fROM THE dESK OF THE pOET**

I'm embarrassed to admit this. The night before last I ate an excessive amount of Sour Chewy Sweettarts. If you've ever had them you know that just one or two have enough toxic chemical dust sprinkled on them to make your mouth numb for several minutes. Well I got into a rhythm of eating one, then adding one to it, then another for three, then four, then five, then  six all the way to seven at one time. In that experiment alone I consumed no fewer than 26 Sour Chewy Sweetarts and even that was after having warmed up with several single helpings.

Sour Chewy Sweettarts were at one time marketed under the name  "Shockers". Let me tell you they should have respected the truth in advertising inherent with that label. The intensity of tartness conferred from all these ***** Wonka treats was remarkable and very well could have been the most face-squinching sourness I've experienced in my fifty-plus years.

The unfortunate downswing of these hijinks is that I developed a chemical burn that spread across the entirety of my tongue all the back to and including the area where my uvula hangs.

It's my own stupid fault. I could feel the chemicals eating through too many layers of cells long before the administration of candy pellets had reached four, even five-count multiples. By the time I had the seven pack ****** down to gel the burning was so bad I had to squint my eyes. The question that found priority amongst all that came to me at that moment was "how long is my mouth going to be so alternately sensitive and numb that I won't be able to eat my beloved jalapenos and spicy vittles?" A couple of days later and that answer still has not been found, although progress has been made to the point where I have faith it WILL indeed heal...you know how paranoid I can think sometimes, surely my mouth will never heal from THIS god forsaken self-inflicted injury, after all, I deserve it, hence the term "SELF inflicted". It's nothing but payback being it's usual self. If I never get to taste the wondrous seasonings of a well-mixed chili recipe cooked to perfection by someone who really knows how to make chili...if I never sigh with uninhibited satisfaction after downing a swig of Dr. Pepper or Miller's High Life or Guinness Stout...if I never again will be able to tell the difference between prime Angus beef and succulent Maine Lobster it is for good reason that I've been deprived of these tender mercies. It's because I knew when to stop and I kept on eating, though tears had begun to form.

No, it's more than that. It's because Universal Forces were all the while begging me, whispering in  my ears, "Stop! Stop! Enough! No more!" What would have happened if Joseph had ignored the Lord on that cool December night? Gabriel let Mary in on what was going down, what do you think would have happened if she'd gotten jealous of Joseph and disregarded the angel because he didn't have quite as much clout as her husband's Messenger? What would have happened? Nobody knows. But I know what would have happened if I'd heeded the advice of the benevolent spiritual  beings who were trying to warn me to lay off of the Sour Chewy Sweettarts. I wouldn't be sitting here typing on the hp laptop about how I got the chemical burn from hell.

But it seems like valuable lessons may be learned at every turn. So it is that with almost every experience I am resigned to also look at this one as the hard earned silver lining. Just what exactly have I learned? Well, first of all I've learned that it would probably be a good idea in the future to regulate severely the amount of Sour Chewy Sweettarts (aka Shockers) I eat in one sitting. If I ever eat them again, If the emotional scars of the chemical burn will free me in my sweet tooth's cravings for Wonka Sugar to ever again opt for the sour stuff. I learned that eating Vlasic Kosher Dill Pickles with such a freshly de-sensitized/throbbing chemically-scorched tongue is a prospect that shares much in common with a full day of taste-testing ghost peppers. Only on a slightly smaller scale does the briny pickle juice pack it's own searing acidic punch.

Other lessons? Oh I'm sure I could fill a book with lessons this has taught me. Writing that book might be the most useful, benevolent gesture I ever offered my fellow man but I don't know if I can do it. But if I did, this would have to be the first couple of lines on the very fist page:

Make sure you're going to have a LOT of alone time the morning after.

But that's just plain good advice.

Why does Sour Lemon shrug?

Sour Lemon thinks your sour lemons stink.
Why does Sour Lemon think your sour lemons stink?
Sour Lemon shrugs while Sour Lemon thinks.

Sweet and sour
just what you are
sweet to my eyes
sour to my heart
sweet with your lies
sour when you try

I try too hard
I make myself believe
things
that are not real
things
that were never here
things
that will never happen

Your presence was sweet
but sour to my emotions

Your presence was sour
so sour

Sweet and sour
so addictive

Now everything is sweet

I couldn't predict it
but now I see

This was all I ever needed

This is to every sour patch kid
That ever tried to be cool by going off the grid
But you’re only as cool
As that mouth behind your cig
And the thoughts you numb with aspirin

I think we all know
It’s sour
Then sweet
But not before it’s gone
So keep it in your mouth a little longer
And then maybe
Just maybe
We won’t cry every time the bag is empty
And the lights turn out
And all we have left are those little grains of sour
That we still eat anyway

This is to every sour patch kid
That ever wrote “I love you” on your eye lids
Then fluttered your lashes
But closed your eyes for too long
Too long to see that the party was gone
And that you were the only one still pretending to have fun

Lets for a minute pretend that
The red ones aren’t just Swedish fish with a little bit of tang
And that the slang you throw in there
Doesn’t make your words anymore true
But were all gonna scream it anyway
Then maybe
Just maybe when we’re screaming
We’ll forget how to talk
And have to use our hand to say more than
Flipping the bird ever could

This is to every sour patch kid
That only did what they did
Just to say that they could
What society forbid

Well this is how it ends
The bag in which you so snugly live
Is ripped open with teeth
And when that happens
You’re gonna fly in between the
Gear shift and the seat
And then maybe
Just maybe
The hand will be skilled enough to get you out
If you’re lucky enough they even look

But even as messed up as that is
Or even as wasted as Kesha is
She has a point
We are who we are
Sincerely, The Breakfast Club

doh re mi fa so la ti doh,now that's a sweet melody
but when love turns sour,the chords get broken,melody becomes a felony
my mama said "son,be careful when anybody comes to say,'i love you' "
my heart bleeds from all sides,a result of the expression "i love you"

the taste of sour love is worse than vinegar
it feels like ur locked up during the winter in a prison in Siberia
i never wanted it this way but this love became like a subway
it cant be repaired oh no! even if the parts are on lay away

when love turns sour,everything goes down the drain
i gave much,too much but don't know what ill get
cold nights,slow music,thoughts of what should have been in my brain
they told me love doesn't last,i shouldn't have made that bet

when love turns sour,you get a heavy heart on a skinny chest
its 50/50 fighting for love is like playing with the dead man's chest
still yet i'll take my chances in this Russian roulette
i tried so hard,but still my forehead got the bullet

this is what i get,mending the holes in my heart
i cant fight this alone,i tried,i tried :(
broken hearts,thoughtful heads,solitary lives,fear to commit,insecurities are all you get
WHEN LOVE TURNS SOUR

Sweet n' sour is the taste you get when you drink lemonade,
Sweet n' sour is the taste you get when you eat Sour Patch Kids,

Sweet n' sour is the feeling you get when you think someone is telling you the truth,
Then you find out that they aren't,

But somewhere in between the sweetness,
And the sourness of it all,
You find the happy medium,

Not sweet,
Not sour,
Just somewhere in between,

Kind of like the color grey.

The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



collected in
collection
A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...

“i hate sweets”
you’d once said
being offered a cake
and having none of it
for you did not like the taste

i wondered why that was
and came to the conclusion
that perhaps the reason
was because you had known
the taste of sweetness for too long
the people around you
they looked at you
talked to you
and they were
too sweet
tooth-achingly so

and maybe that was why you loved me
because i was far from sweet
i was sour
slightly painful
i've been told i'm unpleasant (not by you, of course)

an acquired taste, you'd said

"not unpleasant," were the words you whispered
smile crooked
eyes mellow
relaxed
"just a bit different"

i wondered if you loved me
because i was "me"
or because i was "sour"
because i wasn't "sweet"

so i
covered myself
in candy,
asked you what you think

"my dear,"
you smiled
"i wouldn't care
how 'sweet' you are
for i would still love you"

"but you hate sweets" i countered,
and you
laughed at me
"i also hate the sour taste of lemons," you said
"and you're the most sour person on this earth"

i was directed to this place by Marty Feldman, and he said i should say this password to gain entry: float like a chapati, sting like a vindaloo.

i' not good at making passes at someone's death,
just yesterday i was thinking
while a quiz show took place with haiku clues
regarding famous people, so i wondered
aloud: would it still be the correct answer if
you said: cassius clay? what a cool name,
colossus of clay - what the hell does Muhammad
and Ali have to do with african rooting
when you hardly speak Swahili? a bit pointless,
but a name like cassius clay... unstoppable -
already mythological, rather than a family
feud between Ali and the Caliphs after Muhammad's
death - maybe he should have confirmed his
baptism as Muhammad Ali with a confirmation
akin to catholic practice and added a surname, like
Khadijah, well... if Mozart is turning in his coffin
for his music being turned into a muzak
or a Porcupine Tree tree song, then the first wife of
Muhammad is turning in hers... a wise women
of sound economic acumen could be compared
by secular standards to Gabriel's voice, women tell lies,
just today i saw plain Jane turn into a stunner,
she was gagging to go on a date with a guy of her dreams,
by media standards a subsequent loser in Morocco,
at a photo shoot of practising flirtation a half-and-half
love affair between the Gothic island of the Caribbean
that's England and the Bahamas flirted with olive skin,
blue eyes and pecks, and an ego shaped like a woodpecker...
or an u.z.i., poor guy, got to make a show,
but the ***** is out! she noticed her eyes!
what further shahada of scheherazade?
just one more night, just one more night, one more, night.
demigods and men, traces of narcissus in man resides
in his eyes, nowhere else, man and woman fall in love
with their eyes, rather than narcissus and the complete
visage, but as i once said: imagine narcissus looking
into the sea - he might as well have fallen in love with
the stillness of the lake rather than the image represented
by it - across the seven seas he roamed, across the seven
zeniths, until he came across the Lake of Echo,
and heard the echo of footsteps beside him, to have seen
the natural mirror by moonlight, and settled to lie,
disguising himself as a flower worth recycling:
each god in polytheism his own individual, reigning ideal
in the pantheon of gods: solipsism - with man's intervention
a notably study of, himself.
although i'd love to chat thoroughly about this,
i'm not so sure i want to - hear the words:
you're a good man... you're a good man in a brothel?
you think a ******* would forget saying that
and continue? *persona incognito grata -
a golden crown on her tooth that i peered into with her
Ukrainian accent speaking polish, i lost my virginity
to a French girl without any connection - proceeding
from the way she decided a child learning a new language
aged 8 could not be considered a native speaker
for a psychology experiment - i gave her a silent lesson
in history concerning Napoleon and the last heroic act
of warfare, after that, civilians were utilised like bombs
or rifles, the many guilts after all the killing seized.
anyway, today i decided to cook two knock-outs...
the first was intended as a kolhapuri chicken curry,
the latter was chicken do'h pyaaza, with the later
the title, indeed the fenugreek incident, fenugreek
being a concentrated version of kasoori methi,
if the Turks invented hot & sour with a pickled chilli,
the blue Indians invented a whole palette of sour and hot
with this dish, and the crucial ingredient that's
fenugreek - although the crystalline form of this spice
is more potent - the recipe asked for one tablespoon
of the raw products, the leaves (kasoori methi) -
i added a teaspoon of the concentrated stuff -
what a disaster! i asked for two tasters to tell me that i
wasn't tasting bitterness in the gravy as if i added some
English ale revenge against continental beers...
because the excess of the component of intended sourness
of the fenugreek turned into an ale-like bitterness -
hence the notion that sour isn't an antonym of sweet,
but bitter is - hence sweet & sour rather than
sweet & bitter - you can have a turkish pickled chilli
and still have a compliment on the palette of hot & sour,
but imagine tasting bitterness - excess of concentrated
kasoori methi does the trick - and since Faust doesn't
have an Igor like Dr. Frankenstein, he turned himself
into a hunchback, and started picking out most of the
fenugreek crystals from the gravy, one by one, ony by one,
hunched over the sauces - until the bitterness disappeared
and the intended sourness came through -
it took a while, but Faust as his own assistant kept on
saying: stop lying, stop lying! i want to eat this sauce too!
that's the thing with chemistry and cooking,
i received a present not too long ago, an arsenal
of spices, which means i can punch-bag you a Peshwari
naan with raisin and almond stuffing (a bit of sugar too),
and i can add the raw ingredients - i'm richer with
spices than with drugs or gold: turmeric is also known
as saffron - although saffron is more potent,
turmeric does the same job... coriander powder, cumin
power (also seeds), mint the prime garnish for
do'h pyazza curry... garam masala made from scratch,
meaning i have: cardamom pods, cloves, black cardamom,
mace... and i can make you a kohlapur masala...
honestly... in this great culinary babylon of english society,
from pizzas to chinese to Kentucky to New York
street vendors... i'd give up the cuisine i was born in
and convert to India's palette... i don't need to convert
anything else... religion can remain with those who
barely read, or who read and cite only one book...
let them have it... i don't care...
i already converted to a non-religious fascination with
mystical Judaism (sorry Allah, couldn't do anything
with your name, it didn't fit the Latin revision of thinking
about it), and as such, converted to a dreamy everyday
of India's culinary prowess - Kama Sutra is nothing
compared to the recipes from Kashmir or anywhere
where the blue bloods fascinated the merchants rather than
scalped them in berserker rage among the puritan
envoys.