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The Poem Exchange: Joseph A and Gary B

February 26, 2021
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A fellow member of my Poets All Call group, a bright and imaginative man named Joseph Arechavala, wrote a poem and posted it to our group yesterday. I found the poem contained a metaphor for Truth that was apt . . . and I also felt compelled to respond. So I wrote a poem too. I have Joe’s kind permission to post our exchange for all the Blogoverse to see, and that will come soon, but first I want to share a drawing I just made, based on the fact that Joe is using a Groucho Marx headshot for his avatar. I thought it would be cute to draw Groucho and one of my own personal heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, shoulder to shoulder and smoking their tobacco products of choice, thus:

2021 0225 grouch kurt

JOE:

Truth is elusive
Like a woman
Standing in the distance
The sun outlining
Her beauty
A woman who
You know will
Never walk towards you
But will remain
A vaguely fair form
In the far away field
And you will
Walk towards her
But never
Come close to her
And you will weep

****

GARY:

Let me be your wingman Joe
Truth’s elusive this I know
She knows EVERYTHING you’ve done
Stuff for spite and some for fun

She has more than one big sister
I suggest you date one mister
Luscious Evidence will show you
Family pics of Truth–you know you

Could do worse than date Deduce Me
More plot twists than I Love Lucy
You’ll be challenged to decide
If you want Truth by your side
Or for a bride
With Lies denied

One more sister makes things clearer
That is Truth’s twin sister Mirror
Gaze deep DEEP into her glass–
TRUTH–she’s HERE!!!
–to Kick your Ass.

Whoops.
Sorry.

****
Gary: Joe, you have captured an important aspect of Truth in your poem. I am grateful. And I hope you see, for all my clowning, an important bit of Truth in mine, mainly that showing an interest in phenomena related to Truth does bring us closer to Truth Herself.

Joe: Gary Bowers It just feels good to finally be writing again.

Gary: Joe, I would love to do a blog post on this exchange of ours. May I have your permission?

Joe: Sure. Post the link so I can read it.

Gary: Will do, my friend!
****
A couple of things before I go. First, Joe and many others in our group are suffering from writer’s block. I think the pandemic has something to do with it. So his comment about feeling good to be writing again is a hopeful sign to me.

Second, this is not the first instance in poetic history wherein one poem inspires another. Christopher “Kit” Marlowe wrote “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” in the 16th Century. One year after it was published, none other than Sir Walter Raleigh wrote “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” a fitting response (snub) to the Passionate Shepherd’s overtures (lusty). And in subsequent centuries other poets wrote poems inspired by the original, and in the 20th Century those two sly dogs Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker both took a whack at it. So History is not by any means being made by Joe and me, but what matters to me is that the creative spark was ignited by Joe, and then I got ignited as well, for a pleasant journey to deeper digging.

icad extra: rose rose rose rose

July 21, 2019
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2019 0721 rose rose rose rose

In the Boy Scouts, and in a human-relations camp called Anytown that I attended in June of 1971, there was a campfire song, and it’s especially compelling when sung as a round. There are at least two fine versions on YouTube, and I invite you to go from this post to a search for the video version of “Rose Red” to enhance your listening pleasure.

It has changed over the centuries. In its original form the word “marry” is short for “by the Virgin Mary” and means “yes indeed” or “of course” or “you bet.” The word “an” is an archaic way of saying “if.” “Thoult” is a contractual form of “thou wilt.” Isn’t that lovely?

“Rose, rose, rose, rose,
Will I ever see thee red?”

“Aye, marry, that thou wilt,
An thoult but stay.”

I have quoted three other Rose songs, one made popular by Nat King Cole. The Grateful Dead did a sort of sequel. But long before that was “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” which like “Rose Red” has changed over time. For its curious history see Wikipedia.

I was tempted to excerpt Dorothy Parker’s acid poem “One Perfect Rose” on the card but a) it’s not a song b) I ran out of room. (It can be argued that I had ALREADY run out of room–this is one crowded card!) But here we are in the non-image portion of this post, and herewith as a special feature is the final stanza of Ms. Parker’s poem:

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Lastly we come to the quadruple-acrostic I composed for the image:

rose rose rose rose

river, share a rarer mirror
only show soupçons of cheer. o
slip downstream to see with sighs
every petaled fettled prize

 

Blackagar Boltagon and Friend

September 2, 2015
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black bolt and karaoke fanboy 090215

Some time before the Jack Kirby show organized by Russ “Karaoke Fanboy” Kazmierczak, I mentioned to Russ that my favorite Kirby-drawn superhero was Black Bolt, leader of the diasporadic Inhumans. Later I found out that Black Bolt’s full name according to Wikipedia is Blackagar Boltagon. Isn’t that awful?

On my birthday Russ presented me with a Black Bolt action figure. (Russ has a thing for action figures.) When you push in his tummy (Black Bolt’s, not Russ’s) his arms come up, making his membranous sidewings flight-ready. For Black Bolt can fly. He can also use that tuning fork on his head to harness electrons, combining them with a mysterious, unknown subatomic particle that emanates from the speech center of his brain. (Black Bolt dares not join the Karaoke Fanboy in song; his unleashed voice shatters mountains.)

Sure he’s preposterous. But so was that clumsy-spoken, tablet-wielding, bush-talking Moses, on whom Black Bolt, I contend, is at least loosely based.

As for the Fanboy, here’s a double acrostic I did of him at the Cholla branch of the Phoenix Public Library, finding, to my delight, that I may return to the same drawing-on-scrap proclivity that served me in such good stead when I was working for Sedona Winds.

kf 090215

Kirbyphile & He-Man buff
Artist, songster, other stuff
A rustlin’hustler gives a damn
And breaks down doors with splinter’d jamb
O Action Figure–go deploy
O key to living: ROCK that toy

The transcription does not preserve the acrostic, but it’s more coherent.

Russ has a new chapbook out. He honored me by asking me to write the Introduction. Here is an excerpt from my introduction, but be warned: it contains at least one cussword.

William Blake cried in print I want! I want! and then Erica Jong quoted him in Fear of Flying. Philip Jose Farmer wrote “The Lovers,” a landmarkedly explicit work of science fiction, and he also wrote Image of the Beast/Blown, even more explicit, which features two of the weirdest and most frightening women you’ll ever care to read of. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,” which is heartbreakingly confessional and revelatory of the need and ache which drives us and drives us away. And Dorothy Parker wrote “Travel, trouble, music, art/A kiss, a frock, a rhyme;/I never said they steal my heart,/But still, they pass the time.” That Dorothy could do anything, including leading a horticulture. (“You can lead a horticulture, but you cannot make her think,” she answered instantly, after she was asked to use the word Horticulture in a sentence.) And she was rumored to have sent a message to her publisher who was nagging her about a deadline while she was on her honeymoon, “Too fucking busy, and vice versa.”

Into the midst of this pantheon of twisted romantics strides Russ Kazmierczak . . .

Suicide Note, Draft #817

November 23, 2013
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Image

First let me hasten to say I am not suicidal. The title derives partly from Ben Franklin’s POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK aphorism that “Nine of ten men are suicides.” And Ben is one of those proverbial People At The Dinner Table that I would have if I could have six of anyone who ever lived over for dinner and conversation. (Other possible candidates are Dorothy Parker, Li Po, Texas Guinan, Rex Stout, Maya Angelou, Sally Rand, Groucho Marx, Nick Drake, Isaac Asimov, Jean Toomer…it’s going to be hard to narrow it down!)

Though I’m not suicidal, I’m not taking reasonable steps to extend my life. Currently I’m about 70 pounds overweight. I don’t smoke or drink or drug or gamble, but I’m a man with a past. So by Ben Franklin’s yardstick, unless I drop a few dozen pounds and some of my less life-enhancing proclivities (recreational sleep deprivation, for instance), I will be one of the nine out of ten.

But I so long to live! But it must be a life whose quality includes full mental faculties and not too much pain!

Last night at Balboa House, a monthly East Valley poetry event hosted by my friends Debra Berman and Joe Montaño, I performed the following poem, which I will submit as fulfillment of the title of this post as my Suicide Note, Draft #817:

the old and the lonesome
November 15, 2013 at 11:59pm

less than fifty years ago people cared what she thought
commented when she changed her hairstyle
speculated excitedly when she made a vague and coy remark
about a fellow thespian of the opposite sex

now she sneaks a cigarette in her room at the independent living home
and waits for a phone call from a son or a friend
as tears slide here and there and sighs abound

she hasn’t changed much on the inside
but people care so much about the outside

slowly she acquires citizenship with this community of castoffs
the old and the lonesome whose dreams were realized but never replenished

one morning she canes her way to the lobby
scans the sign with the changeable type

9:30 TRIVIA TIME
10:00 FITNESS
11:30 LET’S CROCHET
1:00 PET VISIT WITH GILDA & NAT
2:30 VAN TO DOLLAR STORE
3:00 AA MEETING – UPSTIRS GREATROOM

she feels mild contempt for the sign’s update person and his “UPSTIRS”
she feels bereft of meaning
she goes back to her room and looks for the remote

Excuse My Luster: Portrait of Dorothy Parker

December 30, 2012
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Dorothy Parker thought “Excuse My Dust” would be a fine epitaph. Had her spirit persisted after her death, and hung around Earth to see what happened to her Earthly remains, I think she would have howled to see that her Earthly remains somehow ended up in a filing cabinet for seventeen years.

She had an incomparable wit. I am sorry to have never met her. I pay my respects by paging her with a sonnet.

dorothy parker