The Apostrophe Blog
Over the years, a number of my poems were featured at riverbabble, a literary journal that unfortunately is no longer online. riverbabble was founded in Berkeley, California in 2002 by Pandemonium Press and published twice a year—once in June, the Bloom’s Day Issue, and once in January, the Winter Solstice Issue. Every month, the Press also curated a reading series at the Spice Monkey Restaurant in Oakland, California.
In Summer 2018, riverbabble published my poem, “First Line of Defense: A Cento.” Not only does this poem use the cento form, stitching together lines borrowed from other poets into a poem all its own, but it is also an (almost) abecedarian. An abecedarian is a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet; it is related to the acrostic poem. According the the definition at the Poetry Foundation website: “The form was frequently used in ancient cultures for sacred compositions, such as prayers, hymns, and psalms. There are numerous examples of abecedarians in the Hebrew Bible; one of the most highly regarded is Psalm 118 (or 119 by King James numbering).”
First Line of Defense: A Cento
About suffering they were never wrong—
Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold.
Cruel time-servers, here is the crescent moon
Down valley, a smoke haze
Even tonight, and I need to take a walk and clear
Far back, when I went zig-zagging.
Go inside a stone.
Hate the people of this village.
I lay my head sideways on my desk
Just as the earth puckered its mouth.
Lately I’ve become accustomed to the way
My candle burns at both ends.
Now is the time of year when bees are wild.
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood,
Pull over. Your car with its slow
Rose, harsh Rose
Sails flashing to the wind like weapons.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master
Upon the darkish, thin, half-broken ice.
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold,
You should lie down now and remember the forest.
An almost-abecedarian cento created from first lines of twenty-one poems in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. Missing letters are K, Q , V, X, and Z. Here are the poets in the order in which their lines appear in the cento—I looked these up after I’d finished the poem: W.H. Auden; Jean Toomer; Louise Bogan; Gary Snyder; June Jordan; Adrienne Rich; Charles Simic; Thomas Lux; Larry Levis; Anne Sexton; Amiri Baraka; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Elizabeth Alexander; Charles Olson; Kevin Young; H.D.; Robert Hayden; Elizabeth Bishop; Denise Levertov; A.R. Ammons; and Susan Stewart.
The public domain image above is a 1902 show-card alphabet—a simple alphabet for advertising signs—by W. A. Thompson.
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.
- The Individuality of a Poetry Signature - September 12, 2024
- Published Online after Being in Print: “And I will tell you a story” - September 5, 2024
- Oregon Poetry Association Honorable Mention for a Prose Poem - September 2, 2024
