Saturday, March 03, 2007

Farewell, Marianne Moore, It's Time for a MARCH SURPRISE

I have been feeling a little spiritually flea-bitten lately, so I absconded with my valuable wit for a few days and feel much better now, though Marianne Moore is a billion times the worse for it. I never even had the chance to illustrate that line from "Four Quartz Crystal Clocks": There are four vibrators, the world's exactest clocks;/ and these quartz time-pieces that tell/ time intervals to other clocks,/ these worksless clocks work well. What a wasted opportunity! Oh well, my health must come first. Every once in a while I start working so hard that I forget to look in mirrors and start believing that I look like an interesting monster, with craggy teeth and bristling hair and popeyes, and it is always a shock to go look in the mirror and see that I don't look like an interesting monster at all, just very clean and focused and maybe a little cow-like as far as expression goes. Luckily this doesn't happen every day. I also did a great deal of thinking about who to celebrate next here at Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes, and the more I thought about it the more it became clear that it is time to rebirth this party as a fatter, many-chinned, more expansive baby. That's right: from now on, I will be celebrating a different poet every time I post, because I am so variable like that. Won't this get confusing? you ask. Maybe, if you're an idiot. And of course, I am inviting you all, my ever-loyal conspirators, to submit artistic interpretations of any poem that takes your fancy. You may also draw my attention to poems that would make particularly good cartoons. Published poems are probably best--don't look at me like that, hear me out for a minute, I'm not working for The Man--since it would be easy to spend all of our time making fun of people on LiveJournal, but I do not play that way. Those young men and women are the future.

I might even celebrate one of your poems, if the spirit so moves me. Of course, I will email you first to ask your permission, since some people might not like to have their poems so raunchily and childishly dissected by my nasty knives.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pleeeez do Eliot’s
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
only it must have all the scattered bones shining and singing too.

Or, Charcoal Man and Ice-Cream Ladywhich is mine and not nearly so interesting, but both are itching at me and would benefit from anything, whatever, especially being forced to be seen.

Fingers crossed, Nic

Patricia Lockwood said...

Both of those are going straight into the file! Though I do have my doubts about whether my own skills are honed enough to properly tackle leopards and charcoal people. The Paint program is a fickle mistress.

Richard Epstein said...

What are a few leopards? I'm waiting to see illustrated this passage from Bk IV of PL:

Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw
Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,
Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis

Patricia Lockwood said...

That would be a good one; this party needs more pards. Duly filed. Peripherally, I will shamefacedly admit it took me a good thirty seconds to connect PL to Paradise Lost because I am as meagerly educated as a non-performing horse.

James said...

Marianne Moore is one of the great contemporary poets of her time. Many contemporary poets have been influenced by at least one of the master poets (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams).