Our prompt this week was to write a poem based on an error, mistake, or slip of the tongue. Nearly as impressive as the poems that came in were the editing suggestions our NLP players made, which were unfailingly cordial and constructive. It was even more difficult than usual to select among the entries.
Let’s start with poems based on typographical errors and the like. Josie Cannella’s “Prayer Against Autocorrect” begins:
Hale Merry, full of grease,
How does your garbage grow?
Wind sill or bells and cuckold’s hell
and petty maidens all in arrow
Paul Michelsen’s self-described “Tie Pose” capitalizes on mondegreens: “I always thought Jimi Hendrix / was such a ladies’ man / ‘til I heard him ‘scuze himself / to kiss this guy.” In “The Pledge,” Millicent Caliban recollects the columnist Art Buchwald’s first efforts to memorize the pledge of allegiance—“I led the pigeons to the flag”— and takes off from there to imagine the pigeons’ puzzled response to the “space marked out in red, white and blue / that did not yield any crumbs.”
Baruch November, a first-time contributor, came up with “Out of nowhere, a Shidduch,” beginning with Polonius’s famous line, twisted:
Neither a borrower nor a bungler be.
In love, the latter I’ve always been—Having lived an eternity
alone for a Jewish man.I posted online for a new
apartment in Crown Heights.
Out of nowhere, a shidduchWas offered with a woman
whose sole descriptor was a love
for stray dogs.
That is just how
these days are— hounds visitThe soft rooms of women
while I busy myself bumblingPlans for a date that’ll
only end with meTurning on the darkness
of my empty bedroom.
It must have delighted Baruch to read that Josie Cannella loved the dog imagery and the last stanza, and was moved to look “shidduch” up in the dictionary—that is, to Google it. Learning that it meant “the offer of an arranged marriage” enhanced her pleasure in the poem.
My favorite of Millicent Caliban’s two poems is “The Poet’s Lament,” which appropriates Andrew Marvell’s majestic tetrameter and a few lines from “To His Coy Mistress” and applies them to the life of an office worker:
Had I but words enough and time,
I might write verse of love sublime.
But at my back I always hear
My supervisor hovering near.
I fear he will inspect my screen
Expecting images obscene.
So must I type this deadly dreck
From nine to five with stiffest neck.
I hate my job with all my heart,
But somehow I must do my part
To pay the bills and make the rent.
My famished soul is ne’er content
Greg Chaimov airs his fascination, which I share, with the way “sacred” becomes “scared” if we transpose two letters. “On Reading Scared as Sacred” was inspired by a line from Yannis Ritsos:
Alone with the moths on the ill-lit porch, he glances up
from Ritsos’s Monochords to track the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse. He’s startled his sense
of the verse as sacrament has led him to assume
a meaning the poet hadn’t pursued.Assume. Ad plus sumere, for “to take,”
related to consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, casts a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes
and the tattered wings that glide
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.
Emily fearlessly edited the poem:
Alone with moths on the ill-lit porch,
he reads and tracks the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse. Assume, relatedto consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes,
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.The impulse to condense is always worthwhile, though we would lose, in this case, “verse as sacrament.” Whether you prefer Emily’s revised version or not, I applaud the effort NLP players are making to critique, edit, and respond to one another’s poems without an inkling of rancor.
Christine Rhein wowed us all, I think, with “Voice Recognition.”
Global warming—turned global warning on my phone,
as I dictate notes about my friend—his cozy home
on the shore of eerie—the lake making its weigh up
his see wall, splashing past it—residence / resonance
in peril. And of course, climate scientists—science dissed,
their data obvious to sum / oblivious to others. How to
school / cool the planet—the question of the our, of mine
over matter, of dollars and sense—profits, pipelines,
the booms day / doomsday clock—so much time, wasted.
Oh, feudal world. Oh, futile trust in words. Monstrous
storms. Towns on fire. Paradise—a pair of dice.
Christine’s wordplay—in which “paradise” is the obverse of “a pair of dice”—won plaudits. Michael C. Rush singled out “The question of the our.” Charise Hoge picked “Oh, feudal world.” The ending wowed both Emily, our critic of the week, and Byron.
The origin of “Singeing from the Roof,” a late entry from Anna Ojascastro Guzon, was “a rare tornado that touched down in the city rather than the usual outskirts. ‘Do they have a roof?’ has been common conversation.”
Somehow, she still stands without a cane
and rolls her own tobacco leaves.
She still laughs at adult jokes and
believes in the existence of God.
She expects her late husband and
lost children to be there when
she meets Him. When asked if she’ll smoke
still, after she passes into eternity
she flipped her cigar, placing the lit end
in her mouth, and chuckled.
“Like this,” she said
with embers singing from the roof.
It was fascinating to learn from Anna that “The practice of smoking cigars backward is not uncommon among Filipino women, and my own grandmother enjoyed the habit.”
Randall Brett’s “XOXO” provoked more editorial commentary and suggestions than any other submission, prompting the author to revise the poem diligently after Emily, Josie, Byron, and Angela Ball all weighed in. I refer readers to the comments field for the full back-and-forth.
I wish I had room to quote more than the first line (“Deliver us from eagles’) of Elizabeth Solsburg’s “Lord’s prayer” and to give sufficient praise to Charise Hoge for her charming poem, “the little things, mon amour.” Michael C. Rush has a fine title (“All Poetry Is Non Sequitur”) with such admirable lines as this: “Ask the fauxpasparazzi and other followers of the Sacred Ineptitude.” It’s always grand when a poet on the order of the redoubtable Denise Duhamel favors us with a poem.
My own effort arose from watching baseball games with the sound off, subtitles distorting what the play-by-play broadcasters said:
Yankees vs. Dodgers (Closed-Caption)
Swing and a mess.
The outfield is playing at normal death.
For next time, I suggest that we consider the “reasons for living” that the protagonist, Isaac Davis, enumerates in Woody Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan. Davis’s reasons include Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, Mozart’s Jupiter symphony (second movement), Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” and Cézanne’s apples and pears. What reasons do you have?
Your poem can take the form of a list, or an annotated list. No more than 10 reasons, and keep in mind the negative defense of living given by Dorothy Parker in her poem “Resumé.” It might put you in a creative mood to listen to John Coltrane play the great Rodgers and Hammerstein hit “My Favorite Things”—or to listen to Julie Andrews sing it. Deadline: Friday, June 20, noon (any time zone).
