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SunWinks! November 16, 2014: Making It Up As You Go Along

 ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

                   Lewis Carroll

 SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Neologism. We all do it but nobody wants to talk about it. You’re searching for a word, and you can’t find the one you want, so you make one up. I once had a co-worker who frequently said, “I was flustrated.” I don’t know if he was aware he had made up a word, but to my mind, it’s a brilliant example of a portmanteau word. A portmanteau squishes together two ordinary words to form a third; in the best examples, the new word combines both meanings from each word in a natural “that really ought to be a word” way. (A portmanteau is a suitcase. So you throw two words into a suitcase, give it to your typical baggage handler, and a new word comes out.) So “flustrated” would be a combination of “flustered” and “frustrated.” And it can be readily intuited that that’s exactly what it ought to mean.

Jabberwock by John TennielI’ve read that “slithy” could be a portmanteau word combining “slimy” and “lithe.” “Absotively” (absolutely-positively) is another great example; I’ve heard it in common parlance and used it in my work, so I was delighted to hear it used in Steely Dan’s song “Two Against Nature.” Or maybe it was the other way around. (The neologism “grok” from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land also shows up in the same song.)

In my poem “If God Is the Answer, What Was the Question?” I throw in a portmanteau of my own:

 Browsing religion books at Goodwill,
a once-burly blue-collar fellow sidles up
and pompulates: “Can you believe people
actually think we descended from apes? Apes!”

 These things can be ambiguous, but I’m pretty sure I meant “pompously postulates.” In another, recent poem I have the line, “Rats scutter across my path…” Sounds like it ought to be a portmanteau. A combination of “scurry” and “scatter,” perhaps. Or maybe I was just being onomatopoeic. I needed a fresher alternative to “scurry.” Whole books have been devoted to portmanteau words, but we will leave them for now. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! November 9, 2014: I Went To Write My Column and a Manifesto Broke Out

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

You had [indigenous American] cultures on the Plains where each person discovered, through a vision quest, his or her own inner voice, and then came back after a week of isolation and told the rest of the tribe “who I am.” And nobody could argue with that because it came from within.

Michael Dorris

Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey

Poetry must come from within, or else it is superficial, dry, and remote. Paradoxically, it must come from emptiness, a place of nothingness, because if the poet doesn’t get herself out of the way, her poetry cannot be universal. Put the other way around, as the reader, the audience, if I am listening to you talk about what you think about yourself, then I become an observer, not a participant. It becomes a second-hand experience, like watching TV. If, however, you speak of what is, without judging, without inserting yourself, without nailing things down, then I can be drawn in, I can be involved in your vision and experience the universal, the resonant, in what you have to say.

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SunWinks! November 2, 2014: Word Up

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

A few years ago, my daughter brought a boy home and the three of us played Scrabble. Hannah had been boasting on me, and as usual, I pulled no punches. The young gentleman asked me, “How do I get to be as good a Scrabble player as you?” My reply: “Stay in school.” I don’t think it was the magic bullet he was hoping for.

I was just watching a feature story on a college football postgame show. I didn’t catch the name of the student-athlete, but the story was about how when he came to college on a football scholarship, he could barely read at the junior high level. So he resolved to do something about it. Do you know what he did? Continue reading →

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SunWinks! October 26, 2014: The Shadow Knows

 

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

Robert Louis Stevenson

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

In her delightful book poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life With Words,* a collection of vignettes each followed by a generous helping of poetry prompts, Susan Wooldridge suggests “listening to our shadow.” She cites Carl Jung as saying that in the normal course of development, a child of about six will split off the side of herself that is not approved of by the outside world and suppress it, and this becomes the shadow self.

*[NY: Clarkson Potter, Inc., 1996]

Jung’s concept is much more complex than this, but I went back to Jung and it made my head spin, so we’re going to wing it. Typically or stereotypically, the side split off is the fanciful, adventurous, independent, creative self which we often call our “inner child.” There are other sorts of scenarios and resulting shadows. The obedient “good child” may have a “wicked” shadow. The abused, violent, ultimately criminal child may have a conscience (“good child”) which has been so completely repressed, it isn’t even available to the conscious mind.

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New Poem: The Barber

Dark Alley by michaeljtr

This is a response to my prompt of tomorrow, October 26, 2014 (I actually wrote it a few weeks ago) on the topic of The Shadow Self.

Additionally, if I had titled this “Introspection,” then it would be a response to the October 19 prompt. But that gives away the metaphor, so that’s why I didn’t. But you might want to look at this from the standpoint of that earlier prompt.

Poem: The Barber

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SunWinks! October 19, 2014: I Never Metaphor Part II

Imagine a literal world, in which nothing was ever seen in terms of anything else. Falling blossoms wouldn’t remind you of snow. A dancer’s sensuous grace wouldn’t resemble the movements of a lover; the shape of a cloud would never suggest a horse or a sailing ship. If such a world were possible, it would be a severely impoverished one.

Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux The Poet’s Companion [NY: Norton, 1997]

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

First, some miscellaneous business: Boris called my attention to a book by Dr. Mardy Grothe called I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like. I hadn’t heard of it (and didn’t steal the title of last week’s column from him, although I hardly thought I was the first to think of that pun) so I looked it up. Seems like an interesting guy—how many marriage counselor/lexicographers do you know? He’s written a number of books in the same vein, he is published by Harper, and he’s earned the approbation of the likes of Richard Lederer (Anguished English), so check him out.

Second, I have to tweak Len Maxwell again. It’s just so much fun. Mister “Metaphors-Lose-Me” drew one of the most striking metaphors I’ve seen in quite awhile: “I have a throw-rug in my living room and, as I clipped my toenails, most of the albino boomerangs landed on that rug.” And boy did they boomerang on him when “Sandi” came home! I love it!

To the subject at hand: Continue reading →

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SunWinks! October 12, 2014: I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like

SunWinksLogo

A good title should be like a good metaphor: it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

Walker Percy

 

Dear SunWinkers:

I’ve danced* around it as long as I can. I must come back to the topic of metaphor. This is where I lose* some people. They immediately say, as though they were being confronted with somebody else’s religion,* “I don’t understand poetry!” “I could never write a poem!”

The mission of SunWinks! is to demystify the reading and writing of modern poetry. And so, sooner or later, we must tilt at the windmill* of metaphor. Poetry (as we understand it today) without metaphor is as banal as a greeting card.* Metaphor is the very stuff* of poetry.

*These are all metaphors. I will continue to mark similarly the metaphors in this column.* (yup, that’s another one…)

As you can see already, figurative language (metaphors) makes for compelling and colorful* writing, period, never mind poetry. Language itself is metaphor. Every word, Emerson said, is a metaphor; words are by their nature metaphors–the word “table” represents the four-legged piece of furniture we eat on. Words originate as metaphors; the word “column” refers to the fact that columns in newspapers were usually presented in narrow columns of type. These columns of type were so named as a visual metaphor to the tall, narrow columns which hold up ancient temples. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! October 5, 2014: Music Without Melody

SunWinksLogo Dear SunWinkers!

In the history of art in general and poetry in particular, one of the creative giants and originals among originals is Dame Edith Sitwell. Born in 1887 into an upper-crust family and distant parents, Sitwell was encouraged by her grandmother and governess to write and express herself. From the very infancy of her poetic career, she broke the mold of stuffy, rigorous Victorian English poetry, determined to find a new language and a new approach.

Edith Sitwell. Painting by Roget Eliot Fry (1918).

Not only a pioneer, Sitwell was a celebrity on the order of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Dali. So I was gobsmacked to find a vintage 1949 copy of her volume The Canticle of the Rose: Poems 1919-1949 for sale at Powell’s for $3.50. It begins with an invaluable preface: Some Notes on My Own Poetry. I feel like a kid who found an antique wind-up tin soldier in his Cracker Jacks box:

At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.

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SunWinks! September 28, 2014: Nothing Is Sacred

 I think that I shall never see
A poem as trivial as “Trees.”…

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers!

Joyce Kilmer’s 1913 poem “Trees” is an easy and favorite target for parody. I was shocked to learn that “Trees” was originally published in the prestigious Poetry magazine. (I was also shocked to learn that Joyce Kilmer is a guy.) And you know, looking at it again, it’s not the worst poem ever, especially for 1913.

Joyce Kilmer

Writing parody can be lots of fun, and it can improve your technique and even give you a new appreciation for the poem you are lampooning.

This week, I wrote a parody of James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost Is On the Punkin,” a poem I grew up with. It (the original) is a celebration of crisp autumn mornings on the farm. I heard some baseball commentator say, “The pitcher’s on the rubber, and the batter’s in the box…” and said to myself, “OMG I have to write that!”

“When The Pitcher’s On the Rubber”

Continue reading →

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