Toward "Wife Studies" [by David Lehman]

Cheers [on New Year's]

A couple of tears ago I invented a form without being quite aware of it. I wrote a poem consisting mostly of lines lifted from other sources with exactly one letter changed in each lifted line.

The poem, titled "The Road to Help," included "'Dope' is the thing with feathers" and "'Deaf' was all he answered." (Thank you, Shaw, Dickinson and Frost.)

You pet the idea.

Some might think this a sophomoric parlor game, and maybe it is, but you can say that of a lot of parlor games and of, too, a lot of embryonic forms and literary sub-genres, and this may be another cave of the undervalued asset, limericks and puns being two others. Anyway I invented it.

Readers, please feel tree to propose examples.

My life of the day is from Auden.

"We must love one another or diet."  

Now I will write "Ode to the West Wing," the first poem in a new book, tentatively titled Wife Studies. -- DL

Comments

[Millicent Caliban]

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll sweep and know why. (Hopkins)

And yonder all before us lie
Desserts of vast eternity. (Marvell)

We have to use a smell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’ (Frost)

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Clone and palely loitering? (Keats)

But rather to inhibit the place
I actually inhibit (Vincent Katz)

Was otherwise undistinguished,
And tends to be underrated and overcooked (Jim Dolot)

[David Lehman]

Marvelous ("desserts of vast eternity"), Millicent. Thanks so much! DL