I Think That I Shall Never See . . .

National Poetry Month isn't just about creating new poetry. It's about lampooning appreciating the poets of the past, too.

The Legal Pad, a Sonnet

Today's sonnet stems from another suggestion from @CollinsMandy.

A Legal Pad
A legal pad, the writer's greatest friend,
With each blue line a possibility
When blank, and then the writer starts to rend
His soul's attire, and shouts his misery

Unto the gods, the universe, and man,
In anger, pain, frustration, sadness, rage.
He might not have a preconceivéd plan
Yet cleaves his heart and bleeds upon the page.

He spills it all, in paper, blood, and ink.
The yellow pages fill in disarray.
And when he's spent, he'll stop. And read. And think.
And ferret out just what he wants to say.

He'll take his pen to yellow page and cull
And hone it into something beautiful.

Carl

[A short story. 1,646 words.]

It's dark. Why is it so . . . oh. My eyes are closed.

I open my eyes. A dirty ceiling fan spins slowly behind the faces of two wizened old men and a young woman who are bent over, staring at me.

"Are y'all okay?" the woman asks me.

"I don't know," I say. My voice sounds strange — distant. "What happened?"

"Ah don' know," she says. "You was carryin' mah lunch tuh mah table, and then yer aahs just went, way-ell, blank. Then yuh jis keeled over. You been out fer almost a whole minute!"

The Purple Turnip

They were buried for a reason, no? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another National Poetry Month suggestion from Mandy Collins about a subject that needed a poem written about it. The turnip.

The purple turnip's not a fruit.
It grows below; it is a root.

It's from the family crucipher,
This favorite food of Lucipher.

It can be cooked or just used raw,
Sauteed, grated, used in slaw.
You can bake it, boil it, beat it,
But, for Pete's sake, don't ever eat it!

Guest Post: James Harbeck Tastes Ascapartic

James Harbeck is the logophile behind the blog Sesquiotica, which, even more so that Logophilius, is devoted to words, words, words. James is a lexical sommelier who explores not only what a word means and where it comes from, but how a word feels when you say it — in short, how a word tastes.

Today, he's dipped into the linguistic smorgasbord that is Infinite Jest and has come up with a taste of ascapartic.

About Blogging

It's three-word Wednesday time. This week's words are growl, hype, and justify.

I usually try to stay on the lighter side with these things, but this poem is what grew out of today's words. It's about this blog, and it's honest.

Floorboards, A Poem

Because it's National Poetry Month, I thought I should write some poems. But not just any poems — I wanted to write something that fulfilled a need.

So I turned to Twitter and Facebook and asked for subjects that were underrepresented in poetry, promising to see what I could do.

I got some interesting responses. Mandy Collins (@CollinsMandy) suggested, among other things, floorboards. So here goes:

National Poetry Month 2012

It's National Poetry Month!
So write poems at breakfast and lunth!
They don't cost a dime
And they don't have to rhyme,
But they can if that's just what you wanth.

April is National Poetry Month, which means I'll be turning up the dials on rhyme, rhythm, and meter in the coming weeks.

The Absurdity dial, as always, is cranked up to 11. Happy wordsmithing!

Today's word: ort

What a short word ort is, like a fragment of a word left behind after some snorting, logophagic ogre has sloppily eaten all the other letters. It sounds like a line from a Swedish Chef script as he makes a sport of destorying the kitchen.

The Most Amazing David Foster Wallace Resource Since David Foster Wallace

And no, I’m not talking about this blog. (What do you take me for?)

It’s no secret that the vocabulary David Foster Wallace used in Infinite Jest is at a level few authors, and perhaps fewer readers, would ever hope (or want) to achieve. I don’t care who you are — and this includes well-weathered lexicographers — you’ll find words you’ve never seen before in Infinite Jest.

Which is how we ended up with a theme for many of this month’s posts.

In the annals of cliché history, the phrase “wouldn’t it be great if someone” has preceded thousands of great ideas that, for one reason or another, were abandoned and either lost to time or picked up for profit by someone else. (e.g., “Wouldn’t it be great if someone put sleeves in this blanket?”) And certainly someone — probably multiple someones — got about a quarter of the way through the literary jungle that is Infinite Jest and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if someone collected all of David Foster Wallace’s unusual and off-kilter words in one place and defined them?”

Many have thought that, I’m sure. And someone actually did it!

While I was researching online for the upcoming IJ posts, I stumbled upon the David Foster Wallace Wiki, a crowdsourced compendium that offers spoiler-free, page-by-page definitions of some of the more or less esoteric vocabulary found in IJ.

Twelfth-century facepalm. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So in short, you can find all the definitions to all the IJ words at this wiki any time you want instead of spending your time here at Logophilius.

But then you’d miss my clever word play, unexpected connections, and overall sparkling personality.

And my humility.

Tomorrow, then, we begin with the shortest word on my Infinite Jest vocabulary list.