When you want intense blue
Cobalt will do.
For white/miscellaneous
Go porcellaneous.
For a texture of nub
Try Crawling Glaze, Bub.
With motile non-sessiles
Do Handle your vessels.
And Showcased Absurdity?
Use Unreal Birdity.
cup, bird, bird, and mug await the fire,
a squadlet facing fate. alas, all will not survive. worse, it is the bird
with the eggs, the one on whom the highest hopes were pinned, that will suffer
decapitation.
irreparable.
.
the sculptor is philosophical. if i make another version of this one, it will be better.
then a sigh. it will not be as alive.
then a shrug. plenty of fish in the sea and on the plate. plenty of birds in the wind and in the clay.
there is a moment of silence. so long old pal.
****
Afterword: Grateful acknowledgment to Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, for the last four words of the poem above.
a potter a sponge an x-acto knife a potter’s wheel a wire tool a needle tool a bucket of water a trimming tool and five pounds of white sandless clay
made a globular vase form let it firm up cut it free from the wheel head turned the vase upside down carefully centered and buttressed with a thick clay roll
trimmed away excess clay righted the vase centered and buttressed it again
and then the needle tool made guidelines the x-acto knife sliced the form into segments and the clay segments were baked in a kiln
and the potter took the fired-clay segments and tried several arrangements and arrived at one that felt super-right but needed something
and the search for that something amid already-fired oddments yielded a tiny egg shape and a corpuscular micronest for it to perch on
and the arrangement zinged
Lately I make a living as a prep cook for SSP America, a restaurant-management firm. Since May of 2023 I have cut onions, portioned sauces and refried beans and turkey slices and many other foodstuffs, used a paddle to mix 200 pounds’ worth of diced potatoes and oil and salt/pepper mix, assembled spring rolls and enchiladas and burritos and yogurt parfaits, fished chicken wings out of congealed grease, and performed many other production tasks. But since late last year, my main job has been to use a hand slicer to subdivide tomatoes, discard the slices unfit to eat, arrange the edited tomatoes into aluminum steam pans, and seal them for delivery with 24″ plastic film, with a label that includes creation date and use-by date.
Over the months I have gotten better at the subtasks of tomato slicing. Chef Adam Rosewicz himself once complimented me on how “pretty” my finished trays were. And my boss Don Williams has called me “Tomatoman.” I take pride in my workmanship and my dependability. The all-day-long repetition suits my temperament as a former marathoner and semipro potter for whom a three-hour session almost always ends too soon.
And as someone who has worked earnestly on all forms of poetry for more than 17 years, a job that involves mostly muscle memory is a Godsend. My mind is free to play with ideas for poems, with unique phrasing, with the little nagging business of a poem that had been written and posted but wasn’t quite right. The hours pass quickly when I have a good tomato-slicing rhythm going and I keep getting good word-notions. Realizing that Lenticular and Perpendicular rhyme can make my day.
The answer to the question “Tomato-slicing poet, or poetic tomato slicer?” is, of course, both. I am proud to turn the work of my hands into a good income. I am only slightly prouder of being a poet who keeps pushing at, and changing, his limitations.
Here is my latest sculpted bird. I make them because they tell me to. They also tell me that they’ll start getting really good if I stick with it a few hundred more or so.
Jimmie the Dog and Jessica the Woman were the best of companions. Alas, Jimmie crossed the Rainbow Bridge, as they say, leaving Jessica bereft. A short time later Jessica, a stellar poet and my friend for more than twelve years, asked me if I did commissioned artwork, and provided me with some photos of her and Jimmie. I told her it would be an honor to try.
Then about a year and a half went by. I kept making attempts and falling on my face. Every so often I’d let Jessica know I hadn’t forgotten and was still trying.
Today I was able to send her the image of my final draft. She stuck a Love emoji on my image and is graciously allowing me to share it with my One with Clay readers/viewers.
Here are the words:
Jimmie & Jessie
Jaunty as a Rock & Roll DJ
Innocent & cuddly as can be
Melting hearts & icecream cones some days
Making bliss & breezes in the trees
In the noise & haste & stale ennui
Every Dog & Woman ought be FREE
What sometimes happens when I take on a project like this is I care about it so much that I choke. I overwork the drawing, I overjudge the work in progress, and then I get overwhelmed, tear up my effort, and start over. My advice to anyone who goes through that themselves is Relax, walk around the block, slow down and stop worrying about a result you haven’t got yet. Today I put my worries aside and knew that my heart was in the effort, and trusted the result would reveal the heart. At minimum anyone who sees this page will know that two of Earth’s creatures loved each other deeply.
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
I’m working on my Magnum Opus THE ACROSTIKON now. Today I’ll do a ground-up demo of how I create an acrostic poem.
The first step is to decide what kind of acrostic to do. The overwhelming majority of acrostics are single acrostics, which means the poem will have all the letters on the left spell something meaningful. The most famous example is Lewis Carroll’s poem to the real-life girl who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll wrote a lilting account of Alice and at least one sister on a boat, and the first line was “All in the golden afternoon.” The leftmost letters of the lines in the poem spelled Alice Pleasance Liddell, which was Alice’s full name before she married a man named Hargreaves.
Let’s make ours a double acrostic of five lines, and have the leftmost and rightmost letters spell Start Small.
We won’t start with Start because one of the secrets to writing a double acrostic is that the last words of the lines ought to be decided first, since we want them to make a rhyme scheme.
S
M
A
L
L
Let’s see. Most plurals end with S. So a close rhyme with S and M end-letters might be Gems and Stem. We can try again if it doesn’t work out.
gemS
steM
A
L
L
A nifty way to “cheat” when a line ends with an A is to use A as the de facto first word of the next line, but leave it where it is. So we can turn a couplet into a triplet by de-facto ending line 3 with a word rhyming with Stem, then add period, space, A, thus:
gemS
steM
diadem. A
L
L
The last two lines end with L, so they will easily serve as a couplet.
gemS
steM
diadem. A
you’lL
jeweL.
Since gems and “diadems” appear earlier, it occurred to me that Jewel would possibly make a good fit, and “you’ll” is a good word to involve the reader.
Now to tackle the “innards.”
S………………….gemS
T……………………steM
A……………diadem. A
R…………………..you’lL
T……………………jewel
Let’s do the final couplet first. Then we’ll have three lines to set the tone for it. But remember, Line 4 actually starts at the end of Line 3 with A. Hmmm. “A little something something some and you’ll” is, what do you know, good old Iambic Pentameter. Now turn the Something’s and Some into something else: “A riff of beadwork and a clasp and you’ll” is a line describing jewelry-making, and then the last line is a simple puzzle to solve: “Turn browlines into Settings for a Jewel.” The jewel is the lady wearing the diadem.
So now we have
S………………….gemS
T……………………steM
A……………diadem. A
Riff of beadwork and a clasp and you’lL
Turn Browline into Setting for a JeweL
Now we invent a setup. S suggests Sapphire, but Sapphire is trochaic. Luckily Star Sapphire, though not strictly iambic, will work.
“Star Sapphire, most celestial of gemS”
Now continue the sentence with the second line…
“Takes breath away like orchids on a steM”
..and complete the thought on the third line:
“And sparks your work-in-progress diadem. A”
Holy smokes–we are done!!
Star Sapphire, most celestial of gemS
Takes breath away like orchids on a steM
And sparks your work-in-progress diadem. A
Riff of beadwork and a clasp and you’lL
Turn Browline into Setting for a JeweL.
Now you try, Friends! My advice is to Start Small. 🙂
NOTE: as it says on the page, this demo first appeared in the Facebook group Poets All Call.
This morning I had a fine meal at Matt’s Big Breakfast, but before I really dug in I arranged cutlery, condiments and cuisine to make what I thought was a solid composition, and took a picture. When I posted the image on Facebook I expressed my intention to use the photo as basis of a work of art to be submitted to an art show whose call for entries is close to the end of the year. A nice friend of mine posted an encouraging comment, and I answered that I’d give her first look at the first thing I created. As soon as I’d done the above sketch I texted her and attached the sketch image, which is strictly a learning exercise, full of drawing mistakes and slapdash execution. I’m hopeful that Part 2 and beyond will reveal an evolution of the handling of the image, and that the last post in this series will include a photo of the final stage of the piece. Please stay tuned!
Here is a drawing I’ve been working on and off on for several days. It started as a study of chicken bones, and then the wishbones seemed to want to talk to each other and the Universe, so element by element the drawing came to stochastic life. It told me to have implied stories here and there, and I did my best to oblige. The last thing it told me was to sign it and stop, and think of it kindly as a possible future painting. It feels unfinished-yet-not, as if “in medias res” is essential to its being. If I do make a painting of it the strategy will be alla prima in bluish violet–maybe.
This post is titled “faux tableaux” because the implied stories are not part of a play nor historical description; also, with Faux being four letters and Tableaux being eight, the title lends itself to the Acrostic poetic form I have been specializing in for more than a decade. Usually I include the poem on the image, but the image is busy enough as it is, so I’m going hyperdimensional and letting it stand separately below.
faux tableaux
far-flinging tenancy undue
adds more to addled syn&tax – a
unit’s cubic aperçu
x-rays the law and says relax
Now, what does that all mean? Well, “far-flinging” might be referring to the implied Disc Golf game in progress in the image; but Far-Flung colloquially means a deviation from reality. Tenancy is an official melding of being and location. Undue implies both unexpected and unwanted. Put them all together and they feed the next line’s “adds more to addled syn&tax” with the made-up wordmash “syn&tax” having a first syllable connoting both Synthetic and Sin, the last syllable connoting both a surcharge and a burden, and the ampersand gluing them together. Meter and rhyme are preserved by the appended dash and indefinite article; read aloud, the third line would begin with “A.” “A unit’s cubic aperçu” shows both the glory and the shame of my quasi-acrostic construction. “Unit” was chosen because it starts with a U and yet must phonetically start with a consonant; otherwise “A” would have to be “An.” And “aperçu” was chosen to rhyme with Undue (though it doesn’t, quite, English speakers unfamiliar with French will impart the Ooh sound to the last syllable, and not the French U sound, which is “ooh” with a hint of “ee”) and also because I flat-out love the word, with its magic cedilla and its densely-packed meaning of “a comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating or entertaining point” into only six letters. As a composer of acrostic poetry I have leaned on “aperçu” often as a line-ending word. I don’t apologize. I’m grateful to have it to use.
The third line feeds into the fourth. “A unit’s [someone’s] cubic [adding a third dimension] aperçu [spoken perceptive observation] x-rays the law {analyzes codified custom] and says relax [things ARE chaotic but are not as gruesome as they seem].”
A classmate of mine recently disparaged me as a “third-rate poet” who does “weird drawings.” To my knowledge he does not write poetry at all, and by his admission he can’t draw his way out of a wet paper bag. (To his credit, he publicly apologized later, saying he was retaliating for some unkind remarks I made about his selfies.) The truth is I’ll take Third-Rate over Nonexistent, and Weird over Nonexistent as well, any day. No one else on Earth is doing what I am doing, the way I am doing it, and it keeps me sane and out of trouble to boot. Bonus! 🙂
On my Facebook feed there was a post from a friend of mine saying to the world, “What are you up to? Send a picture!” And what I was up to was composing a poem. So I took a picture of myself staring into the Heavens looking for the words, and attached it to my comment “Composing a poem” on her post.
But the picture…it was different from the other self-portraits I’ve done. So I drew it in HB pencil, and for background put some of the words and some of the self-instructions I’d come up with in the course of composing “Bouquet of Bouquets.” Here is the poem:
****
Just another day in the life of an oldish codger who every so often takes the pressure off the urge to express by looking into the Heavens, writing down stuff, and sometimes illustrating what he’s written.
One with Clay, Image and Text 