[Tim Murphy]

I printed out this thread (54 pages!), and made a rough cut this morning. Looking for twenty-five poems, I took forty: 12 from Hayes, 11 from Slater, 6 from Anthony, 4 from yours truly, 3 from Wakefield, and one each from ChrisW and Renate. To the rest of you, "Abandon Not Hope!" More, more. But let's move the discussion to Lariat where we can workshop some of the infelicities in these. I'll mash it all into a word document. Then I'll start a new thread over there (in fact I'll paste this posting over there.)

[Tim Murphy]

I've no business setting myself up as the editor of this execrable masterpiece. But nobody else has volunteered, so humbly I leap into the breach. Nonetheless this is a collaborative process. I welcome everyone's opinion, and I welcome revised or new submissions. (We have at least six months for revisions and additions.) Below I shall paste in a tentative Table of Contents for our anthology. I am very primitive with computers, and I would like one of you to volunteer to cut and paste the poems into a word document, appending author names beneath each poem, and paginating the manuscript and the Table. Do as many poems per page as will fit on each one. Edit note: Jim, keep the glorious hexameter at the end of A Stroll. Roger, the revised ending of Rorschach is much better!

Classic Jokes: An Anthology In Verse

I. Poems of Faith And Piety

A Stroll in the Woods (JH)
Knocking on the Door (JH)
Currency Conversion (RS)
Power Golf (RS)
Thou Shalt Not Curse (RS)
Divine Empathy (RS)
Bad Karma (TM)

II. Poems of Folk and Fable

Murder on the Vine (JH)
Who’s Afraid (DA)
Tales of Camelot (RS)
The Peg-leg Pig (TM)
The Giving of Names (TM)
A Case History (Cw)

III. Poems of Love and Romance

The Climbers (JH)
The Wrath of Reilly (JH)
Courtin’ (JH)
The Promise (JH)
Business as Usual (RW)
Refusing Treatment (RS)
Couples Therapy (RS)
The statues (R)
Angus and Morag (JB)

IV. Poems of the Professions

Rorschach (RS)
Le Mot Juste (RS)
It Takes Two to Tangle (RS)
Scalped (JH)
Entomologist (DA)
The Stock Boy (TM)
Sharing (JB)

V. A Miscellany

Cushioning the Blow (DA)
Family Troubles (DA)
Bear Country (RW)
Circus Tryout (RS)

VI. Is it Whisky that Ales Ye?

Epitaph (JH)
A Good End (JH)
The Snatch (JH)
Home Late (JH)
Under the Weather (DA)
Bearing the News (DA)
Village Pub (RW)

[Carol Taylor]

Tim, I can do the cutting and pasting into a Word document if you haven't a volunteer already. I just discovered this thread and the one in Mastery this morning and have been reading for the last hour and chuckling. Where do I post my own doggerel, here or in the Mastery thread?

Carol

[Tim Murphy]

Carol! You Angel! You haven't seen this thread! For Shame! All this time I've been sulking over your lack of submissions! That would be great if you'd organize it. note: The Statues is an untitled poem by Renate, for which I stole Yeats' title. I fear that we have sufficiently disgraced the great Mastery Board with this ribaldry (and the thread is so damn cumbersome), so I've closed the thread there, and all comments and submissions are welcome here.

[Carol Taylor]

Ok, Tim, I'm in. You should have PM'd me--guess I was derelict and didn't read the Mastery board for a couple of weeks and it went like wildfire. I'll start collating them this afternoon. Here's one I just cobbled up, haven't worked out all the bugs but I'm afraid somebody else will use the joke first so I'm posting it.

Alternative Medicine

A woman lay in coma for six months.
Her family squeezed her hand and spoke her name;
the doctor pricked her toe: always the same;
nothing brought about the least response
until one day, while sponging down the patient,
the nurse observed a flutter of the heart
each time she swabbed the woman’s private part,
a definite response to stimulation.
The doctors called the husband and proposed
he give her oral sex. The curtain closed.
They tracked the action from the nurses' station
and watched the line go flat across the monitor.
"What happened?" an intern burst in, out of breath.
The husband zipped his pants. “Well, you’re the doctor,
but if you ask me, I’d say she choked to death.”

Carol Taylor

[Roger Slater]

Carol, that's good! But are you sure you want to spend your once-in-a-lifetime free pass and use your death-breath rhyme at this juncture?

Here's one I sent Tim but never posted, and though it probably doesn't measure up I'll still post it here with the hope that I can make somebody groan just a bit:

NOT WHITTIER

There once was a bear with feet just like a boy's.
One day it strayed to where the carver, Chan,
displayed the fabled jewelry and toys
he fashioned from fine teak. A gifted man,
his fame was such that people often came
from far and wide to meet him and possess
a shapely hunk of wood that bore his name.
All men loved his art, the bear no less.
In fact, the bear was so entranced by all
the carvings that he saw, he stole a sack
and raced into the forest to the call
of Chan's assistants, screaming "Bear, come back!"
The bear could hear them shouting as he ran,
"Stop, oh boy-foot bear with teaks of Chan!"

[David Anthony]

I think the chapter titles are perfect, Tim.
Not sure the book title's quite there yet. Maybe something like "Poems of Faith, Trust and Hopelessness", or perhaps more pithily "Hopeless Poems".
Best regards,
David

[RCL]

"The Unembarrassed Muse"?

Nuts, finally remembered there's a book on American Popular culture with that title. "An"? Or if 50 items, "A Jubilee of Jests"?

Cheers,

------------------
Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited June 16, 2002).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Here's one that I'm unreasonably proud of. As for a title for the collection, can someone think of something that acknowledges our debt to Able Muse?
Richard Wakefield
The Wisdom of the Ages

Mr. Jones was shooting blanks.
His wife deplored their deprivation
of children, so she got one, thanks
to artificial insemination.
Genetics is a game some win,
some lose. Mrs. Jones was grim:
she bore a boy so homely sin
was comely when compared with him.
A neighbor looked. He scratched his head
in wonderment, and then he smiled:
“I guess it proves what grandma said,
‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’”

[RCL]

Very clever, Richard. Hmmm. Something like "The Disabled Muse" or "The Disabused Muse"?

Cheers,

------------------
Ralph