Poetry | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

More news not for penises

July 5, 2017

Start with this little poem, “Spurring him on”, which seems to be heavily sexual:

Hotspur Cockspur:
Thorny, horny, over-
Heated prick.
Spiky, showy dandy,
Sharply tipped.

Actually, this is a continuation of my 2/4/16 posting “Some news not for penises”, which was about senses of cock that aren’t about penises, and it’s mostly about plants, a whole hell of a lot of plants, some of them with sharp thorns (like spurs) that will prick you, some of them with showy spikes (like a rooster’s comb), all of them with cock in one of their common names. So, what with the noun cock, the phallic spurs, and the phallic combs, the topic fairly drips with male sexuality — but this posting is not about men’s bodies or mansex. It’s mostly about birds and plants, plus some vintage dandies and Sir Henry Percy.

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and plants, Metaphor, Metonymy, Names, Nicknames, Phallicity, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Fay Zwicky

July 4, 2017

From today’s issue of The Australian, “Acclaimed poet Fay Zwicky dies in Perth at 83” by Paige Taylor:

(#1)

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Posted in Death notices, Language and plants, Names, Poetry, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

Poems About Sluts

June 13, 2017

(Until the last section, this posting is mostly about silliness. The last section, however, descends to talk of men’s bodies and mansex in street terms, so is not for kids or the sexually modest. I’ll insert a warning when this material is imminent.)

Passed on in Facebook by Michael Palmer, this preposterous book cover:

(#1)

Yes, of course, a hoax. And appeared as such in a volume entitled Bad Little Children’s Books: KidLit Parodies, Shameless Spoofs, and Offensively Tweaked Covers. Then there’s the real book whose cover was tweaked to yield #1.

Beyond all that, we could take the title of #1 at face value and celebrate sluts and sluthood.

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Humor, Poetry, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

Complementary ignorances

May 18, 2017

Yesterday’s posting on Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” elicited this redfaced comment from U.Mass. linguist Rajesh Bhatt:

I only knew this as an Anne Clark song until now!

To which I now reply, equally redfaced, that until Rajesh’s comment I didn’t know about the Anne Clark version, and was in fact only dimly aware of Anne Clark.

(Rajesh supplied a link to a YouTube video of a live performance, at the Berlin Metropol in 1992; you can listen to a studio recording here.)

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Posted in Linguists, Music, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Larkin and the Gray Lady, again

May 17, 2017

I’ve been on break from remarking on some of the obsessions of the New York Times — its periodiphilia, its taboo avoidance, and so on — but I’m moved to return to the second of these topics because the Gray Lady has managed to reproduce, in deail, one of its previous encounters with taboo vocabulary, a tussle with poet Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”.

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Posted in Euphemism, Language in the media, Poetry, Quotation, Taboo language and slurs | 6 Comments »

To Be Young, Gay, and Chinese-American

May 2, 2017

… also gifted, and a poet. That would be Chen Chen, who I became acquainted with through Matthew Zapruder’s poetry column in the NYT Magazine on March 5th, which featured the first poem (“Self-Portrait as So Much Potential”) in Chen’s debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. The poet as a grown-up, in a rose garden (in a photo by his partner, Jeff Gilbert):

(#1)

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv, Music, Poetry, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

Is that a Paschal Peep in your pouch?

April 24, 2017

From Chris Hansen on Facebook, a late entry in this year’s Easter Peepstakes: a model who dreamt he played with yellow Peeps in his Aronik swimwear:

(#1)

About the company, its products, its models, its symbol, and its name

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and religion, Names, Parody, Phallicity, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Sarcasm and irony, Signs and symbols, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Quick, Bruce, the blat!

April 4, 2017

(Not for kids or the sexually modest, unless they/you have a high tolerance for weirdness and obscene allusion. No naughty bits will be on view, no acts of penetration will be detailed in print, it will all be in your mind’s eye. But that might be quite enough.)

Today’s morning name: the verb blat, which led me through a thicket of associations (largely phonological) having to do with beer, bars, baseball bats (real ones, of ash wood, and metaphorical ones, of manmeat), the Platte River in Nebraska, and then (by thematic association) to chiropterans, Die Fledermaus, Bruce Wayne and his boy wonder, vampires, and a lot of mansex — oh, those damn superheroes and bloodsuckers, it comes with the capes, they’re always sliding into Fagotopia, the fuckin’ flits. Along the way there will be two episodes of deranged free verse, none of it in the least bit wholesome, and some disastrous spraying by the Demon Dr. of Whoville.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Jokes, Language and food, Language of advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Morning names, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Poetry | Leave a Comment »