Everything I Needed to Know
Ashes, Ashes, we fall on our asses
because the teacher has us. Rodeo
clowns make about as much sense, but then they
don't graduate from kindergarten
early either. Neither did they have
for their teacher Mrs. Cunningham, whose
grave countenance no kid had the word for:
Her is no bull sitter. Her is squeezing
in chair, knees together. Her is a locked
jaw with lips like a bad ventriloquist's.
Kind of like a lady Clutch Cargo. Or
like the bride of a Nordic Frankenstein,
motherless but blonde, beautiful, and big.
Nobody here knows she has another
occupation but me. I'm her little
Picasso, her baby ham, and cunning.
"Quit staring, Karl Curtis," she says, looking
right at me. She knows for a split
second she disappeared and does not want
to reveal her secret identity
underneath. I know she knows I draw some
very naked ideas. Later, when
we go around and tell in tones like the
xylophone's, girls always first, what it is
you want to be when you grow up, I say
Zorro because a poet needs a mask.
***
Hello Friends —
Today's poem is an example of one of the older poetic forms, the abecedarius (or abecedarium), in which each line begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. "Everything I Needed to Know" comes from Karl Elder's Mead, a collection of 26 abecedariums of 26 lines each (and 10 syllables per line throughout), which I believe was first published in the Winter 2003 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal.
Many variations of the abecedarius form have been developed over the centuries, the most prominent of which is the acrostic (a poem in which the first letter of each line spells a word vertically). To learn more about the abecedarius, I highly recommend Matthea Harvey's article "Don Dada on the Down Low Getting Godly in His Game: Between and Beyond Play and Prayer in the Abecedarius" from the Spring 2006 issue of American Poet magazine. The title of Harvey's article comes from perhaps my favorite contemporary abecedarius, the track "Alphabet Aerobics" by the Bay Area hip-hop group Blackalicious from their 1999 album A2G — which you can listen to here (lucky you! just hit the play button, then select track 8).
Lastly, today's poem-a-day is dedicated to Kevin Perry, with whom I have fond memories of writing abecedariums after school at Galloway.
Enjoy.
Ellen
Labels: NPM