Author: geoplotsadmin

I thought I wrote, not a perfect but at least a good poem, one which began with a real moment of wakening, with a line not perfect but still worth scribbling down. 

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.

‘

Behind it lay an amorphous shifting shape of sound—like the phantom sounds which Mandelstam put to the beginning of a poem.

The next morning, actually May Day, there was more than a sonic shape. Actual words began to fill in. My job was to work with them.

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
I couldn’t tell
The form into which it fell
Emptied of words, only a shape
Triolet, pantoum, villanellea  

 Or this

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
Morning come, it was erased.
Emptied of words, but a shape
of sound, unknown…

Pantoum, triolet, villanelle…

     Finally, the next morning, it fell together. So I thought.

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line
Morning come, it was erased.
All that sleep time gone to waste.
Was it by hap or by design?

To be continued …

 This Mothers’ Day, as I prefer to spell it, I’ve been haunted by memory of the time when Mother washed my mouth out with soap for using a bad word. No, it wasn’t the f-word. 

That was almost 70 years ago, in Houston, not quite the Deep South, but close enough.  A few years before–I was likely around nine–she’d already called out that particular F- vocable. When I had asked where babies came from, she’d replied in her typical back-handed way,  

“Now, George, I know you know. Don’t you boys snicker about it? It’s a four-letter word beginning with F.”

(For months I held them in, afraid I’d inadvertently inseminate a classmate with a fart.)

No, the word I used a couple of years later was, in her mind, much worse. It began with an N.

*

In her own way  she was honoring the origins of not Mother’s, but Mothers’ Day.

Lest we forget: the origins of Mother’s Day lie in the  1870 Mothers’ [sic] Day Proclamation, a “pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The appeal was tied to Howe’s feminist conviction that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.”

Mother, who was a proud Unitarian, would have preferred the 1993 version, updated into a hymn by the Unitarian-Universalist Association, this meant to be much more inclusive in both gender references, multicultural sources.

*

Last night as we were streaming Riot Women, with fabulous music and lyrics by ARXX (pronounced “arks”). I had a brief moment of positivity about the future.

Politics is shaped by cycles. Maybe things will swing back. Am I allowed to hope that he-who-must-not-be-named is the beginning  of dying breath of mindless patriotism, even better of patriarchy?

 

 

 

 

Although its name suggests an off-brand of adult sanitary napkin, a permie is a poem whose semantics are driven by the mechanics of permutation. I wrote my first one in 1977.

 A simple matter of constructing meanings from alternative phrases provided by the poem itself.

     Those who love change fear  —>  Those who fear love change.

The addition of an implied comma could make the readings more varied. Take  the fourth line:
      Those who love, fear change —> Those who love fear, change. 

A world of possibilities open up.

I was alerted to permies by a recent experience with a quatrain I composed early one morning. 

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
Morning come, it was erased.
Was it hap or by design
All  that sleep time gone to waste?

Just as light began to suffuse the room it dawned on me that the order of the sentences could change into:

Was it hap or by design,
All that sleep time gone to waste?
I dreamed a wrote a perfect line.
Morning come, it was erased.   

And that simple inversion of a couple of couplets was just one possible arrangement. According to the laws of possibilities, though not probabilities, 24 sets can be derived from any four discreet items. The opacity of language and the constraints of syntax keep the number of plausible permutations down from the total of possible combinations.

No doubt my discovery was due to my love for palindromes, in particular the works of Anthony Etherin (https://bsky.app/profile/anthonyetherin.bsky.social), as well as the Brazilian and other palindromistas around Liga  Ágil  (https://bsky.app/profile/ligaagil.bsky.social).

I grew an amputation.