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Simple Simon Responds to Sayings of Captain Obvious
English literature tends to be wordy.
Many tricks are exceedingly dirty.
On a bright sunny day the whole sky appears bluish.
All the teachers that pray in Old Hebrew are Jewish.
The weather is always mercurial.
Some questions are strictly rhetorical.
Happenstance is serendipitous.
Alps in France are more precipitous.
Though the days go so slowly, the years fly by fast.
It’s the same in the future as was in the past.
There are a lot of new emerging voices.
Yet not so many satisfactory choices.
There is no life that comes without a tussle.
Then I shall bring along some extra muscle.
Be sure you never eat the yellow snow.
But when you gotta go, you gotta go.
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Lethal Games
A shipwreck off the coast of Madagascar
Kills fewer people than the tracks of Nascar,
And nowadays in North America
The sport engenders mass hysteria.
Around the course accomplished racers drive
And hope to cross the finish line alive,
Regardless of the damage to the car
Enabling them to be that which they are.
In Rome, the people loved the Colosseum,
Which offered them a perfect carpe diem
Where bodies torn apart, one must assume,
Left little for grave robbers to exhume.
Today, the rise of therapeutic science
Has spawned no end of traffic-injured clients
Who’ve paid the highway’s steep and heavy toll
And hope a surgeon’s art can make them whole.
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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden. Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India. His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
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Simple Simon Responds – Feel free to point out the absurdly obvious that all humans are sometimes guilty of. But don’t you go picking on Frank Zappa, master of the poetic and musical message, exemplified by 1974 album ‘Apostrophe (‘)’. You know well enough that “yellow snow” was a metaphor for cultural norms that were indiscriminately accepted despite what was obvious. ( to him anyway) I’m sorry, I know that snow and go make a good rhyme, but come on man. Frank Zappa is an icon. You don’t want to minimize the Icon of our generation.
Other than that, yeah, good poem.
I liked “Lethal Games”, which linked yesteryear’s iron versus bone with today’s steel, plastic, rubber, and gasoline versus more steel, plastic, rubber, and gasoline. Different century, same thirst for blood.
I don’t understand, Frank, what my poem had to do with Frank Zappa. I liked him well enough, and I once saw him and his ensemble perform at the Fillmore East in NYC, but the only LP of his that I ever owned was Hot Rats.
RE: Rable’s comments: I had to look up Frank Zappa. As one who reveled in rock and roll, he was no icon, except perhaps to those who loved the bizarre. Research showed he had only one top 40 hit and that was “Valley Girl” that I do not remember and perhaps never heard. The Simple Simon responses are the types of parody I love to read. “Lethal Games,” indeed.
Zappa was a niche musician, Roy, with a strong cult following. Weird stuff, yes, but with superb musicianship. Did you read about what he named his children?
FM radio, not AM. But now that you know where that expression originated, my work is done.
Frank, we can attack anything or anybody we want here. It’s one of the unique liberties of the SCP, and a main reason why we are read so widely around the Anglophone poetry world.
Joe, I’m not sure where your concern lies here. I can tell you that to me, all which recently transpired is already in the rear view mirror. And I would certainly find it praiseworthy to allow criticism, particularly constructive criticism in an open forum. But when the line is crossed into “attacks” that become a more personal one on another member, is that still allowed? I hope not.
You are telling me something in general terms that I’m afraid I may misinterpret. If you are not comfortable in being more specific, maybe you can use Evan as a go-between (sorry Evan!) so that it all goes through the privacy of email.
Frank, you’re overreacting to all this. The only point I was making is that Kip Anderson has the right to attack Frank Zappa, or make fun of him, or use something that the man said about “yellow snow.” Poetry is a licensed zone of hyperreality, and no personal insults were intended against you. In actual fact, Kip never even mentioned Zappa by name.
There are no sacred icons here at the SCP. We can make fun of anything we want. And Zappa isn’t even a member here.
The only sacred icons here, Joseph, are actual sacred icons. I still don’t understand why Frank was upset. I would be surprised if I found out that Zappa invented “yellow snow.” I’ve known what it is since I was a little kid.
Go ahead and make fun of Zappa. He’s been dead for 32 years, He won’t care if you do. Apparently my joke of saying he was an icon was lost on some folks in the society. I merely wanted to point out that there was an actual source for that expression. It was a metaphor, and I did it in what I thought was a humorous way, not in a way that might be considered insulting. But why bother. The other thing, in the 1970’s AM played the “bubble gum” songs that made top 40 due to its larger audience. College students listened to FM stations, where a more sophisticated level of music was found. This included the poetic and the bizarre.
And please don’t accuse me of overreacting. YOU made a point of telling me about a policy of SCP, and the implication to me was that I had done something very wrong. I politely asked you for clarification and instead of doing that, you place judgement on my emotional state. You really shouldn’t tell anybody how they should feel. Did you actually read all the comments? It doesn’t sound like you did.
Yes, I did read all of the comments. But really, why are you making a mountain out of this molehill? Kip Anderson wasn’t even thinking about Frank Zappa when he wrote this poem. If your first comment was meant to be ironic in some way, it just didn’t work.
Mountain out a molehill? Joe, you better not use that in a poem. Now, I have to ask, why are you involved? C.B. seems very capable of speaking for himself. I have new respect for the man. He spoke his piece without getting personal. And does he know that you are reading his mind? Did he give permission for that?
I have a new metaphor for you: Penalty Box. Third man in has to go to the Penalty Box for awhile. Stay there till you’ve learned your lesson.
Now I know, come hell or high water (don’t use that either, I beg you!) you will want the last word, and I cede that privilege to you based on seniority. Go ahead. I suggest “blowing things out of all proportion” or “acting irrationally”. Or surprise me with something devastating, yet poetic. I will bear the slings and arrows 🙂 without further response.
First off, Frank, you do not get to tell anyone here what they can say or can’t say in a poem. That was the reason this contretemps began — you started it by saying that Kip Anderson wasn’t allowed to “pick on” Frank Zappa, or “to minimize the Icon of our generation.” Now you’re trying to argue that you were just being comic or ironic, when in plain fact no one at all read it that way.
Second, I’m involved because anyone here can make a comment in the discussion threads, and what they say can only be censored by the webmaster Evan Mantyk, or by the poet whose work is being discussed. Kip Anderson can direct that postings in this thread be deleted. but you can’t.
Third, you can’t make up and impose any new rules about a “Penalty Box” or “Third Man” or any other kind of adolescent posturing of that sort.
OK now? I hope that’s all clear.
CB. Your three latest comments just popped up. Not your fault. As I recall, SCP had a server failure yesterday, But now they were apparently entered all at once and put into the proper chronological order, I actually wished I could have read the first two before now. But that third one, hmm. Perhaps the reason that you don’t understand why I was upset is that I wasn’t. If I wasn’t upset after you trashed my latest poem, then nothing else is going to do it. I have written some stinkers, but that was probably the best thing I’ve written. You know why I took more time to present my view? It’s because I thought it was necessary to fully explain why I feel as I do about hell. Besides the, “Its in the bible stupid”, I had a friend who told me that I had very cavalierly dismissed something that he firmly believed in. So I tried for a more thorough explanation for something I believe. So if you were truly worried about my being upset, please don’t be. I have real life concerns that dwarfs anything happening here. I thought that participating in the comments would be a good distraction, but it’s not turning out that way. By the way, Zappa never claimed to “invent”yellow snow,” he just copyrighted the song in which the phrase appears. I just thought you might want to know.
I had a friend at college who every month or so bought a Zappa record and one other, so I got to hear him quite often. I especially enjoyed the Lou Reed-esque monologues.
I think perhaps it needs to be clarified that there’s a classic bit of Zappa which goes ‘Watch out where the huskies go, / And don’t you eat that yellow snow.’ It always makes me laugh, and hearing it just now, it hasn’t let me down.
🙂