“On Not Being Able to Read My Wife’s Handwriting”

I think of my wife’s penmanship as a race
Of dwarves drowning in a cursive swamp, or
Lost, hands waving, as consonants rush face
To face into unmitigated vowels. On the door
To our refrigerator one early morning note, or
A map of Tasmania with spasmodic X’s
Which might mean kisses or malfunctioning T’s.
Oh, Momma, Momma, why didn’t you warn me:
“Never marry a woman whose handwriting
You cannot read.” Full-blown capital R’s
Turned on their sides. My wife has either
Run off with the plumber (or is it carpenter?)
To inaugurate correspondences from Paris,
Or she wishes me to purchase for supper
Hornet butter, three pounds of javelins, and/or
One large rat to stab behind the arras.
Am I holding her message upside down? Possibly.
Now I shall suffer in suspense all day until night
To discover the full-mouthed truth of her scrawl.

— Louis Phillips

| Poems

Sensible Nonsense

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jabberwocky.jpg

“Jabberwocky” works wonderfully in German — writer Thomas Chatterton offered this translation to Macmillan’s Magazine in 1872:

Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben.

»Bewahre doch vor Jammerwoch!
Die Zähne knirschen, Krallen kratzen!
Bewahr’ vor Jubjub-Vogel, vor
Frumiösen Banderschnätzchen!«

Er griff sein vorpals Schwertchen zu,
Er suchte lang das manchsam’ Ding;
Dann, stehend unten Tumtum Baum,
Er an-zu-denken-fing.

Als stand er tief in Andacht auf,
Des Jammerwochen’s Augen-feuer
Durch tulgen Wald mit wiffek kam
Ein burbelnd Ungeheuer!

Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei! Und durch und durch
Sein vorpals Schwert zerschnifer-schnück,
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Geläumfig zog zurück.

»Und schlugst Du ja den Jammerwoch?
Umarme mich, mien Böhm’sches Kind!
O Freuden-Tag! O Halloo-Schlag!«
Er chortelt froh-gesinnt.

Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben.

In The Philosopher’s Alice, Peter Heath calls this “easily the best” of the poem’s many translations. “In no other language is elaboration of structure so readily compatible with entire absence of meaning.”

| Language · Poems

First Things First

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_chicken_egg_square.jpg

Oh who that ever lived and loved
Can look upon an egg unmoved?
The egg it is the source of all,
‘Tis everyone’s ancestral hall.
The bravest chief that ever fought,
The lowest thief that e’er was caught,
The harlot’s lip, the maiden’s leg,
They each and all come from an egg.

The rocks that once by ocean’s surge
Beheld the first of eggs emerge —
Obscure, defenseless, small and cold —
They little knew what egg could hold.
The gifts the reverent Magi gave,
Pandora’s box, Aladdin’s cave,
Wars, loves, and kingdoms, heaven and hell
All lay within that tiny shell.

Oh, join me gentlemen, I beg,
In honoring our friend, the egg.

— Clarence Day, Scenes From the Mesozoic, 1935

| Poems

“Surrealist Landscape”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metamorphosis_of_Narcissus.jpg

On the pale yellow sands
Where the Unicorn stands
And the Eggs are preparing for Tea
Sing Forty
Sing Thirty
Sing Three.

On the pale yellow sands
There’s a pair of Clasped Hands
And an Eyeball entangled with string
(Sing Forty
Sing Fifty
Sing Three.)
And a Bicycle Seat
And a Plate of Raw Meat
And a Thing that is hardly a Thing.

On the pale yellow sands
There stands
A Commode
That has nothing to do with the case.
Sing Eighty
Sing Ninety
Sing Three.
On the pale yellow sands
There’s a Dorian Mode
And a Temple all covered with Lace
And a Gothic Erection of Urgent Demands
On the Patience of You and of Me.

— Lord Berners

| Art · Poems

Heart and Soul

pedal triangle theorem

From a point P, drop perpendiculars to the sides of a surrounding triangle. This defines three points; connect those to make a new triangle and drop perpendiculars to its sides. If you continue in this way, the fourth triangle will be similar to the original one.

In 1947, Mary Pedoe memorialized this fact with a poem:

Begin with any point called P
(That all-too-common name for points),
Whence, on three-sided ABC
We drop, to make right-angled joints,
Three several plumb-lines, whence ’tis clear
A new triangle should appear.

A ghostly Phoenix on its nest
Brooding a chick among the ashes,
ABC bears within its breast
A younger ABC (with dashes):
A figure destined, not to burn,
But to be dropped on in its turn.

By going through these motions thrice
We fashion two triangles more,
And call them ABC (dashed twice)
And thrice bedashed, but now we score
A chick indeed! Cry gully, gully!
(One moment! I’ll explain more fully.)

The fourth triangle ABC,
Though decadently small in size,
Presents a form that perfectly
Resembles, e’en to casual eyes
Its first progenitor. They are
In strict proportion similar.

The property generalizes: Not only is the third “pedal triangle” of a triangle similar to the original triangle, but the nth “pedal n-gon” of an n-gon is similar to the original n-gon.

| Poems · Science & Math

“Winter Eve”

Drear fiend: How shall this spay be dent?
I jell you no toque — I do not know.
What can I do but snatch the woe
that falls beyond my pane, and blench
my crows and ted my briny shears?
Now galls another class. I’ll sit
and eye the corm that’s fought in it.
Maces will I fake, and heart my pare.
Is this that sold elf that once I was
with lapped chips and tolling lung?
I hollow sward and tight my bung
for very shame, and yet no cause —
save that the beery witchery
of Life stows grail. Shall I abroad?
Track up my punks? Oh gray to pod
for him who sanders on the wee!
I’ll buff a stag with shiny torts
and soulful hocks, a truthbush too,
perhaps a rook to bead — but no!
my wishes must be dashed. Reports
of danger shake the reaming scare.
Whack against blight! Again that tune,
“A gritty pearl is just like a titty prune”
blows from the fox. I canot bear
this sweetness. Silence is best. I mat
my mistress and my sleazy lumber.
I’ll shake off my toes, for they encumber.
What if I tub my stow? The newt
goes better fakèd to the cot.
I’ll hash my wands or shake a tower,
(a rug of slum? a whiskey sour?)
water my pants in all their plots,
slob a male hairy before I seep —
and dropping each Id on heavy lie,
with none to sing me lullaby,
slop off to dreep, slop off to dreep.

— Robert Morse, quoted in W.H. Auden’s commonplace book A Certain World

| Language · Poems

Terrible Poetry

We turned, as the winter-flakes fell from the cloud,
And the keen wind blew colder and colder;
And there, in his little grey coffin and shroud,
Left our darling to silently moulder.

— Henry Doman, “The Burial of the Darling,” from “The Cathedral” and Other Poems, 1864

Attend, ye fair, ye thoughtless, and ye gay!
For Mira dy’d upon the nuptial day!
The grave, cold bridegroom! clasp’d her in his arms,
And kindred worms destroyed her pleasing charms.

— Henry More, “Night Thoughts,” from An Elegaic Poem Amidst the Ruins of an Abbey, 1803

I tell you I’m the youngest son of five;
And three lie in their gore
Down by the great hall-door,
And Fred and I are all that are alive.

— John Stanyan Bigg, “The Huguenot’s Doom,” from Shifting Scenes, and Other Poems, 1862

Yet to the mariner, when tempest tost,
Thy presence brings to him but sore dismay;
Contact with thee, all hope were surely lost,
Death then engulphs his helpless prey.

— William Igglesden, “To an Iceberg in the Southern Ocean,” from Poetical Miscellanea, 1858

S.L. Francis’ 1760 “Elegy on Colonel Robert Montgomery Written on the Fatal Spot Where the Lamentable Duel Transpired” ends with the line “Submerged he lies, co-wretched am I now.” “All poets write bad poetry,” wrote Umberto Eco. “Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

| Poems

Bestial Passion

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gorilla_2_(PSF).png

In 1993 Jacques Jouet wrote a love poem in the language of the great apes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Zor hoden tanda
Kagoda bolgani
Rak gom tand-panda
Yato kalan mangani
Kreegh-ah yel greeh-ah
Kreegh-ah zu-vo bolgani
Greeh-ah tand-popo
Ubor zee kalan mangani.

Where are you going, gorilla,
In the dark forest?
You run without a sound
Seeking the female ape.
Beware of love
Watch out, gorilla
A lover dies of hunger
Of thirst, of hoping for the leg of the female great ape.

“The great-ape language has the peculiarity of being composed of a lexicon of less than 300 words,” Jouet notes. “In the absence of any information, it must be deemed that the syntax is according to the user’s preference, as are the pronunciation and prosody.”

(From Raymond Queneau’s Oulipo Laboratory, 1995.)

| Language · Poems

In a Word

vespine
adj. pertaining to wasps

vespiary
n. a nest of wasps

Lord Dunsany and John Drinkwater were appearing as guests of honor at the Poetry Society of America when they fell into a friendly dispute over the relative merits of rhymed verse and rhythmical prose. Dunsany asked, “Supposing you had a line of rhymed verse ending with the word wasp. Where, I ask you, could you find a rhyme for wasp?”

In the words of the Boston Transcript‘s Alice Lawton, “That was the evening’s Parthian shot. Mr. Drinkwater produced no rhyme for ‘wasp.'”

But Arthur Guiterman, who was in the audience, later recalled, “You can find a rhyme for wasp. There is a perfectly good one in the dictionary. I found it at home that night. It is knosp and means a flower bud, or a budlike architectural ornament. Of course, having found it, I had to use it at once.”

I saw a Melancholy Wasp
Upon a Purple Clover Knosp,
Who wept, “The Poets do me Wrong,
Excluding me from Noble Song —
Though Pure am I and Wholly Crimeless —
Because, they say, my Name is Rhymeless!
Oh, had I but been born a Bee,
With Heaps of Words to Rhyme with me,
I should not want for Panegyrics
In Sonnets, Epics, Odes and Lyrics!
Will no one free me from the Curse
That bars my Race from Lofty Verse?”
“My Friend, that Little Thing I’ll care for
At once,” said I — and that is wherefore
So tenderly I set that Wasp
Upon a Purple Clover Knosp.

| Language · Poems