It’s Christmas morning, 5:08 AM local time as I type. The houseguests and the significant other sleep soundly, I hope. Soon the year will end.
In 2010 I encouraged readers of my journal pages to “Try NEW Out.” In 2013 I will be taking my own advice.
Happy Holiday, whatever your holiday may be!
If you have never tried your hand at acrostic poetry, here’s your chance. This triple acrostic has barely been started. but it is revelatory of one of the secrets to acrostic success: start with the end words first. Note also that A, L and Y are easy end-letters for rhymes. (J, Q and U are less so, unless you want to repeat a limited set of words in your poetry.)
In this case the first four end words are Belladonna, pneumonia, begonia, hineyana. That’s an a b b a rhyme scheme, which may or may not lend itself to a Petrarchan sonnet.
I frankly don’t recall whether I ever finished this one. Its color, and the winglike ears of the mournful-eyed pup, suggests the winter holidays, so it grabbed my eye when I was looking through my files.
A long time ago I did layer upon layer of words, erasing most of the layer before I went on to the next one. Then I drew an old-fashioned skeleton key over all, and it looked as if it were suspended in a cage of words. Later, but still long ago, I did this, and it is similar, except the visual is entirely calligraphic.
On Christmas Day, 2008, I sent a reply to Roger Ebert’s blog post that included a link to my sextuple-acrostic portrait of him. His reply, posted that Christmas night: Ebert: That manages to be touching and amusing at the same time. And awfully ingenious! Thank you. Since then he’s sent me a shiny new dime (long story) and declared me Second Place Winner in his Great Limerick Contest, awarding me a print of an Edward Lear etching and a copy of Lear’s The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. Now he declares via his Facebook presence: I’m aving a lot of health troubles that are keeping me from doing work and functioning online. Best person to contact is Chaz. Not in best of shape. So he is on my mind. The poor guy has been to Hell and back more than once (see my page); but his spirit is gigantic. I hope he does more than just get by this latest quality-of-life sandbar–I hope he makes it to tranquil coves.
This summer I saw THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES, a documentary about the Siegels, time-share moguls who made and then lost a boatload of money. Greed, lust, gluttony, comeuppance–this is a little slice of recent American history that I suspect historians of the future will study and discuss to help understand how things got so crazy.
This week the phrase “Pistachio Redeemers” has been nagging at me. It is as random as David Lynch ever gets, I think, and what I ended up doing to exorcize it helps me, I think, to “get” David Lynch a little more. So I have comic-strip continuity with a warped boy and girl bantering, thus:
B: Moustachioed schemers?
G: No.
B: Kardashian bad-dreamers?
G: No. But–nice try.
B: Eustachian tube-feeders?
G: En-oh.
B: Well, WHAT then?
G: PISTACHIO REDEEMERS!
B: Oh. COOL!
G: Thx.
B: ROCK Band?
G: No.
B: Stamp collectors?
G: No!
B: Messianic chewables?
G: Maybe.
G: Time will tell.
As for the acrostic poetry, it is a little less Lynchian, and it cleaves to almost-exact iambic septameter, and exactness of alphas/spaces per line. There is a missing word. Careful readers will be able to find what it is and where it should go. A reader perhaps more clever than I am might know how to fix the line to render the content and preserve iambic septameter.
One final note: this is the first blog post I have made of previously unpublished material.
These are shaky times. I felt the shakiness back in March, and though the fellow in my drawing being pitchforked and jackhammered and otherwise beset looks more like a younger George Carlin than me, I think he may well be a psychological self-portrait. Here are the words: Never grab coyotes by the ruff Nor contain a toxic load of stuff Even if your sitch is cause to fear Even though they're shoving from the rear Ragged edges tugging at the sclera Raw reporting LIVE by Al Jazeera Vermiform appendices display Vanquished methods causing harm today Evanescence wills us to degrade Stilled propriety leaves us unpaid
Here are the lyrics to this quadruple acrostic: Participation ends the stress/Omits the odious unrest/Obliges one too sweet to sour/Destiny's dust to hold the shroud/Let's elevate & love a whale/Endemic to those furling sail I did this just shy of a year ago, and the words didn't make sense today till I realized lines three and four were one subthought, and "too sweet to sour Destiny's dust" was the crucial phrase. Also the acrostic is a distant cousin to "My Favorite Things" by Rodgers & Hammerstein.
Last Friday saw the very last combining of forces between the Phoenix art gallery Deus Ex Machina and the poetry event Caffeine Corridor, hosted by Shawnte Orion and Jack Evans. It was my favorite venue to perform and to spectate. The event will continue, at another gallery down the street, but it will not be quite the same.
The art of Fencing has largely shifted to the metaphorical here in the 21st century. What would Zorro do, here and now?
One with Clay, Image and Text 