They say the day you get a boat is the happiest day of your life. That is, until the day you sell the boat. The friend who shared those words had just bought a small sailboat. I think she may have actually sailed it a handful of times, the rest of the time it sat in the driveway. The one…
Many people know that the poet T. S. Eliot was very fond of cats and indeed created some wonderful cat characters and wrote poems about them. Many people also know that he loved practical jokes – things like exploding cigars and farting cushions. They may also know that he was a fan of detective fiction and wrote reviews for The…
OuLiPo meets Anapestic Tetrameter and the mad, bad and dangerous to know Bored Lyeron (If you feel you must read Lord Byron, or if you are unfamiliar with The Destruction of Sennacherib go here.) The Seduction of Sir Knack-a-Rib The Shakespearian came down like the gulf on the wold, And his so-shorts were gleaming like sonnets of old; And the…
Daffodil: good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy. – from the surrealist dictionary definition generator. Windy today so lots of daffodils nodding and bobbing about in the cheese. Here’s something from the Oulipo Compendium that’s not quite Wordsworth: The Imbeciles I wandered lonely as a crowd That floats on high o’er valves and ills When all at once I saw a shroud,…
There was a period in the early 1960s when my parents had a television (in those days you rented) and one of the programs I liked to watch was All Our Yesterdays produced by Granada Television. It was a look back in time based on the newsreel footage of that week twenty-five years ago – a week-by-week journey through the…
Shadorma – that wonderful bogus poetic form that is such fun to write – is perfect for the paean to the feline companion, the international cat of mystery. It’s also handy in keeping the basic arithmetic sharp. Six lines of 3, 5, 3, 3, 7 and 5 syllables. And done. She thrashes Her tail annoyed to Have to share my…
Unpaired Words Prefix or Suffix reversed or left off. They have no in-, no un-, no dis-, and no -less. Orphaned, they amuse. Ept and whelmed, Gruntled, kempt, and couth. Flappable, Trepid, ert. Corrigible and gainly, Stinting and ruly. But there’s more! Effable, nocent, Nocuous, Pervious, Pecunious, turbed, shevelled And domitable. And change the Suffix! Reckful and Ruthful and Gormful…
What is this Poetic form called Shadorma? Invention So some say. Spanish it is Alleged. Not so fast. Shadorma? Dictionary says Nothing, nowt, Not a thing. It’s a clever little hoax Useful, none the less. Shadorma? Spanish? That’s a laugh. Tish and tosh Internet Myth. But face it, they are fun To write, so there’s that. What I think Is…
Looks like having government officials who are Ignorant and Stupid is nothing new. Chinese poet Su Tung-Po nailed it centuries ago. I was browsing through the International Times for 1969 – the way one does. And there – amid the fevered, underground, counter-cultural world of macrobiotics, head shop ads, rock and roll, anarchy, activism, and psychedelia as seen from North…
November Show’s over, folks. And didn’t October do A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon. Nothing left but fool’s gold in the trees. Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage, While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage And gone to shiver in their…
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this…
While T.S.Eliot was skulking about in green face powder, Gertrude Stein was communing with Cubists and inventing linguistic collage. And – this is amazing – developing the code book for the Special Operations Executive of WW2. Picasso was a frequent visitor to Stein’s salon and they became friends. While Picasso and the other Cubists were cutting and pasting and…
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.– Gertrude Stein As you know from my earlier post I have recently been chatting with Gertrude Stein about her life and particularly aspects of her work Tender Buttons (1914). This was all facilitated by my early acquaintance with…
There, there, said the parent to the anguished child whose ice cream fell to the gutter. There! There! said the whale watcher pointing at the spout on the horizon. There’s no there there, said Gertrude Stein when she visited Oakland in 1934 and found her childhood home razed to the ground. In what they called an experiment, Stamp and Rave…