Alphabet Piumaesque

On one recent night in Seattle, Chris Piuma handed me a tiny abecedarium, wrapped in light-blue laid coverstock and inscribed,

Geof—
The more letters
you invent, the more
poems I have to write.
Enjoy!
         —Chris

Despite the pile of pencil stubs gracing the cover, the chapbooklet (palmsize) is entitled Exercises in Pensmanship. Restricted to twenty-six poems, the series is shorter than expected because no poem is longer than two lines long, and a couple confine their text to a single word. What is going on here?

Beginning with titles, the poems riff off those, quickly and quirkily. Sometimes, a pun is involved; the title is twisted into some new meaning. Other times, I ask myself, What is going on here? There’s humor everywhere. Take

Roman youth

Spent
using the card catalogue

Youth nowadays—there’s an antique-sounding word—is spent roaming the Internet instead.

There is an insistent colloquialism to these poems. Unpretentious to an extreme, but not quite light verse (the theme of my couple of days here).

That movie yesterday

I was like
twenty years younger

“Like,” here, marks the age of the speaker—barely old enough to’ve been in a movie twenty years ago. But that gets to only one interpretation. Maybe the speaker is only a moviegoer, not an actor. Age, therefore, is not an absolute but a relative measure of time.

The series itself understands its inscrutability:

Oh I really should

OK, sorry, getting abstract

This hints that the titles tell almost all, yet the poem doesn’t open itself up quite fully. I like being befuddled by poems, being taunted by their coy meaningness, so these are quite fun for me. But check these out yourself (each the sequence was also published in Aught # 9), and tell us what you discover. I’ve been trying to work out complex homophonic interpretations of the poems, but I haven’t quite found the key.

I really don’t need to know anything more about these. They’re fun enough as they are, but I know I’m missing something.

_____

Piuma, Chris. Exercises in Penmanship. Winston, Oregon: nine muses books, 2006.

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ecr. l’inf.