Let’s throw grammar rules to the snow and have some fun! Fun isn’t a tone that Monday’s poetry posts are known for, but hey, “girls just wanna have fun!” Ha!.
This gay mood started when the Jolly Chairman, Wannaskan Almanac’s favorite contrarian, sent your truly a poem – “o sweet spontaneous” by e e cummings. This burbled up my many years as a high school English teacher – semesters that included mr cummings work in the curricula. mr cummings is known for ignoring capitalization and punctuation, and for unorthodox line breaks, and for radical spacing constructions. Students were mightily attracted to cummings, perhaps because they, too, were bursting out of traditional structures, challenging rules, and fledging straight toward the earth, before winging themselves into the sky.
O’ SWEET ‘SPOT
O’ sweet O‘Spot
how oft’ has the confusion of cornfield stubble
received thy
quanked and doted
piles and puddles
where buj buj bugs will swarm
anon with mithered drops
fingerlings
pinched and O’Spot up top
prurient smile
poised upon thy snout
like a basthornish child
in a pout
no mincing canid
no squeamish cur
no prancing prince
rather
such is our O’Spot
this scamous palamor
a deep north rabbit rambler
runs with foxes
makes chipmunks scramble
Leaves steaming remnants o sweet O’Spot
whiffling through the geytool wood
slanting aside the frozen fields
of nuns
O’Spot conceived and birthed from burning belly
squeezed
buffeted
out slithy loins
o suck’er back
o’bickers black
the gods of netherlands
permit the burbling out
with sound of bells without their clappers
O shun the smells of day-old rabbit
that wind-relieving rabbit
preceded by incomparable toots
of faux perfume
that knocks us shocked-breathed things
to
the couch of gloom
o’sweet O’Spot
of bitey teeth
and catch-ye claws
rest a while ‘neath
the dum dum tree
doo heap-fall
to thy scraggy knees
slide all mimsied
into your
sweet spotted dreams
of fire-eyed rats
and wild-born furry cats
Background
I’ve always loved words and dogs – playing with their endless combinations and expressions. Now that I’m all grown up, I don’t do enough of this. I don’t know to what I might attribute this unfortunate change. Might be the old-country education system with its attendant emphasis on religion and grammar. Was it possibly all that sentence diagramming (some of you don’t even know what that is, right?) with all its straight and angled lines and its predicates and subjects boldly taking center stage? Maybe it was the obligatory confessions (due to inability to discover the “right” answers) of errant dangling participles and errors in the use of commas and semi-colons.
In any case, I have to admit, I’ve “stayed between the lines” in most of my poetry. (I think) Today, at last, inspired by e e cummings and the mystery poet, not to mention The Chairman, I’ve thrown brackets and parentheses, and I’ve spangled the page with words – beautiful words – standing naked before shocked readers. (Or maybe, just maybe, you, too, are a closet rulebreaker who only needs permission to burst out of those lifelong lines.
Go ahead break a few rules or all of them
all
I
dare
u
Exploration 1: How many similarities can you find between today’s poem and e e cummings poem, and the poem by the mystery poet? (This question is the most difficult question of 2020- for one, you have to look up cummings poem, and for an even harder challenge, you must find our mystery poet and his poem. Ooops! That cuts it down to male poets! Oh well, I’m feeling perky today.
Exploration 2: What do cummings’ poem and the mystery poet’s poem have in common? What’s different?
Exploration 3: If you were O’Spot, what would you love for supper tonight?
ReplyDeleteThis is a parody of cummings poem, written by a clever poet, a local I think
He loves Mother Earth
Draws from the well where you drink
My dog’s supper would include a big shepherd’s pie and a bowl of hot chili with beans that go crunch. That’s what I’d like.