Rhymes with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Day 14 of the Obama Presidency, and my government-issued unicorn still hasn't arrived.

I know, he has a lot to do, what with restoring the Constitution and achieving world peace and enacting job stimulus and all.  

But think about this for job stimulus:  UniCorps, a sort of domestic peace corps, employed to clean the poop from all our brand-new unicorns out of the streets.  

Really brings new meaning to the phrase make work project.  And since unicorns poop gold nuggets, the economy will go from in the dumps to propelled by dumps in no time at all.

So what has been slipping through my mail slot, if not gold-pooping, government-issued unicorns?  

Poems!  Yes, I have signed up for a Poetry Pyramid Scheme.   Or, as those of you who were paying a little too much attention during 11th grade English class might think of it, iambway.

But it's not all just sitting around waiting for the mailwoman (speaking of job stimulus, there's a title which sounds very trans-trans; at least it's less apocalyptic than calling the carrier a post-person).  If you want to be part of Ponzi poetry, you have to pen the poems too.

Which I have thus far done in several manic moments.  I'll spare you the first result, a rant against cancer and the ironic timing with which it killed off my friend Gloria, who was a professor of Africana history, the day before a certain unicornilicious president took office.

It's not a bad poem, but this is after all a humor blog. So here's some of the more light-hearted verse I've dashed off.

Genetic Indisposition

In my family

having kids

is like a disease

that skips generations

Well, I thought that was funny.  Of course, in my family, killing off the relatives can also be funny.

And speaking of dark humor, here's another ditty:

The Patient Rooms

When I ride my bike

past the Alzheimer

care facility,

I wonder

about the mementos

lining the windows

of the patient rooms.

I sense I'm not the only one.

My squeeze the Cheez said those were both kind of depressing.  But the Canadians have no sense of humor.  Or, as they would put it, that's humour, and it's not funny.

Of course, some people believe poetry should be more obscure, less narrative.  

For those of you who have been diligently reading this blog for a year, just hoping for an obscure, less narrative poem, today is your lucky day!

Philology Recapitulates Poetry

Professor

Donka Minkova,

world's leading

export on the

schwa.

That's an A-B-C-B-A rhyme scheme, if you pronounce the as thə (those of you too prosaic to enjoy the obscurity of poetry can read up on my obsession with Donka Minkova elsewhere).

But clearly my best postcard-poetry product so far was the truly inspired verse. 

Inspired by me thinking what the hell shall I wrote a poem about now, then looking out the window and writing about the first thing I saw.

Walloon at Walgreen's

Nobody loves the

24-hour

neon-lit drugstore

more than the

Belgian immigrant

next door.

Okay, so I admit, my efforts so far are more chapstick than chapbook.  But at least I am reading great poetry, if not writing it.

And not just reading it, I am teaching it.  In the perfect course:   fantastic topic (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the invention of an American poetic voice), motivated students, glamorous setting, and no grading.  

The very antipode of academia, to use a word I had to look up when I came across it in Song of Myself.  (If there really is an afterlife, I can only hope that somewhere my friend Gloria is teaching such a class herself; after years as a department chair, she earned it). 

Yes, it is nice to dwell in the highbrow world of literature.  Which for me means obsessing about the shopping mall and singing the Gilligan's Island theme song.  Both of which I managed to cover in the first class meeting.

By the second class meeting, which was last night, we had moved on to Dr. Seuss.

Portland does seem ripe for a Green Eggs and Ham parody

I am Sam.

Sam-I-am. 

 

I am in a 

political jam.

I did not do Beau here or there.

I did not do Beau anywhere.

Well, I guess I kissed him in the john,

But only in the john with clothes on.

I did not do Beau when a minor!

I did not do Beau dressed as a Shriner!

Okay, so maybe that isn't exactly Whitman's Calamus.  

I guess it's less poetic when there is an entire media frenzy documenting who you've soused with spray.

But the real reason my poetry is so wanting may be that I've never taken a poetry-writing class.  Which is hardly my fault.  When I was in graduate school, the department's poetry professor was also the department's most egregious sexual harasser (although academia being what it is, he had plenty of competition for the title).   

In addition to teaching poetry and sexually harassing every female under the age of his-own-age-minus-twenty-years (which on the campus of a large public university gives the aging professor an awful lot to do), his job duties included judging the annual poetry prize.  One year I considered making an anonymous entry, entitled Do All Great Poets Sleep With Their Students?  

The original is, alas, lost to posterity, but I think I can whip up something that will give you the basic gist:

Do all great poets sleep with their students?

Is the genus of genius

such a drive undeniable?

O how the pen is 

a tool to be reckoned with!

And what is spilled 

upon pages, unto the ages?

When gripped by the muse,

what doth the poet grip and use?

It's no small feat to coerce

true genius in verse

When he goes about it

he needs sexual outlet.

Tis a measure of talent

to be so carnally spent.

So do all great poets sleep with their students?

Or only the mediocre ones?

I Laughed, I Cried, It Was Better than Katz

There is no picture of Donka Minkova on the internet.

I just looked, because I wanted to start my blog entry by mentioning Donka Minkova. Who, FYI, is the world's leading expert on the schwa.

Though devoid of images of Donka Minkova, the internet is loaded with pictures of schwas. This is, arguably, the oddest:





I am Cornholio! Give me phonetic symbols for my bunghole!









Back in the days when Beavis and Butthead ruled the MTV airways, I was a Ph.D. student at UCLA. The only required course in my entire program was Philology, taught by Donka Minkova.

Not about stamp collecting, that's philately. Philology is the history of the English language.

I loved that course. It was dripping with the sort of oddball facts you can milk for years of cocktail party chit chat. Not to mention the occasional blog entry.

And Donka Minkova loved me. I got an A+ in the course. Not quite as impressive as getting a ə+, but still pretty groovy.

Donka Minkova knew the subject was esoteric and that we all took the class because we had to, not because we wanted to. But she loved philology and wanted to make the course relevant. On the final exam, we had to give examples of how we would apply what we'd learned in real life.

Fortuitously, my friend Orit had come to visit me not long before the exam. Orit is Israeli, so Hebrew is her first language. Dutch is her second language (who the hell knows why, maybe she wanted to keep up on the latest news about Tori van Spelling). English is a somewhat distant third.

At the end of her stay, she hugged me good-bye and thanked me for my hostility. Very Israeli.

Luckily, as a pupil of philology, I knew that just about every word in English except sushi and tomahawk come from an ancient Indo-European root language. For no good reason, I happened to have learned from Donka Minkova that the words guest, host, hostility, and hospitality all derive from the Indo-European root word for stranger.

And what is stranger than a grad student hostess with the mostess quoting philological learnings to an Israeli guest?

I'll tell you what: an Egyptian police band (as in, dudes with trumpets and violins) who wander into a small Israeli town.

Which is the premise of The Band's Visit, the movie I saw tonight.
(See how crazy things get the moment we don't have Charlton Heston to set the Semites on our proper paths?)

One review suggested that The Band's Visit "may be too subtle and too reserved." I beg to differ. There is nothing subtle or reserved about Jews. And especially not about Israelis.

Suffice it to say, this is a film of pushy women, clueless men, and the greatest roller disco scene since Monster.

Take the stranger in a strange land plot, throw in a little linguistic confusion, add some hospitality mistaken for hostility. The result is both hilarious and poignant.

If Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat went out with Siskel and Eibert, this would be their perfect double date movie. Particularly if you could get nu a little tahini on the popcorn. One can only hope it wins a schwacademy award.