Down the rabbit hole

Well, I've gone down the rabbit hole with YouTube, and with Wikpedia -- chasing layers upon layers of interesting-sounding related links -- but never with poetry.

I rented The Age of Adeline on DVD, and one scene around the twenty-minute mark has a guy quoting some poem about "Jenny Kissed Me".  It sounds like a good poem, so I Google it, and find it here at The Poetry Foundation -- and the next thing I know I've started a "Poetry" folder on my hard drive, saved twenty-one poems to it, and re-discovered Sonnet #18 from Shakespeare:  "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" -- which I memorized in high school.


I've never been "into" poetry -- but I appreciate a good song lyric, so --


Good stuff.


--GG

All the world has a haiku

One of my mutant abilities is to detect potential song lyrics or poems, and to crank out halfway-decent poems at a moment's notice.


A co-worker sent this notice around: 
 
The toaster in the kitchen has sadly toasted its last piece of toast. I found its cord melted into a distinctly flat shape, which lead me to believe that it may fallen victim to the sandwich press. I had pressed a delicious sandwich of my own seconds before I discovered the damage and the now-flattened cord was still hot at the time. So there is a very slight possibility that it was me who wrecked the toaster. I will go down and see if I can get another one at lunch and we will hopefully be equipped for toasting by 1:15. 

I will also try to reposition things so that stray cords don’t end up in the sandwich press again. Apologies for any inconvenience.


I detected in the above, a haiku:

The toaster in the
kitchen has sadly toasted
its last piece of toast. 


I particularly like that the meaning of "sadly" is ambiguous:  does it mean that it is too bad that this was the last piece of toast?  Or was the toaster aware this this was its final piece of toast -- and was sad about it, as it was toasting?


I e-mailed my haiku to my co-worker, who e-mailed back that he'd had to Google what a "haiku" was.

I replied that maybe it's a Seattle thing -- lots of Japanese-Americans; we did a lot of haikus during poetry units during school.


I also sent him this:

See Peter Smithers
He Googles what “haiku” means: 
Ah! Enlightenment.


--GG

I can crank out poems

As I've mentioned a few times before, one of the nice things of being middle-aged is that you pretty much know what you're good at, what you're not -- and you're comfortable it.  You're open with your shortcomings -- but you don't worry about false humility about your strengths.

And I don't mean that you go around showing off or bragging.  But you're willing to talk about what you're good at.


For example, I really have no sense of direction -- no sense at all.  But I have pretty strong spacial skills (e.g. being able to tell what boxes will fit into the back of a truck).


So:  last night I was helping my daughter with her homework, which was: creating an additional verse to the Robert Frost poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".  It's the poem with the lines "My little horse must think it queer // To stop without a farmhouse near" -- and ends with "And miles to go before I sleep // And miles to go before I sleep".

The Lady had originally tried to help The Girl come up with a new verse that fit with the original poem -- but they both got stuck.  So The Lady handed The Girl off to me.  The preliminary lines they came up with were pretty close -- but the original poem had eight beats per line ("dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH DAH DAH"), whereas their attempts were missing a few beats.

I tried to not do the homework for The Girl, but instead guide her towards the solution -- but, man was it hard!  I came up with multiple replacement verses in my head, and a zillion rhymes for "-eep" -- but The Girl was having a hard time putting them together.

At that point I realized that -- hey! -- maybe being able to crank out poetry (or song lyrics) is a skill:  apparently not everyone (e.g. my wife, my daughter) can do it.  Basically, if I start with any word that defines the rhyme scheme, I can come up with a verse or two that makes some sort of narrative sense -- basically as fast as I can speak them..


Here's two examples:  I picked the word "quagmire", off the top of my head.  Then I made up a little poem, which came to me basically as fast as I could type it (and by the way -- if you're playing along at home, now's the time to **also** try to come up with four lines that rhyme with "quagmire".


Therefore:

I am in such a quagmire
Whenever I shop at Fred Meyer.
The shelves are full of much attire --
But nothing that sets me afire.

Similarly, "umbrella"

(Again, go ahead and make something up yourself.)




So, then:

You look so grand with your umbrella;
You look like such a dashing fella.
Shirt of red, and vest of yella --
But not as chic as Penn or Tella!


I mean, it's not genius -- but it's pretty good for totally off-the-top-of-the-head.


So, I'll go for a month or two without writing any new songs.  And then I'll have a month when I'm inspired by something arbitrary, and I'll crank out an entire song in a matter of minutes -- usually while riding the bus to or from work.

Yesterday, for example, I wrote all the but final verse of a song about why Archie is an idiot for choosing Veronica over Betty Cooper.  I'm pleased with it.


And the verse that we wrote?  The first line, which The Lady and The Girl came up with, was "Across the sky the clouds creep" -- which was pretty close -- but "Across the sky the clouds do creep" works better.

The second line was -- with prompting from me -- "The bushes look like fluffy sheep".  That is, they're white and fluffy, eh?

The third line is supposed to have a different rhyme.  I think The Girl came up with (by herself!) "At home my mother waits for me".

And then we had a long, drawn-out process where I tried to get the girl to come up with a rhyme for "-eep" -- which also made sense with the rest of the verse.  "Peep"?  "Cheap?"  "Leap?"

Lots of choices, most of them would work.  But we ended up choosing "weep", since it's an emotional reaction and it made sense in relation to someone waiting anxiously for you.  More prodding to get The Girl to craft it into a line.  I think The Girl got to "And when I get home she weeps" -- which breaks the rhythm.  So after additional nudging, we added "will", just to use up an extra syllable:  "And when I get home she will weep".

Decent enough.  :)


--GG

(10/27/13 - UPDATE --  I e-mailed a few family and friends, with a "challenge" of cranking out some rhymes.   Everybody did well:  it seems that the ability to crank out poetry is not as rare as I thought.  Fair enough.

But I'm still keeping the blog entry.)  :)

Perhaps my favorite poem

Ahh -- the wonders of the internet.

A random thought, a poem that I remember liking from some high school literature textbook. Somewhere in my pile of notes and papers, I've written it down. Darned if I know where.

But! I remembered the snippets "Degas dancer... hang his pants on while he slept"; Googled it; and: magic!

"Museum Piece", by Richard Wilbur. I have a bias towards poetry that actually rhymes (it's harder to write something insightful and clever **and** rhyme than to simply be insightful and clever).


--GG