(home)
ec
o no
my
(art d)
eco
on
o my
(pars)
ec
o nom
y?
economy
Leave a comment
Tag Archives: minimalism
hark: a shark
hark: a shark
hark: a shark
feel: an eel
swish: a fish…that got away…in the dark…
unreel
Afterword: Compulsivity led to the creation of this minimal list, minimalist poem. Midevening today I realized that if midnight came and went, and I failed to publish something on my blog, I would end a streak that started on July 25th. My friend RussKaz was nearby when I had this realization, and he happened to have single-word prompts on flash cards, so I asked him to pull one at random, and he pulled “shark.” The rest is hastily-written microhistory, with the subtext that a text-body in motion tends to stay in motion, especially if the textmaker has a screw loose.
za
bread
bed for sauce
toss on stuff
scuff some cheese
tease the heat
eat
tiny time
The challenge for today was to make a work of art on a rectangle of card stock measuring two and a half inches bt one and five-eights inches. Since it would be tiny, “tiny time” seemed an appropriate double acrostic. It didn’t take long to figure out end rhymes with an abab scheme, though “exempt” and “pro tem” are not quite true rhymes.
tiny time
thoughtfulness is tax-exempt
indolence is sans souci
none need senator pro tem
yin needs yang as thou needst me
The poem is a distant cousin to the lyrics of the song “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” The illustration is a sort of resonance with “thoughtfulness,” the first word of the poem, reducing a somilar concept “watchfulness” to the pocket-watch “watch,” the king’s jester “foole,” and the Prohibition-era G-Man Eliot Ness “ness.”
Readers, your time is precious, and there are thousands of demands on it. Thank you for spending this Tiny Time with me.
n.e.s. #19 of 480
Here is some minimalism, and yet still content-rich enough to include a bad pun.
ICAD xlv: Check Raise &Call
For more than ten years Acrostic Poetry has been both a tool and a toy to me. Within its limitations there are unending possibilities.
Today I took a minimalist approach. What’s the smallest couplet? Two words. Is it possible to create a triple acrostic with each line a two-word couplet? Let’s see what happens when we try.
Canned Reprim&. Hierarchic Antarctic. Elysia Indonesia. Correctional Sectional. K-Rational Encyclical.
Is the use of the ampersand cheating? No, especially not nowadays. Number/symbol shorthand has been around 4ever.
Is this Poetry? Of course it is. Ten words will take an agile mind gliding into new associations–“canned reprimand” is relevant in this age of e-mail blasts, for instance–and both the heaven of Elysia and the cold hell of Antarctica are referenced. And what is an Encyclical but an all-encompassing discussion? Let’s dole it out in K-Rations to make it palatable to the soldiers of knowledge. (That’s a K-rationalization if ever there was one.)
Above all, the value of this little exploration is its newness. Certainly there are better triple-acrosticized couplets waiting to be invented (discovered?)–there may even be a QUADRUPLE-acrosticized beast, with more apt associations leading to greater insights regarding the sentient condition. I invite sentient beings, human and otherwise, to create them or to find them. Just give ol’ Johnny Acrostiseed here an acknowledging nod if you do, please. 🙂
Minimal, or Minima List
It was one of those days John Lennon sang about when he sang “Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These/Strange days inDEED…” Suddenly I found myself again at Urban Beans in Phoenix, Arizona with the smallest of time windows. It was 5:35pm. Caffeine Corridor would start at 7:00PM, and I had to talk to at least two people beforehand about at least two different things. After the event I had to dinner&drive back to my home and my love, with an image to post befor midnight. And I hadn’t ordered my large plain-drip coffee yet.
At 6:17pm I was finished with the image. Necessity is the mother of inspiration: I knew I had to keep it minimal–MINIMAL? A theme tailor-made…
One with Clay, Image and Text 