Pope's c-cough of sorts

In honor of Alexander Pope's 274th birthday we post an excerpt from his Essay On Man that is reminiscent in form and spirit of Below Dunster's chiasthmatic coughs:

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king.
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.


We say "reminiscent" (as opposed to "similar," "evocative," etc.) because, of course, Dunster was replete with coughs wrought chiasthmatically from well before the days of Pope--regrettably, few have survived. O happy realm, whose people pray for coughs to linger centuries!
Well, we need say little more about this man or his pen. Suffice it to say we wish he had been a Dunsterian, but we console ourselves in his Dunsteriad-evoking work, The Dunciad (1728: The Dunciad: An Heroic Poem; 1729: The Dunciad Variorum; 1742: The New Dunciad; 1743: The Dunciad in Four Books), in which Pope makes clear his pinings for a hypothetical Below Dunster-like world, sadly ignorant that such a domain was in fact flourishing on his own island and surely would have honored an artist of his caliber with the magnificentest of sloes. It is not unlikely that, had the above quatrain been genuinely chiasthmatic, Dunsterians of the time may have heard from afar and transported the short man below Dunster directly.
Posthumously Below Dunster honors him with plums and a post.

two for form, three for you

a morsel in five
then five-plus-two syllables
and then, again, five
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (10/16/2003)


when muses wear bit
and bridle, or hack and then
abscond, leaving this
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/03/2003)


how hopes rise in Fall
with my turbulence and peace
on a Gaul-bound plane
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/11/2003)


combe-sprawling and soaked
grass and me sotted with sloe
and you, and you too
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (05/16/2006)


century of love
for you, whether I lived three
years or all of it
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/31/2100)

399aftershock

worth pondering

chiasthmatic cough XXVI

The poet lacking time to post
The British mailer, vision
Jews are clipped to save the most
Coupons, for circumcision.

Exhibit Kaf

special thanks to Gabriel B. Wickizer

An old ode to an old friend

where the showing up would happen


MIKLAS
(in Sapphic stanza)

Once, for instance, shaved like a monk, you showed up
Wearing painted sneakers and jeans. Your artwork
Was a model of ardor: I remember
Pens of yours running

Out of ink, not due to your scholarly zeal,
But because your trousers were saturated
With it. Sometimes, out of your blue, you took to
Rolling on cobble,

Adding new hues: purple from mixing blood with
Blue already present. An otherwise drab
Vindobona public Gymnasium gained
Dash on your easel.

Sewers were your forts, and at times I joined you
Under Amadeus' deathday city's streets,
Trudging through those soggy canals against the
Laws of our fathers.

Seven years I spent on the teeter-totter
Keeping you in balance with canon’s children;
Seven years I lived as the liaison be-
Tween you and Normal.

Now that I’ve been gone for a weighty eight years,
Has the seesaw tilted you up or down, friend?
Either way, your paints must have spilled, my poor boy
Miklas, my Vincent.

.

The dripping spigot

On the eve of a new day (“At last!” some say), a new form—new to this venue, this shadow of the universal Below Dunster, that is—a new form that we hope will usher in, drop by drop, the cool contents of a new era of Dunsterian fecundity.

The dripping spigot lends itself to pith, mirth, and myth alike. It is based on a descending number of syllables in alternating lines (see the boldface) and an ascending syllable count in the other lines (italics):

3 . . absentee
0 . .
2 . . ballots
1 . . are
1 . . in
2 . . demand
0 . .
3 . . great demand

The only other requirement is that the last word of line 6 (which may be the only word of line 6) be repeated as the last word of line 8. It is through this repetition, spilling from line 7’s subtle or screaming silence, that the lightness or the depth of the poem will typically be enforced, and through which the reader, aware or unaware, will absorb the tightness of the artistic piece. [If that last phrase launched in your spleen a fairy backflip (layout, not tuck) of Proustian remembrance, it may be that you have encountered it already on page 52 of Yours Truly’s thesis “Intrusion, Fusion, and Illusion: Vladimir Nabokov and the Artistic Rearrangement of Reality” (a terrible titular denouement following a sonic and semantic tour de force of introductory ascension and the standard colon-peak), where I disagreed with Page Stegner—the same—as to the significance of the number 36 in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.]

A caveat: newlings may be tempted to disregard lines 2 and 7 of the dripping spigot, as they contain zero syllables, but the essence of the form is captured in the poet’s consideration of these lines. Do not think of them as spaces, but as crucial lines that happen to contain no syllables (for a related, though distinct, phenomenon see “On certain names,” January 23, 2005).
Some examples:

. . . . . .

On, Vixen!

Santa
needs
you
big time

so big time

. . . . . .

Alexis

nectar
of
God’s
meadow

my meadow

. . . . . .

Edelweiss

Trophy
Of
Alp-
En quests

Rugged quests

. . . . . .

chiasthmatic cough XXV

The poet used to be a pauper
The prince plumbs truth’s crevasses
Mules are made with zinc and copper
Brass, by mares and asses.



(technically, a variant of chiasthmatic cough XXIV--with all feminine endings, in honor of the comments under "why I walk," April 15, 2006)

chiasthmatic cough XXIV

The poet messes with your head
The shrink plumbs truth’s crevasses
Mules are made with white and red
Pink, by mares and asses

a stutter in time

399omega

Sonnet to an old friend

(Roman Madly, ever-young Berlinian emigré painter and sometime Dunsterian, best known for his still life Cherries On a Wall)

399psi
penultimacy's apex


Roman, under alien guise excelling
Germanic for thy first eleven years
A merry can of germs at length rebelling
A country or a boy the Birth-marked rears.
Can Ada chronicle thy splintered tree?
Check republics, kingdoms: find it! Will
It ally with a thornclad shrubbery
Hungry for the dust of Europe’s mill?
.
Then mark the soft-striated trunk of Roman
And/or a twig reclining at its base
Slovenly a tick explodes the metaphor—
You crane your beastly neck to see its omen:
Belle jumping where no prince will give her chase
Nor wayward Latin swain has roamed before.
__________________________________

the lineaments of unfulfilled desire

399chi

oh, for a c-cough! where the sloes excel

'neath Dunster-Old's rheumatic wrack

aching for thee—

It is not well!

oh, for a c-cough! lest like gray Flamel
at last thy long-pneumatic knack
turns from the lee—
Thou art not well!

oh, for a c-cough! in the plumtree dell

for sans that hiasthmatic hack

hale though I be

I am not well!

i.e.,

399phi

.