Like an old lovely pear, poem by Mathias Jansson (Homonyms and Homophones Poetry Series)

Like an old lovely pear
by Mathias Jansson

Homophones are not homophobes
They are words that like each either
They have a common sound sole
Sorry I meant of course sound soul
They are like an old lovely pear
Or perhaps it should be spelled pair?
Like when you complain about your girl’s watch
That has a loud annoying tic
And she slaps you in the face
Because she thought you said thick
Or when you order mousse for dessert
And they bring you a piece of moose instead
Life is never easy with words sounding the same
And have a different meaning of what you say
When people hear your explanation
I had a blew moved because of the morning
And you really tried to say
I had a blue mood because of the mourning
You can only reply with a sine
People only here what they want to reed

IMAGE: “Two Yellow Pears on Folded Linen” by Carol Leigh. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mathias Jansson is a Swedish art critic and poet. He has contributed with visual poetry to magazines such as Lex-ICON, Anatematiskpress, Quarter After #4, and Maintenant 8: A Journal of Contemporary Dada. He has also published a chapbook at this is visual poetry and contributed with erasure poetry to anthologies from Silver Birch Press. Visit him at mathiasjansson72.blogspot.se, or his author’s page at Amazon.com.

Hymns and Hems, poem by Suzanne O’Connell (Homonyms and Homophones Poetry Series)

HYMNS AND HEMS
by Suzanne O’Connell

I thought hymns
and hems
were the same.
I pictured God
bent underneath
the table lamp,
holding his needle
and thread,
stitching up
those beautiful chords,
the ones
that shook the walls
of the church
every Sunday.
I pictured God
stitching his perfect
overcast stitches,
to hem the trees
and rivers
and mountains
of the world,
so they wouldn’t trip.

SOURCE: Originally published in The Willow Review.

IMAGE: “Stone City, Iowa” by Grant Wood (1930).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Suzanne O’Connell lives in Los Angeles where she is a poet and a clinical social worker. Her work can be found in Forge, Atlanta Review, Blue Lake Review, G.W. Review, Reed Magazine, Permafrost, Mas Tequila Review, The Round, The Griffin, Sanskrit, Foliate Oak, Talking River, Organs of Vision and Speech Literary Magazine, Willow Review, The Tower Journal, Thin Air Magazine, Fre&d, The Manhattanville Review, poeticdiversity, The Evansville Review, Serving House Journal, Silver Birch Press, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Licking River Review. She was a recipient of Willow Review’s annual award for 2014 for the poem “Purple Summers.” She is a member of Jack Grapes’ L.A. Poets and Writers Collective.

Taxi in the Rain, poem by Ricki Mandeville (Homonyms and Homophones Poetry Series)

TAXI IN THE RAIN
by Ricki Mandeville

The city’s drenched, slow roll of wet wheels,
wiper-click metering the downpour.
Cabbie pulls over near the theater
to pick up a fare, careful not to splash
her legs—long dancer’s legs, likely just
a small role, though she’ll make a splash some day,
blonde as sun, big Broadway eyes, and those legs.
It’s not fair, he thinks, easing his yellow
bucket of dents to a stop, watching her
slide inside like a ballerina,
making scarcely a dent in the flat nap
of the backseat. She tells him the address.
He eyes her in the rearview. She doesn’t notice.
Poor hack. It rains harder. Fogged glass. Those legs.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Unless I count the fragments of poetry I write in my head, I don’t follow the common advice to “write every day.” But my muse, when she knocks, pounds hard, and I must answer. This poem came knocking in response to a suggestion by the poet Tobi Cogswell that I try writing a poem incorporating homonyms and homophones, per the Silver Birch submission call. This poem contains 6 pairs. I left my holiday breakfast untouched to write it. It seemed the right thing to do.

IMAGE: “Dancing in the Rain II” by Kathryn Trotter. Reproductions available at fineartmarketplace.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ricki Mandeville’s poems have appeared or will soon appear in Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, Pea River Journal, Texas Poetry Calendar 2014 & 15, Penumbra and other journals and anthologies. She is a cofounder and consulting editor of Moon Tide Press and the author of A Thin Strand of Lights (Moon Tide Press). A speaker for various literary events, she lives near the ocean in Huntington Beach, California.

Sleeping with the Dictionary, poem by Harryette Mullen

SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY

by Harryette Mullen

I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.

SOURCE: “Sleeping with the Dictionary” appears in Harryette Mullen‘s collection Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Flaming June Dictionary Antique Art print by Reimaginationprints, available at etsy.com. (The print is composed of an antique dictionary page and “Flaming June,” a painting by Sir Frederic Leighton (1895).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Harryette Mullen is a poet and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and African-American literature. Mullen was born in Alabama, but spent most of her childhood in Texas. After receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, she attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation on slave narratives. Mullen’s poetry collections include Tree Tall Woman, Blues Baby: Early Poems. Trimmings, Muse and Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was nominated for a National Book Award.

Z, essay by Tom Robbins

Z  (Excerpt), An Essay

by Tom Robbins

…It’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup.

 Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type of pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill. This is partially due to Z’s relative rarity: my dictionary devotes 99 pages to A words, 138 pages to P, but only 5 pages to words beginning with Z.

 Then there’s Z’s exoticness, for, though it’s a component of the English language, it gives the impression of having zipped out of Africa or the ancient Near East of Nebuchadnezzzar…Take a letter? You bet. I’ll take Z. My favorite country, at least on paper, is Zanzibar; my favorite body of water, the Zuider Zee. ZZ Top is my favorite band…Had Zsa Zsa Gabor married Frank Zappa, she would have had the coolest name in the world…

Photo: Tom Magliery, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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The above essay taken from Tom Robbins‘ essay, “Write About One of Your Favorite Things” (Esquire, 1996) and collected in Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins (Bantam, 2005)

The right words, quote by Jack Kerouac with painting by Edward Ruscha

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

 JACK KEROUAC, The Dharma Bums

Painting: “There and Here, State I” by Edward Ruscha (2007)

All those words, quote by C.S. Lewis, painting by Edward Ruscha

“Don’t say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, ‘Please will you do the job for me.’”  C.S. LEWIS

Painting: “Etc. #207“ by Edward Ruscha, 1991.

Dolphin quotes by Sagan, Aristotle, and Adams

“It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English — up to 50 words used in correct context — no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.” CARL SAGAN, author of Cosmos

“The voice of the dolphin in air is like that of the human, in that they can pronounce vowels, and combinations of vowels.” ARISTOTLE, The History of Animals

“Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much…the wheel, New York, wars, and so on…while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man…for precisely the same reason.” DOUGLAS ADAMS, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Illustration: “Dolphin Dreams” by lillyarts. Prints available at zazzle.com.

The Power of Words, New Yorker cartoon by Drew Dernavich

CAPTION: “You’ll have to phrase it another way. They have no word for ‘fetch.'”

CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Drew Dernavich, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Z, Essay by Tom Robbins

Z  (Excerpt), An Essay

by Tom Robbins

…It’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup.

 Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type of pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill. This is partially due to Z’s relative rarity: my dictionary devotes 99 pages to A words, 138 pages to P, but only 5 pages to words beginning with Z.

 Then there’s Z’s exoticness, for, though it’s a component of the English language, it gives the impression of having zipped out of Africa or the ancient Near East of Nebuchadnezzzar…Take a letter? You bet. I’ll take Z. My favorite country, at least on paper, is Zanzibar; my favorite body of water, the Zuider Zee. ZZ Top is my favorite band…Had Zsa Zsa Gabor married Frank Zappa, she would have had the coolest name in the world…

Photo: Tom Magliery, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

###

The above essay taken from Tom Robbins‘ essay, “Write About One of Your Favorite Things” (Esquire, 1996) and collected in Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins (Bantam, 2005)