“I cannot tell the sum”: A cento for the day after the election, November 2024

I cannot tell the sum

I cannot see a spoke

I cannot see - your lifetime -

I cannot vouch the merry Dust

I cannot buy it - 'tis not sold -

I cannot be ashamed

I cannot be proud

I cannot meet the Spring - 

I cannot want it more -

I cannot want it less -

I cant tell you - but you feel it -

I cannot see my soul

I cannot make the Force

cannot fold a Flood

cannot feel the seam

cannot solder an Abyss

cannot prick with Saw

cannot make Remembrance grow

cannot comprehend it's price -

All this and more I cannot tell - (Andrew Shields, #111Words, a cento, 6 November 2024)

I can’t pretend like I understand: A cento for Election Day 2024

I can't pretend like I understand. I can't even be sure. I can't even say it with a straight face. I can't unlock it. I can't hear you any more. I can't get no relief. I can't hear one single word. I cannot explain that in lines. I cannot play this game. I can't make it all match up. I can't say anything to your face. I can't remember what it's like. I cannot be excused. I can't help myself. I can't even touch the books. I can't sing a song that I don't understand. I can't get out of bed. I cannot move; my fingers are all in a knot. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, a cento, 5 November 2024)

Wikipedia’s List of female United States presidential and vice presidential candidates – and comedian Gracie Allen’s 1940 spoof campaign

There's a Wikipedia "List of female United States presidential and vice presidential candidates" that goes back to Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child receiving nomintaton votes at the abolitionist Liberty Party convention in 1847. Only two women have ever received electoral-college votes for President, both in 2016: Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party and indigenous activist Faith Spotted Eagle, who received a vote from a faithless elector pledged to Clinton. But my favorite piece of trivia is in the list of women who have received 40,000 or more votes for President: it concludes with comedian Gracie Allen, whose 1940 spoof campaign for President for the Surprise Party garnered 42,000 votes nationwide. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 November 2024)

Mosquitoes in poems by Jane Hirshfield and Meagan Chandler

I have a set of online poetry magazines that I read to find poems to send Facebook friends on their birthdays. This morning, I read "I Was Not, Among My Kind, Distinctive", a new poem by Jane Hirshfield in the November 2024 issue of "Poetry": "I fed the world’s mosquitoes who fed the world’s bats." Perhaps that line would not have stuck in my head if it was not for "The Horse Trail", by Meagan Chandler, from the excellent Singapore-based daily literary magazine "Eunoia Review": "[...] the humming mosquito tickling / my ear with thirst as I clear a way through tangled reeds / convinces me that I am needed [...]." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 November 2024)

 

“Torius”, the earliest known named resident of the area that is now Basel

For my sixtieth birthday in August, my wife and my in-laws gave me a subscription to the new ten-volume history of Basel, "Stadt.Geschichte.Basel". Since then, I've been reading the first volume, one or two pages at a time, and in the last few days, I've arrived at the section about the Basel area during the Roman Empire. This morning, I came across an illustration of a "Gepäckanhänger aus Geweih" ("Luggage label made of horn"), which has an inscription: "T.Tori". As the book notes, this refers to the name of the luggage's owner, "Torius", which makes this otherwise unknown soldier the earliest resident of what is now Basel whose name is known. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 November 2024)

“Crackle”: The fifth derivative of position

I wanted to look up "crackle" because I wondered from a poem by Ada Limón if it might be the name of a bird (as the context of the poem suggested). It's not, but it is a name for "the fifth derivative of position". In order, the derivatives of position from the first to the sixth are velocity, acceleration, jerk (or jolt), jounce (or snap), crackle, and pop. Yes, the fourth to sixth derivatives are named after the characters in advertisements for Kellogg's Rice Krispies: snap, crackle, and pop. The latter don't come up often, but according to Wikipedia, reduction of snap, the derivative of jerk, to zero improves railway tracks. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 November 2024) 

Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Ohio sixth-graders in 1976

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was released as a single in the United Kingdom on 31 October 1975 and in the United States that December. At some time before June 1976, my sixth-grade music teacher at Ottawa Hills Elementary School in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, brought the song in for us to hear, discuss, and sing. We went through it so often that I have had all the lyrics and all the instrumental parts memorized ever since I was eleven. Or as a classmate said when I wrote a March 2010 post about listening to "Bohemian Rhapsody" with my children Miles (then 10) and Luisa (then 6), "the lyrics are burnt into my brain." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 31 October 2024)