All it takes is a letter...

Emily Dickenson left the world with lots of poems in her desk. A modern Emily Dickenson would leave the world with lots of poems in her disk.

Forgot something....?

This, from a French "Best Photos of the Year" sent to me by a friend...

meta-free-phor-all!

QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY MAGAZINE

Send only your BEST work.

It is strongly suggested that you read several issues before submitting. We do not publish religious poetry, erotic poetry, sound poetry, concrete poetry, or poetry with words or phrases already under copyright. Poems, in other words, must be entirely original. We rarely publish poetry that rhymes, unless it is very good.

Every few issues, we run a theme issue. To learn what the upcoming theme will be, please purchase the previous issue of our magazine.

Because of our fixed format, poems must not be more than 32 lines long or 27 characters wide, single-spaced only, in Times New Roman font.

We do NOT accept simultaneous submissions. Please copy the following text into the covering letter with your poems:

I certify that I am the author of these unpublished poems, that they are not under consideration by another journal, and that should one or more pieces be selected for publication, I will grant QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY MAGAZINE the right of first publication. In the event that they are reprinted in *any* form (print, web, electronic media), I will cite QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY MAGAZINE as the place of first publication.

If it is discovered that you have ever simultaneously submitted poems while under our consideration, you will be placed on a black list to be automatically circulated to all other magazines on our data base.

Out of 5 million poetry submissions last year, we published seven. Two of these were unsolicited ms.

We are currently seeking volunteer readers. We have a considerable backlog, so we may take up to 24 months to respond.

If you should happen to pass away while your work is under our consideration, please notify us through your next of kin. Posthumous submissions will not be considered more than six months after the poet's death.

Please include SASE.

Should your poem appear in our magazine, it will be considered for our annual QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY PRIZE. Winners will be declared QUINTESSENTIAL POETS, win a cash award of $1,000 US, and a life-time subscription to our magazine. They will also receive immediate solicitation from Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Blackbird...

Riddled

Major cleanup today. We got rid of an extra bed, moved furniture around. (That one piece gone, how much easier the living space to piece together!) As I was cleaning, I made these up. Pls. excuse my sense of humour:

What did the broom say to the vacuum cleaner?
You suck.
What did the vacuum cleaner say to the broom?
You make sweeping statements.

FOR SOME HALLOWEEN FUN, TRY THIS LINK...

Good for several chuckles...

Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt, wrote this for New York Times back in April 06, and read from it at Harbourfront on Saturday.

Proposal for an Alternative Use of the Empire State Building, on the Occasion of Its 75th Anniversary

Personally, I think it's great that they store all the fiction writers in there. Sure, the vistas feed the imagination on good days and suicidal ideation on bad days, but what appeals most is the community. We work so much in isolation after all.

Everybody is so plain-spoken and honest on the realist floor, it's very refreshing, although when you finish a conversation you're not sure if they were really saying anything. Still, that's much more pleasant than chatting with the allegorists, who start nattering on about sentient cows and the inevitable recursiveness of human experience when you ask a simple question like "Do you know what time it is?" or "Do these pants make my ass look big?"

People complain about getting lost on the experimental floor, but I think it's pretty easy to navigate - the walls have signs that say "This is a wall," the floor has a sign that says "This is a floor," and in case you miss the signs the first time, they are repeated over and over again.

Critic-novelists stay close to ground level, so they can argue with themselves over whether to take the stairs or the elevator -- whatever they choose each day, they insist that everyone should do it that way. Hang out with the domestic fiction guys for longer than a quick drink and you'll discover they're quite paranoid, constantly accusing each other of stealing their "unique" material, but they throw great cocktail parties if you go in for that sad undercurrent thing. I know I do. John Grisham and Stephen King types have their own floors, although it's a mystery what goes on there - when their names come up, people say "If not for them..." and then trail off into an eerie silence, the kind of disturbing quiet you hear when you pass the sophomore slump floors. (Keep typing, guys!).

Floors 35-86 are the midlist stomping grounds, full of plenty of likable folks, even if they always manage to steer the conversation around to how "it's all about the work." You might want to take the express elevators. It's a long ride up to the breakout book floor, but people say it's worth the wait.

Sometimes you have to shoo away a memoirist from your desk. They wander in from time to time.

A loud alarm goes off every couple of hours or so to warn you when someone starts a new literary journal. The mad stampede you hear immediately afterwards is people looking for stamps. Building maintenance is performed by those who indicate in their author bios that they have held "real life" jobs before "settling on this writing thing." ("...worked as a longshoreman, quarryman, bouncer, boxer's cut-man, haberdasher...") After an epidemic of "snark cough" told us that delicate lungs were being irritated by airborne particles, we recruited some former construction workers from the post-9/11 anti-ironists and neo-sincerists, and they quickly removed all the snark from the ceiling insulation, well under estimate. When the furnace broke down we burned a hybrid fuel made out of MFA students and novels of linked stories. This was an abundant energy source and kept us warm until spring.

All the poets are in Madison Square Garden -- where else would they all fit? -- but we keep a few around to work the lunch room. They say the fry cook takes a mean author photo. ("Now put your hand to your face and show us how painful the words are.") Attendance used to be required at lunch, until thedubious subgenre of "cafeteria novels" surfaced, was denounced in a series of reactionary essays in the New Republic (Who can forget "Tut-tut to the Hysterical Cafeteria Novel"?), and now people just eat whenever they feel like it.

Then they go back to work.

My humanity's in question

Got this hilarious message, replete with implications metaphysical and physical, in my Spam box:

The message you sent requires that you verify that you
are a real live human being and not a spam source.

To complete this verification, simply reply to this message and leave
the subject line intact

I guess spam sources are not real live human beings.

If you need a spam filter, by the way, Spam Bully does a great job of presorting your emails into folders entitled Inbox, Spam, Not Sure. (The vast majority of so-called spam I get, by the way, is stuff bounced back from filters because someone is using my website domain name as a bogus source .... making up addresses like xyzk@briancampbell.org to send out their junk )

------

"The Poets of Poetry"

THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY

This was my site meter the other day.

Unknown Country -- WHERE ARE YOU? I feel like I'm being deluged -- paratrooped? -- by SPACE INVADERS. Has someone at Guantanamo Bay taken a liking for me? Which of Bush's not-so-secret European prisons is this one? If I open up my atlas, will I suddenly see this little pimple -- or great expanse -- called UNKNOWN C.?

I imagine this Unknown Scene from a Shakespear play (typo, but he did spell his name that way, sometimes, I'll leave it) -- say Macbeth:

Dunsinane. A room in the castle.

Enter MACBETH, Doctor, and Attendants

MACBETH

Bring me no more reports; let them fly all:
Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane,
I cannot taint with fear...

Enter a Servant

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!
Where got'st thou that goose look?

Servant

There is ten thousand--

MACBETH

Geese, villain!

Servant

Soldiers, sir.

MACBETH

Go prick thy face, and over-red thy fear,
Thou lily-liver'd boy. What soldiers, patch?
Death of thy soul! What soldiers, whey-face?

Servant From the Unknown Country, so please you.

As I've said before, that's be gotta my favourite place -- the country I'm from.

Land of muses?

Land of spooks?

Or ... some odd place whose every inhabitant is shaped like a question mark?...???

Today is a rarisima day on the calendar, a con-figuration which will only occur (concur) once: the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year, the biblical number of -- you guessed it -- THE BEAST.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is apparently the word for a fear of that number. Great word, eh? The challenge for you poets out there: to make it an endrhyme in a heroic (anti-heroic?) couplet. Or better, make it part of a haiku.

The age-old folk tale goes that if you mispronounce the word even once, you will be cursed through all eternity. (A folk tale I just made up -- ay, what a beastie I! -- he said, swishing his tale...)

According to the link above:

Prominent hexakosioihexekontahexaphobes include the late Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. In 1989, when they moved to the former president's final home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, they had the address of 666 St. Cloud Road changed to 668. The late Johnny Carson was not hexakosioihexekontahexaphobic, because this had earlier been his home.

Ah ha! No wonder he hosted a late night show...

I'm not sure what hexakosioihexekontahexaphobes are supposed to do today. Nothing? Is that a good thing to do? (I think of the proverbial deer, frozen in the headlights...)

Some Anagrams

Frankly, I am not as enthused about anagrams as one might expect of a self-proclaimed (when did I do that? just now) wordsmith. Spelling is a picky thing, and our so-called Roman alphabet is woefully inadequate at reflecting the sounds of the English language, so if you can wiggle the letters around to spell something else -- well, woopty-do for you, but I'd rather not bother my head. (Ibid, chez moi, for crosswords, by the way.) However, in checking on the use of anagrams in the Da Vinci Code, I came across this site with some good ones. Favourites include:

Evangelist = Evil's Agent
Madam Curie = Radium came
The Meaning of Life = The fine game of nil
Slot Machines = Cash Lost in'em
Conversation = Voices Rant On
Funeral = Real Fun
Mother-in-law = Woman Hitler
Snooze Alarms = Alas! No More Z's
Software = Swear Oft
A Gentleman = Elegant Man
Barbie doll = Babe I'd roll
Salman Rushdie = Read, Shun Islam
Mr. Mojo risin' = Jim Morrison
(from the Doors song, "L.A. Woman"-- didn't know that one was an anagram)
Vladimir Nabokov = Vivian Darkbloom
(Vivian Darkbloom is a character in Nabokov's Lolita)
Ronald Reagan = A darn long era
George Herbert Walker Bush = Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog

An afterthought...

Maybe in the sequel, authentic documents will be revealed that will prove that ... Jesus was GAY! That the 12 disciples were his harem, that Mary Magdalen was a TRANSVESTITE! That the Virgin Mary was actually a LESBIAN! That an ancient secret society of gay artists and intellectuals, including Da Vinci, have been communicating this through symbols and allegories depicting the sacred homophilic. What would this be called? The Gay Vinci Code, of course...

Some Google Searches That Reached This Blog

lewd santa
leave my private parts alone
invisible peephole
narrative scuptures
woodwork writers
woodwork rubrics
patterns cow woodwork
woodwork reindeer
the great semelier
bushwhacked Canada
men undressing each other
mainline Philadelphia garage sales
apology for stealing someone’s secret
Campbell's bit and spur
largest organism on earth (I've gotten dozens of these, by the way, due to this)
largest orgasm on earth (rather less common)

and most eerie of all:

Brian Campbell found dead

FRIGHTFULLY ENGLISH! PART II

(For Part 1, click here)

A curiously pronounced fear and awkwardness of touching and kissing. The legacy of curtained tablelegs. (I have never seen a curtained table leg, but I have seen the legacy, indeed, lived it.) The famous lack of style or flair in the sexual and sensual – all stemming from the Great Victorian Inhibition. Contrast with France – wine, perfumes, provocative style, la fine cuisine. Indeed, in French culture almost everything is mediated through the senses. In the English, almost nothing is. (For some readers, this huge generalization may seem absolutely baseless: for me in Montreal, the contrast is experienced every day…)

The word, “indeed”.

The word “rather” (used as adverb).

The terribly frequent use of tag questions like, “isn’t it? Don’t you think?” “Shall we?” and all the peculiar nicety, inner doubt and hesitation that conveys. (Here in Canada, by the way, we replace most of those with, “eh?”)

The adverb “terribly”.

A certain harmless eccentricity one can only describe as “dottiness”.

Little poetry readings with a dais and a mike stand where you are supposed to stay behind that dais. (Big poetry readings with the same setup are also Frightful! -- if rather less dotty.)

Describing new poets as “budding poets”.

Inviting writers to a networking shmoozathon with “Be sure to wear your poodle skirts and spats!” (This actually came out of our own QWF… Poodle skirts, I’m quite sure, are deep American, but, nevertheless, without that Frightfully English! legacy…)

Of course, those within the culture who revolt against the Great Inhibition show they have also absorbed it to the core. If D.H. Lawrence’s romanticisation of sexuality reached an almost grotesque extreme, his Frightful English!ness that gave him that edge. It can’t just be natural. They aren’t relaxed about it. The Great Repression lead to the hilarious neuroticism of Monty Python -- also to the viciousness of Sid Vicious. We have the whole culture of “dirty” jokes, betraying what still remains an underlying reserve of hysteria about sex that simply doesn’t exist in, say, French culture. American raunchiness has roots not only in its Puritan past, but in the Frightfully English!

Frightfully English! authors include Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Arthur Conan Doyle. Auden and Spender and Wilde are Frightfully English! despite themselves. Although Hardy or Dickens offer up plenty of Frightfully English! in their texts, I don't believe they are Frightfully English! to the core. (Let me think again about that...) Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe are not Frightfully English! They predated The Great Inhibition.

***************
There is a certain undeniable sense of fairplay in this Commonwealth. A decency. Hypocrisy requires the presence of moral standard: that Mahatma Ghandi could not deny – after all, he parlayed it into India’s independence.

Weak (with a handful of notable exceptions) in visual arts, but great in drama: I teach ESL, and the most marvelous communicative teaching materials still come from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Many are conceived with the same sense of fun as quintessentially British shows like “My Word!” (Hey, what is the origin of these shows, as well as much of the contemporary method of second language teaching? Parlour games of the English aristocracy!) Fussy fun, but fun. Although frequently, for North American use, I have to edit my text materials for sentences like, “They had quite a row, and were throwing crockery about!”

Here in English Canada, although watered down by a North American accent, we still have, deep in our core, the Frightfully English! … in spades. Upper Canada (Now Southern Ontario) welcomed the United Empire Loyalists – indeed, could have been called the United Loyalist State of America. Until relatively recently – the living memory of certain older folks – the Daughters of the British Empire were a force (The likes of Richler and Layton had things to say about that). Liquor in Ontario can only still be bought at the LCBO. We had our Lord Thompson of Fleet. We have our Lord Conrad Black (although now they have him, and they can keep him). When I listen to or watch CBC, I often wonder, is this my culture? The Royal Canadian Airfarce – in my pre-cable three channel days, that one frequently made me want to throw my shoe at the television. (I remember a phone-in show on CBC Radio that lasted over an hour on reminiscences of drinking tea.) Speaking closer to home, Westmount (Montreal's oldest and wealthiest English enclave) is itself a highly characteristic expression of Frightfully English! As well as, of course, North Hatley. Just go to summer theatre at the Piggery, or Lac Brome.

Of course Frightfully English! is worldwide, vast as The Empire. New England has it as much as us. We need only think of poor Emily Dickenson.

As for myself, my ancestry is truly mongrel: Scottish/Irish as well as certain mongrelian tribes of Central Europe. But I'm hopelessly -- Ontario -- English.

My French Canadian girlfriend continually reminds me of it.

This of course keeps me humble.

All of which is of course jolly good… wouldn’t you say? (Eh?)

FRIGHTFULLY ENGLISH!

Looking over a post I wrote a few days back, this sentence gave me pause:

Like many things printed-word literary in Anglo-Montreal, this one manages to be frightfully English! and not particularly renegade.

Now, what did I mean by “Frightfully English!”? (The exclamation point is essential.) Well, when I wrote that, I wasn’t thinking of The Sex Pistols nor Cat Stevens nor the Beatles nor the British Blues Invasion nor pub or soccer brawls nor BBC World News nor (to go into literature) Ted Hughes at his darkest nor Percy Shelley (nor Mary nor Mary Wolstoncraft) nor William Blake nor D.H. Lawrence… nor Shakespeare … although there are elements Frightfully English! about all these… even, in incipient quantities, in Shakespeare…

I was thinking of these particular, all too familiar tags and trappings that taken together create a powerful gestalt one can only call “Frightfully English!” Call this, if you will, a cluster of clichés and stereotypes, passé, more than depassé. But it is a gestalt still powerful, even today.

I am thinking of blue-haired ladies in pearl earrings and necklaces and flowered dresses, whose limited but exuberant language of emotion consists of “Oh, how lovely!”, “Oh, how awful!”, “Just charming!” “Oh dear, I do say, I quite like that!” Or any of the above, taken singly.

I am thinking of Wedgwood tea services and fine bone china and dainty little pastries and everything associated with, “Do come to tea!”

I am thinking of word “chesterfield”—the town, the piece of furniture. Also Manchester, and anything containing Chester, including of course the name Chester.

The hideous flowered wallpaper & brik-a-brack interiors of “Coronation Street.” “Coronation Street” itself, all that pale workingclass mimicry of that Frightfully English! aristocracy.

Tarts – all kinds. Including the “cheap little tart” you can pick up at the pub.

Ye Olde Pub. (That’s the chiefly boozy version of Frightfully British, enough Scottish, Irish and Welsh that it makes for a questionable inclusion … but read on…) All that lousy Industrial Revolution fare – fish and chips, pub food. The North American version is of course the hamburger and the hotdog. Hard to call these a cuisine. See notes (to come) on sensuality & the lack of it.

I am thinking of the Frightfully Stuffy, English! aristocracy, a guilded cage whose birds still flutter in such tight, pre-defined little circles. (Here in North America the circles we fly in have not been so confining or pre-defined – but we are definitely flying in circles, even if we haven’t quite defined them yet.)

The fox hunt, recently banned under the pressures of the equally Frightfully English! animal rights movement.

Dried flowers in a Wedgewood vase.

Rock gardens with lawn dwarfs and waterwheels.

The word persnickety. The word concoction. Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickle Peppers. All the fussiness and finicky drabness contained or implied in this list.

More, as I said, to come...

LISA MEETS EDVARD

"ASSONANCE" IN EDUCATING RITA

In the 1983 film Educating Rita, Rita (Julie Walters) asks Professor Frank Bryant (Michael Caine) the meaning of assonance. Here's an excerpt from the script, which believe it or not, I was able to find on the net:

R: What does assonance mean?
P: What?
R: Don't laugh at me.
P: Er, no. Erm, assonance, it's a form of rhyme.
R: Erm, what's an example?
P: Do you know Yeats?
R: The wine lodge?
P: No, WB Yeats, the poet.
R: No.
P: Well, in his poem The Wild Swans At Coole, Yeats
rhymes the word "swan" with the word "stone". You
see? That's an example of assonance.
R: Ooh, yeah, means getting the rhyme wrong.
P: I've never thought of it like that.

OK, you students of verse, what's wrong with this dialogue?

Well, what the professor is actually describing is consonance, which according to my Holman's
Handbook, is the use of words in which the final consonants of stressed syllables agree but the
vowels that precede them differ, as in "add-read,", "bill-ball," and yes, "swan-stone."

Assonance is the resemblance or similiarity in sound between vowels followed by different consonants, as in "lake-fate," "dike-knight", and "trodden-cobbles."

Personally, I prefer my own definition of assonance: the sound assholes make when they're
describing slant rhyme.

It was a delightful movie, by the way, charming and witty and profound by turns (I rented it last night). Michael Caine and Julie Walters were perfect for their parts. Highly recommend this one, as (yes, it has become) an old-time treat.

The Elements of Spam

Charles directed me to this hilarious link which draws upon the legacy of Strunk and White. Weird but true, the examples of use/misuse here make a far more vivid impact than those of S&W themselves. (Who remembers the innocuous examples of S&W?)