon a time after time:
Caught up in circles
Confusion is nothing new…
My thoughts have wanderlust. And wonderlove. I am unshaven, but even after I shave I’ll be a work in progress at least as long as I live.
My last post invited readers to e-mail me if they wanted the words to the poem behind the eponymous Love Birds. I sat back and waited, eager to respond to the flood of requests. Alas, I got not a one, not even from–sob–my Girlfriend. [sad face]
Humbling experiences build character. I am perhaps too puffed up/showoffy, or too much, to use my daughter’s charming locution, the Attention Whore. But it drives my creativity, and creativity is just about all I have to offer to civilization and posterity.
So, folks, as you never requested, here is the cheat sheet on the strict-character acrostic poem I wrote as backdrop:
This also reveals acrostic methodology. FIRST, decide on the acrostic; SECOND, decide on the rhyming (or near-rhyming, as in this case) words at the ends of the lines. THEN write one of the lines of poetry, and do a character grid that exactly maps that line. (It doesn’t have to be the first line, and truth is, it’s often easier to acrosticize if you don’t.) Then write the rest of the poem, and have your eraser handy.
Bonus (?) feature: here’s an example of my sign-making layout skills, with my workplace and the cause we evented de-identified:
This post’s title was to have been “Post #222,” for this is my 222nd post, and I have a thing for certain numbers. When I’m on a treadmill I call eleven minutes and eleven seconds “getting my ones;” 22:22 is “getting my twos;” and so on. I used to get my fives. Then I got old and deconditioned.
But the title is “Unchain’d Mallardy” for two reasons. Reason one: I consider this one of my worst puns of all time, and I take perverse pride in that. Reason two: the song “Unchained Melody,” which I love to hear and wish I could sing, came to be in about as random a way as this page did.
This morning the first thing I did to my blank page was to rub a pencil’s edge over it while it lay atop the drawing table I’ve owned and used for more than 40 years. Here is what I got:
The scratches, gouges and dings from often-ill-advised use of my table gave an unevenness to the graphite rubbing, as I hoped it would. Straining to see something real in the randomness, I suddenly perceived a duck on the surface of a body of water.
Here is a progression of my drawing’s stages from that point on:
The gorgeous and talented Salma H didn’t enter the equation till I’d written the poem. I had left room for her beforehand, though–I knew another element would demand existence.
Here are the words:
Umberto Eco’s lists give calm
Not too unlike the torsoed Salma
Cacophony does discord tell
Harmonious-webb’d feet compel
And to the brain by way of sclera
In waterfowl we’ve funhouse mirror
Nor do we need go R F D
‘D seem Ducks do Delivery
As in…From Evil? [Author smiles]
Way back in ’09, and early ’09 at that, I took a tangential look at nudity. The effort, with three epigrammatical quotations and two acrostics, looked like this:
This week I dug it out and had a go at revamping it. I had learned a year ago, reading Art Spiegelman’s awe-inspiring MegaMaus, that his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus was thirteen years in the making, and that he’d painstakingly done draft after draft of comic-book pages, panel studies, and layouts. Now I would see what reflection and rework would do for one of my own.
This study includes the epigrams but not the acrostics. I added a quotation, concentrated more on the calligraphy, experimented with more angled text presentations, and drew a different imagined nude cat lady. (I felt the original looked too YOUNG-old.) Then I did a text study of my acrostics:
Note the lines “Magistrate or Auntie Em/A Joy, a Challenge, a Dilemma.” The scansion sort of jumps the rails to maintain acrostic integrity; were there no acrostic, the break would yield “Magistrate or Auntie Em a/Joy, a Challenge, a Dilemma.” I especially liked the flat-breaking plane of the NAKED NAKED NAKED triple acrostic. Now I was ready to integrate the studies into yet another study.
This result took about three hours, and could have taken another three to unmuddy and finesse the image, had I the time. I do not, so I will save the FINAL final image for another time. But there’s a valuable creative-process lesson in reworking an original. I will be doing a lot more reworking, of this and many others, in 2013 and beyond.
One with Clay, Image and Text 