An old photo retrieved from the house of my mother, lost to the Earth on December 11, 2020, became the source for my most recent drawing, finished around 5 AM Mountain Standard Time today, which is Mother’s Day. Rest in Peace, Power and Possibility, Jane Bowers Stoneman!
I have been blessed to know a good many Susans in my life. One, a fuel truck driver, hiked Havasupai with me. One, a six-foot lawyer, had the assertiveness of a runaway locomotive. One, a sculptor, sold over ten grand’s worth of her wares in a single day. One, a department chair, decided to explore reducing the toxicity of the hydrocarbon-laden printing medium Intaglio. There are others, but we have a lot to cover here, because while there’s not a lazy Susan in the bunch, I bring to your attention Susan Vespoli, the unlaziest Susan of them all.
Susan is a poet. She’s also a teacher. She’s lived in Guam and in a cabin in the woods in Arizona. She’s loved and lost and lost and won and fought cancer and won some more and fixed up a house and sold a school. She has a website with the unforgettable domain name susanvespoli.com, where you will find out much more about her in her remarkable essay “Autobiography in Eight Hairstyles.” She has a Taylor Swiftian propensity for going into detail about past relationships, but in this hairstyle odyssey she nails down the best reason possible for doing so: “More lethal than bad food, bad drink, and bad exercise habits, more toxic than chemical exposure, is the act of not owning your thoughts or speaking your mind.”
And that is what makes her writings so valuable. She is showing you cinéma vérité with her poetry. You must believe it because it is immediate and it is real. Pardon the bluntness, but she’s not fucking around. She has been there and now you are going to be there too, no euphemism, no denial. No dancing. (She has said “I can’t dance.”)
So it was she who reawakened my desire to resume my “Eminent Poets of Greater Phoenix” project. Volume I was published in 2010. I did about two dozen poet/acrostic/portrait pages since then but never lashed them together into Volume II. Now I want to.
So, to rewet my feet, I have done the first one in over a year, thus:
Susan Vespoli
Sure as RSTUV
She knows what it is to Be
Undeterred. The Truth she grasps
Speaks and makes her readers gasp
And Writes of Wildness gallop so
A hoofbeat rhythm helps her go
Now a Captain, now a Stray, she’ll
Nestle Life-blooms like a Lei
One more thing: She recently trounced me in Words With Friends, not for the first time, nor the fifth. Then in the next game she lobbed me a watermelon-sized Home Run pitch, using the word INNER so that I could make WINNER or DINNER or TINNER or some other, and get a triple-word score. I suspect she’s trying to let me win one. Hey, she’s an all-caps POET; she knows what she’s doing.
Not to be falsely modest; so am I. I flirt with her a little sometimes with some of the words I use–why not? It’s fun, and I’m harmless. In the game I show below, the one she got me good in, she played DUEL and I crossed it with LUV. If you’re going to Duel, do it with Luv. 🙂
Another Bad Pun Brain Teaser today. Here is the contest, and the response, as it appears now on my Samsung laptop:
Scott and Jess are frequent flyers with my contests, and frequent winners. So this time I made an Executive Decision:
WOW, that didn’t take long. Scott, multi-Bad Pun winner, has the correct answer. Jessica, multi-Bad Pun winner, has THREE brilliant answers, and the Judges say they would accept at least two of them, the left one and the right one.
What am I going to do with you two brilliant people? I don’t want to discourage you, but I do want to give ordinary mortals a chance. So here’s the deal: henceforth, you two must WAIT TO POST a minimum of ONE HOUR. As soon as you get the answer, write it down and take a time-stamped pic, so if you both get it the prize will go to the first.
Meanwhile, I’ll try to come up with harder Bad Pun Brain Teasers. Truly, I am in awe!
Oh, the Judges would also have accepted “River Deep, Mountain High,” and, if Dolly were wearing too tight a bra, “PLEASE Release Me, Let Me Go.”
ETA on the two Dollies is three days or so. I want to do them justice.
One more acceptable answer–blinding flash of the obvious from Yours Truly–“Hello, Dolly.”
And here is what Scott will receive in the mail in a couple of days:
And this one’s for Jess:
Congratulations to the brilliant Winners!!
The five Joneses, in no particular order, are Tommy Lee Jones, John Paul Jones, Davy Jones, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and Davy Jones. By far the most fascinating life of the Joneses goes to Jeffrey Catherine. She was not wearing a monocle in the photo i used as source, but I needed an eye-magnifier to catch her arresting gaze.
How this came to be: Yesterday I wrote a poem whose protagonist, receiving bad employment news, got a bit sloshed and decided to spend the four idle days making five amazing portraits and falling out of love. Though I am not myself the poem’s protagonist, I will own that I did get a little sloshed yesterday in the interest of the poem’s verisimilitude. 🙂 How amazing these portraits are is your call, not mine, dear Reader. To my eye they all miss the Amazing mark, some more widely than others. (I will give the Davy Jones Monkee sketch an honorable mention for sheer economy. Zoom in on it and you will see that the illusion of detail disappears snd it becomes lines and blobs, and not many at that. Placement of features turned that trick. It took about thirty seconds to draw.) But the poem’s protagonist did say it was an intention and not a promise.
This was a good idea, a tribute to four deserving women with lovely singing voices who also happened to inspire, and thus be Muses. The execution isn’t so hot, but that’s what I get for using the Unforgiving Pen for this one.
Mama Cass Elliot was compared by Graham Nash to Gertrude Stein, that patron of the arts of yesteryear. Joni Mitchell inspired Nash to write “Our House,” one of the loveliest songs ever written in the service of describing the bliss of ordinary life. Linda Ronstadt inspired Jerry Brown, called by some “Governor Moonbeam.” She also showed up in one of Paul Simon’s songs in his classic “Graceland.” And Carole King inspired an entire generation in general, and James Taylor in particular.
Brava, sweet-sounding Ladies. I hope some day to do you better justice.
Sing O Muse
Saintly Mama Cass had donned a muu-muu with some room
Innocence in Joni Mitchell fed her aperçu
Next came Linda Ronstadt with a songbird’s light caress
Go-to gals like Carole King rule airways with finesse
Day Fourteen, and here is a paste of the prompt:
“Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/people that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.”
So I thought of the poets, and there are too many. Then my inner acrosticist took three cards out of the Rolodex: Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sylvia Plath. All left their mark. All were driven and bedeviled and haunted. And they haunt me. I know the opening lines of “The Raven” and “Daddy” and I know all of “IF-” And Kip, Poe and Syl uniquely identify them with three letters. So there may be an Acrostic in the future…but I’m not feeling Acrosticky right now. But let’s see what happens.
Kip Poe Syl
Rudyard and Edgar and Sylvia Plath
Let us be shaped by this odd Threefold Path.
Let us get Kip for the blood and the bone,
Firmly embed in Testosterone Zone.
Poe is for Passion so darkly uncomic,
Endlessly rhymed with a beat metronomic.
Syl’s so unsilly, such willies she gives,
Pouring her hope into such porous sieves.
Put them together, you get KipPoeSyl,
Mournful and frantic as Hank’s Whippoorwill.
“Hear the lonesome Whippoorwill.
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Hiram “Hank” Williams, Sr.
Alas, today Bernie Sanders called it a campaign, ending his candidacy for President of the United States of America. My hope is that the Democratic National Committee will give him enough power to wield to make him a vital part of the next Administration. Here’s hoping!
This is the year of the pandemic, and it makes for a lot of text exchanges. One such that I’ve had with my former co-worker Yuko led down a conversational path to an exchange of not just text, but images. The photo source for this drawing is one of those images. Yuko had explained that she was angry at her mother because she didn’t like the noodles she was given. A sketch, and then an acrostic poem, were born.
baby yuko
bogus noodles every day
and i’m MAD and hope that u
bring me food that is ok
yummy, sweet and tasty too
Some time ago I had a try at capturing my admirable co-worker Amanda M. (Feel free to peruse the other 1500 entries in this blog to find it.) As the months passed my portrait attempt looked more and more like a misfire. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more and asked Amanda if I might try again. She was kind; I took another pic of her; I tried again with the result above, which is an attempt at Making Amanda Amends for that last botched effort.
I wouldn’t call this one successful, but it is less unsuccessful. The lighting is less harsh. The likeness is a half bubble off, but that is because I tried TOO hard and overworked it, so the heart is there.
Making Amanda Amends
Meet her & gain a fine sense of euphoria
Add Work-Commingling in with your Sensorium
Know a Professional Waldorf-Astoroia–be
Into the work tho the noise is stentorian
Nothing wrong with admiration if you understand
Gaining a new friend–a happy supplement to plans
My 2013 portrait of Lynda Barry has been my laptop screensaver for quite a while. She continues to blossom and thrive, and teaches creativity two-thirds of the way across the country from me. I would love to take that class. Some day I hope to.
This October 5th I will be an exhibitor and performer at Meet Your Literary Community, an event conducted by Jacob Friedman of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Jake suggested that I do caricatures for charity, so I am warming up, and this ten-minute sketch of Ms. Barry, its photo source found via Internet search of “lynda barry 2019 headshot,” is today’s first try. It is Conté crayon on Stonehenge paper.
If you are unfamiliar with Lynda Barry and her work, I urge you to seek out her images and image-rich publications. There is also a fine Facebook group aptly named Lynda! Barry! Rocks! The group name inspired the title of this post.
One with Clay, Image and Text 