Buggeryville

I wrote three nice poety things about JonArno Lawson's A Voweller's Bestiary over at Agora. Recommended for fans of lipograms, bestiaries, and children's literature.

God: "Palin? Oy! A yoni lapdog!"

[A certain newspaper that's running a "Sarah Palindrome" contest -- you google it yourself if you care -- told me they couldn't print "yoni" in a newspaper, after they asked me what it meant.]

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.

Wm Shkspre, R&J, prologue

This is a little complicated, so bear with me. There's a reward at the end, I hope.

Craig Conley created a terrific dictionary of one-letter words, including as many definitions as he could find for each letter. Then, through a series of ineffable events, he developed The X-O-Skeleton Story Generator. You play a game of Tic Tac Toe, alternating between Xs and Os, until the game is won (or drawn). Each X and O is connected to one of a few dozen possible meanings for that letter, drawn from Craig's dictionary. X might refer to magnifying, like a 4x camera zoom lens, or it might refer to the mark one makes instead of signing one's name, or the mark that tells you where to sign it. By the end of the game you'll have a string of up to nine different concepts, alternating between Xs and Os like the kisses and hugs at the end of a letter.

I decided to give this method a try. But I don't write stories, and I enjoy making my constraints as tricksy as possible, so I decided to write a limerick. One that gives a basic account of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, much as he himself does in the prologue quoted above. Also, like the play, the Tic Tac Toe game had to end with neither side winning, which meant packing nine different concepts into the five lines. Also I tried to work in as much internal rhyme as I could, because if you're going to rhyme, you might as well rhyme all the way.

Anyway, you can read "An X-O-gesis of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" at Craig's blog.

I strongly encourage others to give the X-O-Skeleton Story Generator a try; I don't think the possibilities are nearly exhausted yet.

Write a sentence (in the comments) in which all the letters are in alphabetical order.

Ad Infinitum offers up a little gem in one of its footnotes. It's by Hugh Primas of Orleans, a twelfth century writer. He summarizes the Bible in two hexameters:

Quos anguis tristi virus mulcedine pavit
hos sanguis Christi mirus dulcedine lavit.

"Those whom the serpent's venom filled with its dire magic, these Christ's astonishing blood washed in sweetness." More or less. Notice how each word in the first line is paired with a word in the second line. Obsessive rhyme was big in the Middle Ages, but this is the first time I've seen it pushed this far. And it's still in hexameter.

Anyone want to take a stab at pulling off something similar in English?

I have these manuscripts sitting on my hard drive, where they do me and the world no particular good at all. So I have decided to start putting them online in pdfs -- hopefully, pdfs which will be easy and pleasurable to read on the computer (which means they are not being designed to be printed out).

I'm going to start with 5×5×5(×5), which, as its name suggests, is a series of 125 five-word poems. They were inspired by Bob Perelman, I suppose. In his poem "Chronic Meanings" he wrote: "Five words can say only." For me, this rubbed up against the idea that people can keep five things, more or less, in mind at once. Then, after an event celebrating the release of his book The Marginalization of Poetry, I wrote these poems in a frenzy, in exactly two hours.

I've often presented these poems in random order, or in random selections, although many of the poems relate to their number in the sequence. I tore through the entire sequence in ten minutes at the Poetland event a few years ago, and one of the poems was quoted in a review of the event in the Oregonian.

The photograph in the cover of the pdf is by Anthony Easton.

Download 5×5×5(×5).

Update: A very nice review by Geof Huth.

HO
HON
HONE
HONES
HONEST
HONESTY