Writing My Own Pantoum

by Horace J. Digby


I was never big on poetry. But when a writer friend named Luana Krause told me about a new kind of poem based on geometry, I liked it. It's called a pantoum (pan-toom). Actually they date back to the 19th century, but to me any poem that doesn't begin, "There was a young man from Killarney," is new.

Pantoums are six verses long, and each verse has four lines. Poets call these verses "stanzas," but trust me, they're just paragraphs. In a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of each stanza repeat as the first and third lines of the next stanza. Clear enough? Luana had a chart. The first and third lines of the first stanza end up clustered in the last stanza. Nobody likes a clustered last stanza (well, except for Sitting Bull).

Here's that chart: http://arb.nzcer.org.nz/nzcer3/english/written/3200-999/wl3236.htm.

The first line of my pantoum was easy. It was also the last line, so I copied it to the bottom of the page. The second line was repeated a the first line of the next stanza. I wrote new lines every so often, and pasted them wherever the chart said. Remember the chart?

Soon I had a dull ache in my cheek bones and my temples were throbbing. But I kept going. I didn't stop, because I was . . .

Writing my own pantoum.
The lines are all hopping about.
Why the first line goes where the last lines goes,
I don't think I can figure that out.
The lines are all hopping about.
Doesn't this thing need to rhyme?
I don't think I can figure that out.
Now the second line is the fifth line.
Doesn't this thing need to rhyme?
My brain is beginning to cramp.
Now the second line is the fifth line.
Who the hell's idea was that?

My brain is beginning to cramp.
Will my keyboard be melting down too?
Who the hell's idea was that?
I've been writing this poem since noon.

Will my keyboard be melting down too?
Tell me now, if anyone one knows.
I've been writing this poem since noon.
Will this riddle see me to my doom?

Tell me now, if anyone one knows.
Why the first line goes where the last line goes.
Will this riddle see me to my doom?
Writing my own pantoum.
What you see is my tenth draft. I'm still not happy with that line about "doom." But if I do say so myself, my poem doesn't even look like a limerick.

When I read it to my son, Adam, he said, "It's great Dad." There was genuine respect in his voice, although he did wince at the Sitting Bull joke.

"What about the Killarney joke?"

"It should be 'Nantucket'," Adam said cheerily. But his enthusiasm was waning.

"I saw you wince at 'Sitting Bull' . . . "

"Wince is a polite word for what I did. But it's fine, Dad."

"Let me re-read this line about . . ."

"PUT THE PANTOUM DOWN!!!" Adam said, sounding like the commander of a SWAT team. He had unholstered his Smith & Wesson 340PD DAO J-Frame Magnum, but the laser site wasn't on. There was no red dot.

This may seem weird, but that little red dot is how I tell when an article's finished.

-- Horace J. Digby

Copyright © 2006 Lexington Film, LLC. All rights reserved

Spellling - The New Democracy

by Horace J. Digby
Winner of the Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor


Google® is my new spell checker. Just type in any version of a word and see how many "hits" you get. It's so grand and ever so democratic, letting the Internet vote on spelling. Even the word "dictionary" is beginning to sound so . . . well, dictatorial.

Here's how my system works. Take a word, like "dichotomy." If you Google® it as "d-i-c-h-o-t-e-m-y" (with out the hyphens of course) you get eight 813 hits. This means 813 people think you spelled it right. But "d-i-c-h-o-t-o-m-y" with a second "o" gets 12,600,000 votes. Isn't that great?

Sure 813 people think you are wrong, but that other 12,600,000 could beat the phonics out of those guys in a fair fight.

And the next time your son or daughter gets marked down for spelling "dichotomy" with an "e," this data proves that little Johnny or Barbara is entitled to partial credit at least. Dan Quayle is demanding a recount on his "potato" goof back in 1992. His spelling, "potatoe," gets a respectable 1,300,000 votes on Google.® But then, "optato" (the typo I entered on my first try) got 924,000.

The point is (with all due respect to Webster, Cambridge and Oxford) dictionaries are a thing of the past. Instead of just seeing what Webster thinks, now we can find out how everybody spells a word. Dictionaries no longer serve any function, except of course if you want to know what a word means.

Search engines don't work well for that. Take "dichotomy." To me it sounds like an operation . . . "They're going to take my dichotomy out next Tuesday.

When I Google® it there's this big a split of opinion. It's like two different schools of thought—two entrenched camps—exist around the meaning of "dichotomy."

One down-side of using search engines for spell checkers is, you have to come up with alternate spellings—especially if the your first try doesn't get many votes. A good rule of thumb is, if you get less than ten million hits, you're spelling it wrong. On the other hand, just try looking up "soriasis" in Webster's.® You'll never find it. On Google® it gets 52,800 hits.

Andrew Jackson said, "It is a damn poor mind that cannot think of more than one way to spell a word."

I actually found five versions of Jackson's quote on the net. One site left out the word "damn." Heck, even Nixon deleted expletives. But in this case, the title of the site with this "D" word sensitivity is, "A Hell of a Parentheses." No kidding.
Another site attributed the quote to Thomas Jefferson. Many things are attributed to Jefferson recently.
I've figure Jackson's original quote was probably: "It is a damn poor mind indeed that can think of only one way to misquote a President."

-- Horace J. Digby
http://www.lexingtonfilm.com/

Copyright © 2006 Lexington Film, LLC. All rights reserved