In a previous post I did a poem intertwining Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath. “Kip Poe Syl” lent itself to an acrostic, but I did not do one. Now I do.
Kip Poe Syl
Khartoum beckons. Reaper reckons. Lass
Keeps fiendish company as love takes pass
Into Manhood-proving fateful fray
IF NEVERMORE & Daddy go away
Pip Pip hooray Bedeviled eggs go well
Parboiled plenteously here in HELL
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.
Ayn Rand must be turning over in her grave. A long time ago, she proclaimed that A equals A. Now people everywhere are saying “It is what it is,” and not giving Ayn any credit. (Nor, to my knowledge, did John Prine tip his hat to Rand when he put “You are what you are, and you ain’t what you ain’t” in his lyrics to “Dear Abby.”)
“It is what it is” is a semantically empty phrase that usually (in this neck of the woods, anyway) connotes that something not-great but unchangeable exists. As Robert Heinlein was wont to say, “You can’t argue with the weather.”
So why use it for an acrostic? Well, ten years from now it will remind me of the way people were talking ten years ago. (Fifty years ago, kids my age were calling Cool stuff Boss. Cool survived; Boss died.) Also, the end-letters work out fairly well for acrosticization, and enabled a reference to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, heroic mongoose of the Kipling oeuvre, as well as the Robert Mondavi vineyards, which I was privileged to visit in the mid-80s, enjoying their five-course meal accompanied by five different wines.
Here are the words to the triple acrostic:
It pays a Cobra to BEWARE of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
The savage Truth would humble the most cock-eyed optimist
It’s like an alcoholic at a vineyard of Mondavi
So many vampires want to taste the blood of whom they kiss
One with Clay, Image and Text 