[Janice D. Soderling]

Last night I was reading Elizabeth McFarland's "Over the Summer Water". She has a lovely poem there "Flower Market Rittenhouse Square", that starts:

All dressed in new linen,,
The girls in the Square
Are bare-kneed
And fair-kneed
And young as their hair.

And I thought I would give it a try, but alas, I suppose my thoughts were not as pure and lovely as Elizabeth's so in my exercise, I came up with a highly mediocre animosity poem with only one salvegable line.

But it felt good. My sneers turned to cheers and my grunts to hunts for the right words. (Note Michael Cantor's helpful post on visuwords at GT.)

So I had the thought this a.m. that we could all (or some of us anyways) cleanse our souls with some animosity poems that challenged our formalist yearnings.

Not necessarily tetrameter, abccb, (as above) but limerick, epigram, clerihew, lament, complaint, whatever.

It is OK to hate snow-shoveling, Wall Street bankers (in general), the boy scout leader of your youth, the baseball player who couldn't catch a pop-fly, hey you got imagination. Or nonexistent people, I live in a villa with no neighbors upstairs, but so what.

It goes without saying no ad hom--well, the cultivated and clever folks reading this will not need any reminders on this point, will they?

Old poems or new, it doesn't matter. But cleverness counts, whether form or content, or hopefully both.

So don't kick your dog. Cleanse your soul before Christmas.

Animosity poems!!!