Tag Archives: writing

BOOK REVIEW: Write the Fight Right by Alan Baxter

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Write The Fight RightWrite The Fight Right by Alan Baxter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amazon page

I was going to pan this for being the wrong book, but then I read through the blurb (and even the subtitle) and realized that it was largely my fault that I got the wrong book. Furthermore, I recognized that the information contained in this tiny e-book is good and that it’s packaged in a concise form. I, thus, concluded that this is the right book for someone—just not me nor many of you. I’ll, therefore, devote the bulk of this review to differentiating for whom the book will be beneficial and for whom it won’t. Because of the dearth of books on the topic I was interested in, I can imagine others erroneously purchasing this book and having (the albeit tiny) $2.50 worth of buyer’s remorse.

I purchased this book (and another one that returned on the search for “writing fight scenes”) because I’m rewriting a chapter in my novel in which fight scenes are prominent. I realized that there is a fine art to writing a good fight scene, and that I could use some help in being more effective at it. One needs fight scenes to have fast pacing and to be visceral. At the same time, one must avoid getting bogged down in detail even in the face of multiple attackers or unfamiliar and complex weaponry. This book won’t help you one iota in this regard, and, to be fair, it says in the blurb that the book will not help with one’s writing.

The book is about what it’s like to be in a fight and how to separate Hollywood myth and misconception from reality. As a long-time martial artist with both military and law enforcement training as well as an avid reader, there was nothing new or interesting in this book—though there wasn’t much I would disagree with either.

Three criteria for readership:
1.) You haven’t witnessed or experienced a fight (outside the choreography of the silver screen) since middle school. This book describes the experience and effects of fighting and what skilled fighters try to do in close-quarters combat. It aims to help writers purge theatrical nonsense from their fight scenes and inject some verisimilitude.

2.) Your fight scene is a standard 20th/21st century brawl. What is discussed is one-on-one fighting–unarmed or with weapons that one might see wielded today. One won’t gain insight useful in historical fiction, or anything that doesn’t echo today’s form of fighting.

3.) You don’t want to put a lot of time or effort into reading and / or researching the subject. The author does advise the reader to take martial arts or self-defense classes as a superior way to learn what he is trying to teach. What this book has going for it is that it’s only a 43 page (and a couple dollar) investment. If one is interested in getting a much deeper understanding of the topics covered, I would recommend a combination of Lt. Col. David Grossman’s On Killing in conjunction with any number of full-length martial arts books (I’m reading Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do presently, and it’s certainly an excellent candidate.)

To summarize: this book is useful to teach one about realism in fight scenes, and not about structuring such scenes. There are only three examples (2 short and one long) in the book—none from what would be considered exemplary works. If you’ve taken a martial art or had military or law enforcement experience, there’s unlikely to be anything new or intriguing in this book. Even if you just watch MMA regularly and / or read about fighting or combat, there’s a good chance you won’t learn much.

However, if watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Rumble in the Bronx and say, “So that’s what a fight looks like,” you should definitely give this book a read.

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A Few Thoughts on Writing Book Reviews

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UlyssesOne gets an entirely different perspective on reading and writing when one starts doing book reviews. One finds that many of works that have been capturing one’s attention are, in fact, crap in one or more dimensions.

 

I think about books along five dimensions. I’d like to claim that I synch these five dimensions to the five-star rating system that I inherited from GoodReads, but I don’t. How I rate the book is more subjective than that, though the five dimensions are roughly the basis of my scoring. One will note that most all of my ratings are three through five. This may make it seem like I’m a softy, but it’s because I review what I want to read. By passing the twin threshold of having been started and having been finished, the books I review have generally shown themselves to have some merit in my eyes. I’ve occasionally given a lower rating to a book that was intriguingly bad or deliciously bad—or because it seemed good until the ending was botched. Just know that if someone else were picking my books, my rating distribution would be much more bell-shaped.

 

So, back to the five dimensions:

1.)    Language: For a book to get a five-star score, it’s usually got to impress me with its use of language. Note that I didn’t say “dazzle” me. Authors that try to “dazzle” are as likely to get points deducted for lack of readability. Not that I don’t agree with what Neil Gaiman said, “…, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.”  Still, I like to find something that intrigues in the use of language. It’s as likely to be successful use of sparseness as it is colorfulness. And, if you’re going to thwart convention, do it artfully and thoughtfully. Incidentally, it’s not just fiction in which I’m looking for creative and intriguing use of language, but it’s more likely to be pursued in that domain.

2.)    Organization: In fiction this might be a narrative arc that builds and maintains tension. In nonfiction, it can be narrative, but more likely it’s just a logical arrangement so that the information is easily consumed.

3.)    Readability: This is related to the previous items, but it’s not identical to either of them. It’s also hard to define readability except to say that it’s as easy to read and comprehend as it can be and still get the message across. Obviously, some works have a more difficult message to get across, and some works have to be purposefully vague in places. I also grade on a curve or older literature which might be needlessly purple, but right for its time. However, writing is always and everywhere and act of communication and, therefore, the clearer one can be the better. If I can read through once and not have to go back to figure out what’s going on because of what seem like conflicts, I’m usually pleased.

4.)    Uniqueness: Sure, there’s nothing new under the sun, but if you’re the four millionth teenage vampire novel, good luck getting my attention. That’s not to say that any hackneyed-looking concept can’t be done up with new and interesting specifics. Unless you have a James Patterson-like sweatshop of writers in your basement, you’re not going to catch the latest fad while it’s still a fad so give it and think creatively. It’s like they say about taxi drivers and stock market advice. You know when to sell a stock when a taxi driver gives one a hot tip to buy it.

5.)    Thought-provocation: This is simply, does the book offer food for thought. This applies not only to nonfiction works that are trying to inform. A novel, too, is hard pressed to get a five-star rating unless it makes me go “huh” about something.

 

It’s worth pointing out that I use GoodReads as my platform for building reviews. I use it because it’s very simple. One drops the review into a box and, when one publishes it, the cover photo and hyperlinked title and author are right there without ever having to mess with finding a photo of the book jacket or deal with building links. They also have a quick-study guide to the html code one may need for font manipulation and so forth. I do write the reviews in Microsoft Word and paste them into the GoodReads form because I’ve been twice bitten with accidently pushing some random combination of buttons that irrevocably deletes my post—inevitably as I’m putting the final edits on it.

BOOK REVIEW: 250 Things… by Chuck Wendig

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250 Things You Should Know About Writing250 Things You Should Know About Writing by Chuck Wendig

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amazon page

You’re not going to get any visionary insight from Wendig’s book. What you will get is a lot of practical advice on writing salable commercial fiction delivered in a concise and humorous package. However, be forewarned, Wendig’s humor isn’t for everyone. It’ll appeal most to frat boys and others who enjoy the gratuitously bawdy.

The book really is arranged as a list of 250 pieces of advice on writing commercial fiction. These items are arranged logically into chapters covering topics such as character, setting, plot, description, screenwriting, and marketing your manuscript. The book offers a good way to review a lot of information if you enjoy the author’s sense of humor.

Rather than recommend the book without reservation, it may make more sense to make a couple lists of my own.

List I: People who will love this book.
-If you watch Robot Chicken and Archer, you’ll love this book.
-If you want to be the next Chuck Palahniuk,…
-If you send freakish porn to co-workers and are shocked by their stunned silence,…

List II: People who will hate this book.
-If you watch Downton Abbey and The MacNeil Lehrer Newshour, you’ll hate this book.
-If you want to be the next Chaucer,…
-If you are a deacon or lay minister in your church,…

Wendig’s language doesn’t leave a lot of room for middle-of-the-road views. His attempts to entertain as he informs will make the book quite readable for some and unpalatable for others. However, I suppose if you’re in the Venn intersect of those who watch both Downton Abbey and Robot Chicken you might have middling views on the book.

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Drunk, Narcissist, or Buddha: What Kind of Writer Are You?

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IMG_0173I read a story in The Guardian the other day entitled “What drives writers to drink?”  It was actually an edited excerpt from a book by Olivia Laing entitled The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink.

I found this piece fascinating despite the fact that the title question seemed readily answered with another question, “In what other occupation must one regularly, repeatedly, and thoroughly get punched in the soul in order to succeed?” Writing is a personal act, and no piece of writing that is read escapes the assault of criticism, invited and uninvited, which ranges from sagacious to ridiculous.

One somehow has to find the courage to wade through what feels a lot like attacks on one’s intellectual self in order to discover what is useful and what is not. If one summarily rejects all criticism and advice, one will neither grow nor is one likely to be published. If one accepts all criticism as having merit, one may find a psychiatric ward in one’s future–and one is likely to remain unpublished. So the trick is to be able to answer the question, “What within this writing is genuinely bad?”

The problem is that it feels like the question is, “What about me is flawed?” It’s like holding a mirror up to the core of one’s being and noticing that you have some rot.

How do writers do this? There are probably innumerable approaches, but three common ones come to mind. The first is the one thoroughly addressed in Laing’s book; that is, some writers self-medicate. The article references a quote by Tennessee Williams, “…you felt as if a new kind of blood had been transfused into your arteries, a blood that swept away all anxiety and all tension for a while, and for a while is the stuff that dreams are made of.”

A second unhealthy approach is to reject any assertion that contradicts one’s perfection. In other words, be a narcissist. These are the writers who meet each and every piece of criticism with statements like, “you just don’t understand what I was trying to do there, my misspelling was actually a clever commentary on the zeitgeist of 20th century Armenia.”

The narcissists have the advantage not becoming clinically depressed by the constant rejection and criticism that is a life of writing. The downside is that they have to live in a world in which everyone else on the planet is ignorant and incapable of recognizing brilliance when it’s shining in their faces, and that is depressing in its own way. Only a few in this group manage to get published, and they do so through a combination of being truly great and, at least early on, being willing to tarnish their awesomeness by accepting some editorial suggestions.

The third approach is the one that we should all aspire to, but it’s a bitch getting there. In the title I used “Buddha” as a code word for the enlightened approach. What is the enlightened approach to dealing with rejection and criticism? First, one must realize that equating one’s writing and one’s self is illusory, and that criticism of one’s work isn’t criticism of self. Before any writer gets to the point of submitting works to agents, editors, or publishers someone along the line has told one that one’s writing is good. This fatal compliment causes one’s self-worth to become entangled in one’s writing.

Second, one must develop a confidence that isn’t rooted in external validation. In less pretentious words, one mustn’t feel it necessary to be loved by everyone with whom one comes into contact. This is hell if one’s entire life is writing. The value of published writing is inseparable from how it’s received. My only suggestion on this point is to find something else in one’s life that allows one to build self-confidence. For me, this has been martial arts. Sure there are usually rank tests, which are about validation from one’s teacher. However, what it really comes down is whether one experiences success in training and sparring. If one sees some success, the rank starts to be irrelevant to one’s confidence. I think outdoorsmanship is another such skill– for those less scared of bears than being beaten ugly with a stick. There are few activities in which other’s evaluation of one is ultimately irrelevant, but those are the activities with which one should seek to balance one’s writing.

If anyone needs me I’ll be guzzling Bourbon and contemplating how the publishing industry is run by poop-weasels.

Teachable and Unteachable Lessons

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[Note: This is posted in my Jissen Budōka blog as well.]

Source: Wikipedia; Status: Public Domain

Source: Wikipedia; Status: Public Domain

Miyamoto Musashi, who was undefeated in over 60 duels, claimed that he never had a teacher. Some historians refute this claim. Whether one accepts it or not, the statement astonishes.

Musashi wasn’t talking only about martial arts, but about the many areas in which he was accomplished. Not being a painter or a sculptor, I can’t say how important a teacher is in such domains. But it’s easy enough for me to imagine a successful writer who never took a formal class in writing; someone who read profusely and practiced his (or her) craft relentlessly could do it. (Certainly, one can easily imagine successful writers whose formal education was in some area other than writing because there are so many of them–probably at least as many as those whose education was in writing. Examples include: Vonnegut [Chemistry], Crichton [Medicine], Zane Grey [Dentistry], Ursala LeGuin [Anthropology], and J.K. Rowling [French]. That’s not even to start on the many literary legends who dropped out all together– e.g. Dickens, Faulkner, Twain, H.G. Wells, and Jack London.) This isn’t to say that writing teachers don’t make writing better, but just that there is a path to this skill that doesn’t involve being fed lessons.

However, I struggle to imagine a martial artist achieving so much without a teacher. Boiled down to its most workaday definition, a martial art is a collections of lessons about what works in a combative situation. This is what separates the importance of a teacher in martial arts from that of a discipline like writing. In writing, one has the leisure to make one’s mistakes, learn from them, and self-apply course corrections. Musashi was in life or death duels; he couldn’t learn lessons at such a leisurely pace and in such an iterative fashion.

A martial arts teacher has a number of roles, such as preventing inertia (slacking) from taking hold in the training hall. However, the most fundamental purpose is to pass along the collection of lessons so that a student doesn’t have to learn them all by way of personal experience. Most of us aren’t Miyamoto Musashi; we can’t survive the process of learning all our own lessons.

Needless to say, I am a firm believer in the value of a good teacher. I’ve had several over the years, and I received valuable lessons from all of them–all with different, but no less valid, points of emphasis and flavor.

Having said all that proceeds, there’s much that cannot be taught. Such lessons may be described or discussed, but they cannot be learned except through the initiative of the student. I said that most of us can’t survive the process of learning all one’s own lessons, but I’ve increasingly come to believe that one can’t survive learning none of them either. In the beginning, one must be fed the lessons from a teacher in order grow. However, as the decades pass, one increasingly needs the space to learn one’s own lessons. If one lacks said space, one will stagnate and eventually the wheels will roll off one’s training altogether.

So what are the unteachable lessons? Knowledge can be conveyed, but not everything that a martial artist must learn is knowledge. Confidence cannot be taught. A teacher may explain–or even show–how he or she became confident, but that won’t translate one iota into the student being more confident.  This is like a Buddhist monk telling one that “desire is the root of suffering.” One may understand that statement. One may believe the statement. However, one’s suffering won’t decrease because one has the knowledge.  One’s suffering will only decrease if one conscientiously does the hard work of reducing one’s desires.

Another area of unteachable lessons are the lessons that the teacher has never learned. Loyalty is a great virtue, and so there may be a tendency to restrict one’s learning to the lessons of one teacher. However, even if one has an outstanding teacher and are practicing a great lineage, blind spots happen. The only way to learn whether there is anything of value obscured in those blind spots is to throw off one’s blinders and have a look for oneself.

What blinders? An excellent and tricky  question.  It’s like when someone says, “it’s not what you said, but the way you said it.” We all understand that there is some intangible character in language that is commonly understood but not easily seen or defined. In any culture (and a dōjō contains a culture, believe me) there’s always a collection of norms, rules of thumb, ideas, beliefs, mores, credos, etc. that come to be taken so much for granted that they become an invisible filter through which one sees the world. This isn’t an inherently bad thing, and it’s probably necessary to produce sufficient order in a chaotic world in which to learn and grow. Having said that, some of the ideas and beliefs in our cultural filter may be arbitrary, or at least not universal, but yet we don’t necessarily see the potential for error because we are seeing the world through the cultural filter. We take for granted that grass is green, but what if we see it through a yellow filter? Then it’s blue. Right?

Why I’m a Slacker Lately: or, Mysterious India

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What's this India I hear so much about?

What’s this India I hear so much about?

I haven’t been writing, editing, or conducting research much as of late. This has probably gone unnoticed in the vastness of the cyberspace, but in the spirit of blogging I thought I’d answer a question that no one asked. I recently learned that my wife and I will probably be moving to Bangalore, India later in the year. This has kept me physically occupied with home repair and boxing up the house. In my non-labor moments, my mental faculties are largely devoted to understanding the country in which I will be living. I’ve never been there before.

India is a harder nut to crack than one might think. Yes, there is the obvious. At 1.2 billion people, it has the world’s second largest population and is screaming up on China for number one. It’s the seventh largest country by land area. It’s the birthplace of that most excellent yoga that keeps all the twisty people twisty. It’s home of tandoori chicken and naan bread, both of which I love.

However, that’s all superficial. I must sadly admit that–until recently–my in-depth knowledge has come from three sources:

1.) The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

2.) A junior high school field trip to see the film Gandhi, which I had been under the impression was six hours long, but, according to Wikipedia, is only a little over three hours long. I guess that, just as kids think everyone is taller, a kid’s perception of Oscar-winning motion picture run times is greatly distorted.

3.) A ton of reading about the Indo-Pakistani rift and its strategic implications as a graduate student studying International Affairs with a focus on Strategic Studies.

With respect to number 3, the amount of study of this region was not commensurate with the fact that the Indo-Pakistani border region is generally voted “Most Likely Point of Origin for Global Nuclear Winter.” I’m not suggesting that the relationship between India and Pakistan is any more dysfunctional, unstable, or rooted in irrationality than other relationships between nuclear powers. However, the adjacency of the two countries is a problem from the perspective of strategic stability.  When alarms went off in the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. back in the day, there was at least a little time to evaluate and communicate. Being next-door neighbors makes the Indo-Pakistani conflict particularly troubling. That said, they’ve had some pretty big strain tests on their relationship without blowing up the world, so that’s a positive sign.

So why does this country, which should be so front and center in the global consciousness, remain so mysterious? One way we know countries is by those grand competitions through which nations–friends and enemies alike–interact.   In this domain, India really hides its light under a bushel. India has won 26 Olympic medals in 23 games, this is fewer than either Kenya or Jamaica–and both of those countries did it in fewer games. Yesterday, in a post about a book by Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian, Imre Kertész, I may have mentioned that Hungarians have won 12 Nobel Prizes–that’s more than India by a large margin.  Now, while India has had its problems, it’s 100 times more populous than Hungary, and has a history of publishing scientific literature in English (an undeniable advantage in this domain.) Depending upon which country Rudyard Kipling is counted toward, India has either eight or nine Nobel Prize wins. Of course, it would be ridiculous to think that India doesn’t have the human capital to excel in such domains.  While I realize it may not be a representative sample, I think almost every Indian I’ve met in person has had an advanced degree and has been smart as a whip. So it’s certainly NOT true that this is a country that undervalues education.  With a third of the world’s population, statistically speaking, they must be home to physical and mental specimens of humanity that are as impressive as any, but somehow either the will or ability to convert that human capital into winners on the global stage is missing.

I do know a little more about India. It’s the birthplace of both Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as a bunch of other religions. As a martial artist, I’ve heard that  many believe most Asian fighting systems could trace their origins back to India. I don’t know how much truth there is to this belief. Martial arts always evolve into optimization with the local conditions and culture, and, therefore, a lack of superficial similarities doesn’t discount the possibility of such a connection. One of the origin myths the Indo-centric martial arts is the story that Bodhidharma brought a fighting style to China that would be the stepping off point for most of the myriad Asian martial arts. The current consensus among historians seems to be that this part of the Bodhidharma story is not true (See: Meir Shahar’s The Shaolin Monastery.) However, that being said, there is an odd but clear connection between this most pacifistic of world religions, Buddhism, and some of the world’s most kick-ass martial arts. Whether one is talking about China’s Shaolin monks or Japan’s legendary warrior-monk Benkei, it’s clear that some exceptional martial arts have developed in tandem with the spread of Buddhism. Of course, even this just creates more questions, namely: Why should a pacifist religion have legendary fighters sprouting up anywhere near it?

I’m looking forward to getting to know more about India than that it’s huge and its Chicken Vindaloo is scrumptious. It’s a country with a long and intriguing history. I want to see its jungles, its deserts, its mountains, and its beaches. I want to visit its temples and learn from its sages. I’m eager to see its vivid colors and smell [at least some] of its pungent scents. At some point I expect to have some awesome posts about my time there, and hopefully some bold pictures as well. In the mean time, please forgive my slacking.

POEM: Overcast Day

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Clouds tugged themselves over the city like a thick quilt
adding to the gritty gray inner-city nightmare.
I rode through this monochrome madness
without seeing a person on the sidewalks.
I felt their eyes peer down through ash-covered windows,
like a hand running over the tips of tiny hairs on my back
A high-pitched tone sounded in my ears
filling the void of chirpless birds and dumbstruck relicts

It can’t be long now.

WRITING DEVICES: The Author Cameo in A Dead Hand

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I’ll soon finish reading a novel by Paul Theroux called A Dead Hand. I won’t get into the details of the book in this post because I’ll do a review later, but there’s a writing device in it that really intrigued me. Theroux inserts himself into the novel in a cameo role as a competitor to the protagonist. That is to say, the main character is a traveling writer who writes mostly magazine articles, while Theroux a prolific writer famous for travelogues such as The Great Railway Bazaar and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,  as well as for many novels which are written with a travel writer’s sensibility for location. (A Dead Hand takes place in and around Calcutta, India.)

I enjoyed the author cameo. It would only work well for a writer like Theroux, one who is both well-known and, because of his nonfiction work, who readers have a feel for as a person. Still, I couldn’t think of another novel I’ve read in which this has been done. I’ve only read Theroux’s nonfiction so far, so maybe this is a running gag with him.

Inserting himself offers some opportunity for adding humor. For example, there’s a part in which the main character’s friend, who is also a go-between who introduces the two writers, says, “He [Theroux] said he wanted to take the train from Battambang to Phnom Penh.”

To which the main character replies, “He would. The bus is quicker!”

This technique also gives one the impression that we are getting some inside insight into the writer. When the main character mistrusts the author, how are we to process that?

Granted it’s a little like an actor looking into the camera and talking straight to the audience.

I’m interested to hear if this is a more widespread technique than I’m aware of? Who else does this?

Your Life is Hard? Try Working with Ninjas,Pirates, and Smugglers!

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Ninjas, pirates, and smugglers aren’t exactly chatty. They burn, or shred, their correspondence. They sow seeds of disinformation to confuse the authorities. They lurk in the inkiest of shadow worlds behind doors we don’t even know exist. Still, who wants to do a hatchet job on a pirate? Right?

Did I mention that these are characters in the novel that I’m currently revising (or did I let you believe I was talking about in-the-flesh smugglers so that you’d keep reading.) Sorry, no one ever accused me of NOT being a deceitful bastard. Well, my friend, you’re now more than Tweet deep in this post; that’s quite an investment; it’s the modern-day equivalent of having read The Iliad, so you might as well keep reading.

Kiss the Cobra (my third working title) features a cast of characters of not only the aforementioned occupations but also monks  (both the scholarly and  kick-ass kung fu varieties), an Emperor, a muay Thai master, and a secret society that makes ninjas look like chatty Cathys. Like all good lies, this novel begins with a seed of truth. That seed is the rescue of Emperor Go-Daigo from imprisonment by an evil (ok, quasi-evil) shogun in 1337.  From that seed, it’s my wild imagination run amok… or is it? The Emperor assigns the loyalist ninja who rescued him, Korando, to travel to Southeast Asia to acquire an artifact that legend has it will help him re-consolidate power.

Cut to the present day, a linguistically-talented young man, Matsuo (a.k.a. “Matt”), comes into possession of a scroll. The scroll is Korando’s journal, written and hidden as a confessional. Matt investigates Korando’s journal on an electronic bulletin board only to find himself being chased by nefarious characters. Matt discovers that there are still people willing to kidnap, kill, or commit treason for the secrets that Korando’s journal may possess.

The novel weaves the 14th century journal with this present-day cat and mouse game between the forces of good and evil. There’s murder and mayhem, love and betrayal, victory and defeat, virtue and vice; in short everything you love in a novel is densely crammed into this book.  There’s even one character who may or may not be a Zombie–I’ll let you be the judge.

Now let me just add this screenshot of me to show you ho

Do you ever get a chill on the back of your neck?

Did you ever get an inexplicable chill on the back of your neck?

TODAY’S RANT: The War on Rhyming Verse

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A fine Hungarian poet who Wrote with and without rhyme

A fine Hungarian poet who Wrote with and without rhyme

it’s my cross, my curse
this rhyme in my verse
rhymers aren’t taken seriously
and are berated furiously

“Oh, your poem is so cutsie,
like little baby bootsies.”
call it banal or call it niche
but “cutsie?”, please!, step off bitch

just because my verse ain’t free
don’t act like I’m a perp to slavery
I spare my words the sting of the rod
they’ve never tasted a cattle prod

I’ve never waterboarded my “ands” or “buts”
or kicked a pronoun square in the nuts
I don’t whip my adjectives to get ’em in line
I stand waiting patiently holding a sign

Why steer my words like some stern brigadier?
because it scratches an itch somewhere in my ear
I know my rhymes sometimes lack cachet
because they’re little too Ogden Nash-ay
but from the hilltops I sing
like that guy Rodney King
hear the words of my song
“Can’t the poets all just get along!”