The Apostrophe Blog
My poem, “the pattern of vanishing,” has been accepted for publication in the IHRAM Publishes 2025 Rapid Response Anthology with the theme of “America’s Slide Towards Authoritarianism.” IHRAM stands for the International Human Rights Art Movement and was founded out of artist-activist Tom Block’s passion to use creativity to spur positive social change. According to their website, IHRAM works to “bring together all members of society through our programming, from artists-in-exile and at risk; to activists on the front lines of the struggle for rights and justice in their own country; to creators working in all media; to national and international politicians, government agencies, social leaders and celebrities. We believe that creative engagement with all members of the society is the surest path toward social justice and positive change.”
My accepted poem is about the recently published list of words to be expunged from every official U.S. government communication including print publications and websites. I wanted to write a poem that would confront this blatant censorship of language, to highlight both its idiocy and its fundamental banality. So I decided to use the abecedarian form. According to the Poetry Foundation’s website, an abecedarian is “related to an acrostic, a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet.”
The Rapid Response Anthology is scheduled for publication in October 2025.
The public domain image above is of Carriers of the New Black Plague, a pictorial map drawn by William Henry Cotton that was published as the central double-page spread in the inaugural issue of the anti-fascist magazine, Ken, in April 1938. The map names and shames every current totalitarian leader and offers a satirical commentary on their methods for controlling free speech. As noted on the website of the P.J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography at Cornell University: “Caught here in all their peculiar beauty by the soul searching stylus of W. Cotton, Ken holds up for wonder the mangy motley pack of little ‘strong men’ who are now leading the world on a backward march to the Dark Ages. . . . In effect, over more than half the world, Liberty is now in totalitarian Eclipse.”
Words from eighty-seven years ago all too true right now. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- Acceptance News: 2025 Rapid Response Anthology - July 12, 2025
- Don’t Fence Me In! - July 5, 2025
- Nothing to Celebrate Today… - July 4, 2025
