This is Dr. Seuss in 1941

Haiku for Lovers--the review

Dance of Love” image by Kjunstorm

We are born loving poetry. As children we delight in rhymes and rhythms and repetitions that older people dismiss as "sing-song" or of they're word snoots, "doggerel." But how old were you when you read Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham? I can still quote it

I would not like them
here or there.
I would not like them
anywhere.
I do not like
green eggs and ham.
I do not like them,
Sam-I-am

I can still quote it and I bet you can too. That's the power of poetry. Once you hear it, it sinks into your synapses and stays there. We are born loving poetry and yet most of us stop reading it when we leave school. And yet poetry is all around us, just waiting to be rediscovered. (In L.A., the metro buses used to carry poetry placards and one weary commute I discovered Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII" with its startling and sexy imagery:

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
 
Now that is a love poem.  Which brings me to Haiku for Lovers. One of the most elegant forms of poetry, haiku's strictly structured, 17-sylllable shape is infinitely flexible, endlessly versatile and has become the perfect poetic construct for the 21st century.

This Valentine's Day Buttontapper Press published a collection of poems called Haiku for Lovers: An Anthology of Love and Lust that is a beautiful assemblage of words and images that in another era would have made a gorgeous coffee table book. Every poem is paired with a photo, a painting or an illustration. All of the artwork is nicely done and most beautifully complement their poems. One exception for me was the color photograph "The Modern Femme Fatale" b Nicki Varkevissar that accompanied Sue Mayfield Geiger's three-act haiku "Film Noir." 

The model was lovely and the photograph was nicely done but for me, "Film Noir" forever means black and white, not technicolor. I was also disappointed by the photo of the young woman kicking up her flip-flops in the bed of a truck that accompanied Janet McCann's lovely "Because We Are Old." I wanted this romantic poem about love in the autumn of life to feature a mature couple and not a woman in the lush summer of her life. But those are minor quibbles; as a whole, this is a wonderful collection of bite-sized reveries about love and lust and sex and romance and sometimes everything at once. There's sci fi writer Don Webb's frankly phallic rocketship erection; and Richard Scarsbrook's "Intoxication," an elongated erotic reverie. There are phrases that stick in your heart, like h.l. nelson's "Painstaking lacing of emotional corsets." 

The various stages of love are chronicled here from Fiona Johnson's "New Love" to Dave Wright's emotional "The First Five Months." There's romance here (Kenneth Pobo's sensual "Pink Calla Lily'")  but also doses of practical reality as in Bridget Brewer's "Life Has Taught Me This" and Vuong Pham's "SEX Billboard" in which he talks about what REALLY gets his juices flowing. Then there's Katya anchentseva's "Slept Bad After Sex," which weighs and balances the good and the bad of the night and the morning after.

Editor Laura Roberts'  "outro" (as opposed to an "intro") presents a couple of bonus naughtyhaiku that are offered almost apologetically even though they're both smart and provocative. On sale for less than three dollars at ebook-sellers everywhere, Haiku for Lovers is a perfect non-caloric treat for yourself or a belated VD present for your sweetie. Because everyone needs a little poetry in their lives.

Wednesday Word Snoot: Silly Words

Courtesy of Graphican.com

You may remember that during the run-up to election 2012, Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of using "silly word games." I half-heard that news report and what I heard was "silly words."  That set off a train of thought that ended, as many of my trains of thought do, with a spot of Googling. (Search engines are the best thing to happen to procrastination since ... crossword puzzles. You can waste a lot of time Googling, as with completing crossword puzzles, but you almost always learn something.)
Who knew there was a linguist who's compiled a list of the "100 Silliest Words in English?"  Check it out here.  My favorite is "bloviate," which means to speak pompously or brag. Some of the words on the list are actually phrases, but let us not split hairs.
Writer's Digest has compiled a list of funny words to help writers write funnier stories. I'm not sure I see the innate hilarity of words like "bulgur" and "knickers," but a fair number of the words on the list not only sound funny but have obscure definitions (which they don't give, I guess assuming that writers will know what they mean). And extra points to you if you know what a "bumfuzzle" is. (If you don't, check it out at dictionary dot com.
Wikipedia has an entry on "Inherently funny words" that's extremely academic but has some interesting pop culture references, including one to a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Joe Piscopo tells Commander Data that words ending in K are always funny.
But if you want to know what words are really inherently funny, it's best to have a little kid around. If you find them repeating a word or phrase, it's going to be because it tickled their fancy. (My sister, for reasons unknown to the rest of the family, thought the name "Gene Siskel" was hilarious and was prone to using it to punctuate sentences when she was a little girl.) Dr. Seuss was the master of silly words, and his word "grinch" is now a permanent part of the lexicon.
Wouldn't you love to invent a silly word that got adopted by everyone?