Joe B. on going inward

Apropos yesterday's insanely long self-reflecting pseudo-poem I was interested to read Joe Bageant's column today where he gives his personal solution to something I've been struggling with lately, namely, the individual's response to particular devastating events and progressively alarming situations nationally and globally vis-a-vis human rights, the current wars, the deteriorating economy, the maddening political climate and/or our eroding environment.  Whew.  All the distressing stuff all in one big overflowing basket.

Some people work very hard, to address and try to alleviate certain of these situations, in however small a capacity.  Others  register awareness, are concerned, may even be well informed, but continue life habits that contribute to the very problems causing the concerns.  For most, it's all just something one sees on the news, nothing that affects one personally, except perhaps the vague awareness that money (i.e., lack thereof) seems to be a big problem lately.  Life is still lived, pretty much as it's always been though, nothing's changed, really, in one's overall outlook. People, in general, though, do seem more worried.  At least that is the impression I get from all quarters.

Writer Joe Bageant left the U.S. and moved to Mexico where he pens dispatches about America's class war, among other things.  He touched on a dilemma I myself have been wondering about, i.e., what can one individual do about the stuff that's happening lately?  These are not happy times.  They're becoming increasingly uncomfortable times.  You hear phrases like "another Great Depression coming" and "World War III" and  "Armageddon".  (Not that everyone believes these will really occur, but it's in the air, so to speak.)

Anyway, a few try to steer civilization in a more evolved direction by tackling one issue at a time, and are failing.  "Why do we lose the important fights so consistently?" Joe asks.  "What has kept us from establishing a more just kingdom?"  Something is missing, he says, and he thinks it is, in a word, "the spiritual":

... the stuff that sustained Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and gave them the kind of calm deliberate guts we are not seeing today. I am not talking about religion, but the spirit in each of us, that solitary non-material essence, none the less shared by all humans because we are human.

Of course this is where a fourth of the people stop reading.  It's those words  "kingdom" and "spiritual." 

While those elite forces can own everything around us, and have proven they can make life quite miserable if they care to, they cannot own that thing inside us. The one that gives out the last sigh before sleep, and travels the realms of the great human collective consciousness alone. This is the consciousness that ebbs and flows between all external events. There is nothing mystical about it. Go sit in any quiet place with your eyes closed for a half hour or so, and that self will invariably say hello.

And this is where half the readers left will depart, because of the words "elite forces", "collective consciousness", and "mystical", ha ha.

This is also the self that our oppressors can never allow a moment's rest. Because when it finds rest, it finds insight, and can fuse the spiritual, psychological and material worlds into some transcendent vision that can at last [be] seen and sought after. It makes Buddhist monks rebel in Sri Lanka and creates indigenous liberation theologians in Latin America.

And there go the rest of the readers, because of the words "our oppressors", "transcendent" and "Buddhist monks".

Okay, I exaggerate.  But its true.  Certain words are "buzz words" for certain people and when one encounters them, they immediately impart a signal to the brain that warns:  "Oh oh, don't go there.  The writer is a such-and-such."  I have to laugh.  I, too, react to certain buzzwords.  When I first landed on Joe's website many moons ago and saw the heading: "Deer Hunting with Jesus", I almost turned away.  Glad I didn't. What a character.  And I say character with the utmost admiration.  Joe is what many of us today are reluctant to be:  Totally honest about who we are and what we think.  Joe can be rather blunt.  He cusses and says things that make you squirm --'cause it hits home.  But he's right on the mark more times than not, and writes what many think but don't dare say because it's too, well, blunt--almost, gasp, revolutionary. Not everyone's style or way of expressing things.

Continuing on:

Fortunately for Wall Street, the world's bankers, the military industrial complex, there is science, which they love so dearly they purchased it outright. Scientism has successfully sold the notion that spiritual awareness is superstition. By that accounting, the mind is no more than the brain, and love is a body sack of chemicals interacting. (A stunningly successful new public relations campaign by BASF chemical corporation campaign actually declares that love is chemical. Its success both here and in China would give Orwell the heebie jeebies.)

I know about Orwellian heebie-jeebies.  Recent history's full of them, though often too subtle to notice, unless you're paying close attention.  Didn't know about the BASF thing though.

Joe, like his readers, is "ordinary and fearful," reminding us that we all "live on the same planet watching the unnerving events around us, things the majority does not seem to see."   And while bloggerdom and the Internet bring together many of us who've never met but somehow emotionally or psychologically connect with one another, sharing the same affinities/outlooks/concerns, etc.,  "beyond that, we are each on our own, most of our waking hours, for the rest of our days."  Something a little hard to acknowledge, for some.  Anyway, Joe plans to pursue the 'kingdom within', "which is individual and does not much involve rage or politics--in other words, shut my pie hole and grow stronger, and with luck, a little wiser."  So next year by this time (he says), he's shutting down his website.  He's already written his last book, doesn't plan to write another, and the connection with his readers, I guess, will end.

That's a weird feeling, you know, to be abruptly connectionless.  Imagine--everybody suddenly no longer there within a phone call or keystroke away--all those people, loved ones included, no longer "connected" to you.  You're on your own.  Totally.  I mean, what if it weren't just bloggerland or distant  friends, etc.  What if it were everybody you know, including your entire family,and closest and dearest companion?  I'm not being morbid here.  Thousands of people all over the world go through this, every day.

But playing the "What If" game is very practical sometimes.  You learn to devise possible solutions to imaginary what-ifs so that if the time ever comes--and it horribly, sometimes does--then you've at least once considered the possibility and it might be a bit  less soul-shattering.  Or not.  You never know about these things.  Basically I'm an optimist, my mate even more so than I. And experience helps.  If you ever got out of--at the time--a life-shattering situation, and are now okay, you can look back and see what worked and what didn't, how long it took, what you could have done differently, both before and after, etc.  You do this by going inward, and you can call the lessons learned "spiritual" or not, that's just a term--for getting in touch with the part of you that knows, even when you don't, and you sometimes have to just stop, and listen.  I think that's what Joe means by going inward.  It's at least what I mean by it and they seem similar--his version of it and mine.

I was still wondering though, whether individual responses have to be an Either/Or choice. Either join a group and raise a stink and fight the Whatever, or go get quiet and change your life and find your inner peace.   

In any case, you do what you can, where you can, when you can, and never stop.  It shouldn't be a sometime thing, though.  It should be a way of life.  Not everybody thinks like that, not everybody cares. And even if they do, is that enough?  What can one person do?  Well it's not just one person actually.  It's one person here, one person there; three people here, five people there; a hundred people here, five hundred people there;   a hundred thousand here, two hundred thousand there, scattered over many theres, and I think they're increasing rather than diminishing.  I could be wrong.  And never, of course, anywhere near the majority.  But still ...

How many dozens of people, in their small way, helping one another, tiny random acts that're never noticed, ever publicized, seldom acknowledged, completely forgotten, in every pocket of the universe -- they've got to count for something.  Calm , deliberate guts"  (Joe's phrase).  Not fearful, crazed and worrying, swallowed up in uncertainty, but Calm.  Deliberate. And with Guts.  A stance that could get you through just about any situation.  Gandhi had it.  Martin Luther King had it.  Aung San Suu Kyi has it.  Not just the 'giants' but all the others, mostly nameless people living (and sometimes giving) their lives for justice sake, have it.

Joe was right that no one can "own that thing inside us. The one that gives out the last sigh before sleep, and travels the realms of the great human collective consciousness alone."  

This is beginning to sound like a speech, groan.  What you call getting carried away in the moment.  Unintentional, but you see what words do to you sometimes, they open up all kinds of doors and stuff comes tumbling out, making you think, so you start thinking out loud, the fingers start tapping, you're suddenly a-sea in a wash of words, reader beware.  Good thing only three people read this blog, ha ha.  But thank you Joe, you ol' curmudgeon down Mexico-way.  A bunch of words on a webpage, a line in a poem in a library book, a random phrase overheard in someone else's conversation-- how the written or spoken word can jar the consciousness, bring understanding--or at least open the gate to it, instill one to action, give a sense of hope--all of the above. 

Going inward, not as an escape, but to draw from a well of resources you didn't know were there.  And not just "spiritual" stuff but ... Going for a root canal, even:  Calm. Deliberate. And with Guts.  So not just the biggies but the little everyday things as well.

Thanks Joe.

Update:
And thanks to another Joe (Hutchison by name) for sharing the "pale blue dot" and quote from Sagan, demonstrating "the folly of human conceits" of which we have many.   He was absolutely right (Sagan): "Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand," underscoring "our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another ... to preserve and cherish" it.
Amen to that!


________________________
oops, slipped off the Brevity Wagon again.

Everywhere, that Trickster

Have you ever written something, spontaneously spilling out what maybe might best have been left unsaid ... and then the next morning, quite randomly and unexpectedly falling upon a string of words on the computer screen that seem related, that jump right out and hit you in the eyes with the impact of a sledgehammer?  In context, they don't apply to you.  (Or do they?)   But they seem like they do, and it's jarring.

Yesterday I had been verbally scolding myself for wasting so much time "playing" my little word-games (as in the day-before-yesterday's engaging but time-consuming 8-8-8-6 exercise)--that is, instead of writing seriously, I get too caught up in distractions, neglecting my housework, being buried in paper up to my chin, at my desk.  Anyway, this morning I'm link-hopping and land on two unrelated pieces whose words jump right out at me, before I've even begun to read:

Twisting syntax and abusing grammar are a poet's prerogative, but these techniques are also always a game of roulette: the lines may clunk through such contrivance, or the wonder of novelty fade.

[From a review of Joan Houlihans' The Us, by Jacob A. Bennett in The Critical Flame.]

"Twisting syntax", "abusing grammar", lines that "clunk" through forced "contrivances", ouch.

I'd begun to sense, on my own, that the "wonder of novelty" (of self-imposed word-playing exercises, for example) was "fading" for me.  You don't have to rub it in, I said to the printed words that jumped out from the page.  They seemed puzzled. They hadn't a clue what I was talking about.

After Bennett's book review I wandered on over to Henry Gould's essay "On Reading Gabriel Gudding."  And it happened again! 

I would say we live in a time of near-systemic obfuscation — political, economic, educational — amid which the sphere of poetry hovers with an air of insouciant and facetious cleverness. Poetry per se has evolved, it seems, into light verse: an occasion for admirable displays of a poet’s intellectual graces (wit, charm, technical facility, humor, thoughtfulness, etc.).

There it was again, words that seemed to be talking--directly to me:  "Obfuscation", "insouciant" and "facetious cleverness", suggesting an occasion in which a poet, instead of creating a real poem, might work feverishly instead to find and/or triangulate and/or juxtapose words to "display" his or her "wit, charm, technical facility, humor, thoughtfulness, etc," passing it off as a real poem.  Double ouch.  

Gudding, writes Gould, "is a star of large magnitude in the current pantheon of witty versifiers" (Are you a real poet, self whispers to Self--or just a "witty versifier"?).  Gould continues, writing that Gudding's tale is:

both absurd and terrible (sublimely so), of the snake shedding its skin, of the emergence of a New World self: a self as Prodigal, lost in the wilderness, and desiring wilderness.

I all but collapsed at this one.  Especially the "sublimely terrible".  They referred to Gudding's tale, but seemed equally applicable to some of the wordplay poems I've at times produced.  Darn words.  What a coincidence:  "snake shedding its skin" (Writers, I had written yesterday, should sometimes shed their skin).   And "self as Prodigal" (I'd referred to voices telling you to leave; a voice that calls you back).  How about "lost in the wilderness, desiring wilderness".   Like my implying that one is lost in poetrydom sometimes, wondering where one fits, or if one is qualified to hang with the masters, so to speak--and despite the occasional unexpected spotlight, shrinks and retreats, ultimately prefering "wilderness".  Man, it's like the little buggers (words) were having fun with me.

Nah.  It was the Trickster.  The Trickster is everywhere.  The Trickster is a pain in the butt.  He wakes you up.   He gets in your face, assails you with your own absurdity.  (Thanks, I needed that.....  I think.)  So it was just another run-o'-the-mill online catharsis confirming the need to be reminded sometimes that you need to get back on the path.  It's almost Buddhistic:  the very thing you find the hardest to do (requiring the sacrifice and immersion and attention of the self, while acutely conscious of the difficulty and strains on Self) is also the thing that can bring you real happiness, when you eliminate the obsession with the selfness of the Self, if that makes any sense.  In context, it meant simply, climb outta yourself and focus on something else for a while:  clean the papers off the desk, go for a walk, go help someone do something, stop shuffling words, the writer you is not the all of you. Poorly expressed, but that was what it implied.

I blame Bloggerdom for this.  Before, I'd just ... write.  In Blogland you have an audience. Now it's like you have to do little dress rehearsals, make sure the presentation is flawless (or at least not completely outrageous), so you won't get laughed off the stage (that is if anyone actually arrives)..  You feel pressured to come up with new skits, if only to show you've still got it in you, can still pass the test of clever.  I think Tom Montag over at The Midwesterner is right, though.  "If carpenters fussed as much as poets/ we'd all fall through the floor."   And Joe (Perpetual Bird) Hutchison's "Diagnosis" of trends OULIPOian suggests that some poets may actually be in danger of OCDing on wordplay.

I honestly had no idea mere occasional wordshuffles, engaged in as a pleasant pastime, might eventually become an actual poetic movement, with its own theories and newletters and competition between practitioners, let alone be capable of driving one maniacal. Ouliponizing Wallace Stevens's snow bird into an unintelligible soap mandible was enough to make me rush to decompulsivate any word-play tendencies I might have, Cold Turkey, ha ha.  (Notice my sentences are getting longer and more sesquipedalian.  I've definitely been infected!) 

How, excuse me, is this "poetry"?  I mean "real" (as in It-means-something-to-me) poetry?  It seems to me the evolution they speak of vis-a-vis poetry has more to do with emphasis on process and form.  For the sake of Entertainment.  Whatever happened to worth of content?  Artful manipulation that focuses the reader's attention on the artful process, and by consequence on its inventor, can be poetic.  You can love a poem you don't completely understand, because of the language, imagery, metaphors, rhythm, and what it says to you that resonates as you're reading it. But cleverness aside, contemporary avant garde poetry like Chance Operations, however,  that produce lines like those in Jackson MacLow's poem "Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair":

reason is sullenness: it's there that practices left when six into
nothing narrow, resolute, suggests all beside that plain seam./
Pencils, mutton, asparagus: the table there. [1]

leave me hungry for substance.  Yes, it's interesting, creating unusual syntax and images and poetic experiences that the reader can take part in, but does it mean anything to them?  I find, in reading certain examples of contemporary poetry, that the stagecraft too often gets in the way.  I can't get past it to get to the kernel of the thing.  Remove the costume, the backdrops, and there's nothing there.  But it was a clever, well sewn costume, an amazing production. Definitely innovative.  Colorful, even.  But would I go back for a repeat performance--that's the question.   "What was it about?" someone asks as the curtain closes.  "I have no idea," you say. "But it was interesting."

Trickster says:  Untangle thyself.  Simplify.  Climb back on the train.  Keep going.
Check.

Anyway, I'm done with this [subject].  (Thank goodness! the words chime, in chorus, rolling their i's).  Dang buggers.  They're everybloodywhere!

*And of course,  the resolutions made yesterday, about no more word-tweaking or my inherent aversion to de-verbosifying -- have all just been broken.  Oddly enough, I've become enamored of haiku lately.  And the shorter, semi-minimalist, less-than-five-line poem.  To condense what might normally take me 12 lines to say--into three or four.  And have it make sense.  And still allow for alternate meanings.  Now that's a real challenge.

I still like wordplay, though.  "Light" verse, even.  But I don't consider it "real" poetry.  Or that the ruminations above are anything but ruminations.  They'll only lead to ruination, though, if I don't learn to zip it up.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggg!!!!

Poems are like batteries...

Thanks to Joe Hutchison over at The Perpetual Bird for his excellent posting at Suite 101 on the writing of metaphors.

How many poets do you know who would use the lines of one of their own, unpublished poems to give an example of a tortured metaphor, much less deem it "bizarre" and possibly even "grotesque"? (Yes, we all do that, I suppose, or at least some of us do, in re-reading something we've written years ago that in the light of now seems hopelessly naive, embarrassingly trite, or pompously pedantic (referring to fiction here) or just blatantly bad (referring to poetry) and the last thing one wants to do is showcase those words--except perhaps among trusted friends in moments of mutual hilarity, as in a  "You think YOUR early stuff is awful--bet you can't top THIS one!" kind of way.)

But Joseph Hutchison is a fine poet and I wish I had had someone like him as a mentor when I was first being introduced to poetry. I think I've learned more from his insightful explanations (in this type essay) and discussions about poetry (on his regular blog) than I ever did in academia.

"Poems are like batteries," he says, "they store imaginative energy and release it in moments of illumination." A poem's force is felt in its metaphors. And not just any old metaphor will reach the reader in a way that "shines a light into the dark that surrounds us".

Poems as batteries ... this metaphor itself illuminated another realization--that batteries don't work forever, they have to be frequently recharged, that imaginative energy can be in short supply, and that poems, like their authors, come and go. But the creative force behind the delicate job of the finding of words to construct a meaningful poem somehow remains. That it comes easily to some and is enormously difficult for others is not the point.  I guess I'm interested more in the fact that poems continue to be created at all, that countless individuals are still compelled, century after century,  to sit down, put pen to paper and attempt to express things that cannot be expressed in quite the same way in any other way except in a poem.

Poems need to be re-read [recharged]to release their illumination to new generations of readers. Poets want readers to see what they see: Stop a minute. Look. Can you see where these words are taking you? Can you feel their effect?

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay talked of her candle burning "at both ends"[1], not lasting the night, and she invited friends and foes alike to just look and see its "lovely light".  That little poem, for me, expresses the sheer strength of this force, the power of mere words on a page to enable the reader to see and understand what a poet sees and strives to describe without actually describing it.  This just to say that for some of us, poetry is indeed sometimes a connection ... to that light in the dark "that surrounds us."


"Metaphors Gone Amuck"

Words are like threads           [cliché in need of a fresh likeness]
that we weave to connect
the fibres of being,
the eyes of our seeing,
that others unravel, restitch
or preserve
but preserved, are forgotten;
destroyed, are remembered.
a tapestry forever
in progress.

Poetry:  an unfinished portrait of words
seeking other words
that bring the light
to light.

Or something like that....

Thanks to Joe Hutchison for a fine article on metaphors.   [I actually cringed when I saw his reference to writers who have this inexplicable "urge to be ostantatiously inventive".  Dang.  There goes my bloggy wordplay plans for the week.  I never met a 4 I didn't like.  On the other hand, meta 4s are so uppity, so beyond the beyond, so to speak.   That kind of thing.  OID:  Ostantatious Inventive Disorder.  (Or is it Overly Idiotic Digressionamblia?   Obviously Intentionally Delusional?) ("Can I ask a rhetorical question? Well, can I?" -- Ambrose Bierce)

Less is More

Nearly everyone is familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Do six words constitute a story, though?

Robert Swartwood asked that very question in a posting last Spring on Flash Fiction Chronicles.  And "what about those really, really, really, really, REALLY short stories?" he wondered.  "The, you know, six-word stories.  Are they considered flash fiction?  If not, what should we call them?"

Swartwood decided to coin a term for those "very, very, very, VERY short stories":  They should be called Hint Fiction, he says "because that’s all the reader is ever given.  Just a hint.  Not a scene, or a setting, or even a character sketch.  They are given a hint, nothing more, and are asked — nay, forced — to fill in the blanks"  And having defined it, he proceeded to establish the word limit:  "It cannot be anything more than 25 words."

Swartwood started a Hint Fiction Contest and over the course of the month of August received 2,463 submissions.  Here's a sample of one that received honorable mention:

PEANUT BUTTER
by Camille Esses

He was allergic.
She pretended not to know.

The fever has apparently caught on.  Commenters on Swartwood's posting at Flash Fiction Chronicles in April announcing the birth of Hint Fiction immediately chimed in with their abbreviated "stories":

A BRIEF PARADOX

by Joseph Grant

One day, I met my future self. He had a gun. I shot him first. Wonder what I did to piss myself off so much.

I don't know about you but when I sit down to read a story, I kind of want more than just a "hint".  Literary teasers, okay.  Everyone loves a mystery, myself included.  But presenting the writing itself as something of actual substance seems, well ... a tad fraudulent.  I feel cheated.  "Where's the beef?!" as they say.  It sounds more like a vague idea for a story that one doesn't apparently have the time nor inclination to flesh out and actually write.  The reader's just going to have to figure it out from the hints given.  In other words, Hint Fiction merely provides an outline.  You have to write the story for yourself from there.

It sounds cool and trendy but Hint Fiction seems to me more like a bunch of orphaned blurbs out there looking for a blurbologist, to get proper placement--less "hinties" in search of a story than writers in search of   inspiration.  But what a concept!  Think how you could impress people, saying you've read a hundred stories this week ("hint" stories, that is); and then meet friends' incredulous gasp of disbelief with the disclaimer:  "Some of them were only one line long!"

That got me thinking, for some reason about one-liners--poems, specifically, that consist of a single line.   How many one-line poems are there out there?  This one came immediately to mind--Joe Hutchison's "Artichoke" (Windflower Press, 1979), which I've seen quoted a number of times.

ARTICHOKE

O heart weighed down by so many wings.

What if you break that into separate lines?  Make it a three-line haiku, for instance? Placement of words, spacing, punctuation, all allow for a range of interpretations for the reader to arrive at a different meaning from that which the poet intended. Which brings me to consider how much form matters sometimes, both in how we determine to present a thing and the degree of  comprehension or appreciation we experience as a reader based on that presentation.  

What's even more interesting, though, is that the words themselves sometimes manage to shake off these often arbitrary restrictions and float directly to the consciousness regardless of their packaging.  I think the words in Hutchison's poem do that.  (And I'm not just saying that 'cause I adore eating artichokes--that slow, delightful process one has to go through, one delicious pluck at a time, to get to the pièce de résistance, its exquisite core.  To those who have never indulged in this pleasure, put off by what seems more like barnacles than 'wings', all I can say is, You don't know what you're missing!)

In general, are writers slowly migrating from one form of writing to another, their writings becoming increasingly shorter?  Steve Almond in Boston told Doug Holder recently that he recycled many "failed poems" into 500-words-or-less short short stories. Steve chose to publish his latest book, This Won't Take but a Minute, Honey, using Harvard Book Store's Espresso Book Machine. Audience members at his upcoming reading on December 2nd will be able to buy their own special editions of the book—to be printed up during the reading.  How's that for convenience!  So it seems not only is writing being 'downsized' but it's being churned out faster than ever before.

Is it really that far-fetched to imagine that we may one day soon have, on sidewalks everywhere, card-operated literary vending machines where you insert your card, and out drops a piece of fiction or poem. Just select a category:  Flash Fiction.  Hint Fiction. Flarf. CellStories, Prose Poems. Haiku. Long Novel. Short Novel. Essay.  Aphorisms.... They come in all flavors because the texts are edible.  (Otherwise the vending machine people would see little profit.) 

Reducing writing to its absolute minimum: are there any poems out there consisting of a single word, I wondered.

The answer is Yes.

"Picture the word 'tundra' slightly below center in an otherwise completely blank page, as it was presented in Cor van den Heuvel's book the window-washer's pail (New York: Chantpress, 1963). The poem also appears, similarly, in the first edition of his Haiku Anthology, 1974, p. 163.".[1]

Condensed, compacted, reduced-to-the-mimum writing is both easy and hard to execute.  It's easy to spew out a quirky mini-synopsis of a never-to-be-written, potentially longer story, and call it Hint Fiction; it's damn hard to write really good haiku.  Creative writing takes hard work.  The insight can be instantaneous, the intended imagery brilliant, the idea or concept innovative.  Now comes the hard part:  how to put all that into words.  And not just any 'ol words.  The choice of a single word can be the key to accessing the meaning--or the ruination of any desire to continue reading because of that little dose of suspected mediocrity.

The act of writing a poem and the act of reading it are two different animals.  And then there's ... the words themselves, swimming around in a nether world apart from both writer and reader, defying categorization-- though they are endlessly categorized, described, analyzed, taken apart and restructured, elevated, spit upon, stretched to their breaking point, vomited out unassembled, or paintstakingly condensed to a single syllable.

First there was Flash Fiction.  Then came CellStories. And now we have Hint Fiction.  Here's my Hint Fiction endeavor for the day.  Two poems.  (The rule says it can't be more than 25 words; it didn't say "no less than X words"). I'm going into extreme-writing-mode now and condensing, not to a one-liner, but to a one-worder (first poem) and--you know it's eventually going to come to this, don't you--creative writing stripped down to a single letter (second poem).  Okay here goes:

UNTITLED #1


Four.

UNTITLED #2


I*

___________
* this is not a Roman numeral 

    

                                                 



"Hey, Fred!  Check out my new wallet-sized book: 1000 Hint Stories for the Chronically Rushed, selections of which will be coming out in keychain size in time for the Christmas shopping season."
_______________________________________________



--Apologies to Hint Fction writers everywhere.  It just isn't everyone's, er, cup of teaspecks.