CALLIGRAMME

“A calligramme is a text or poem, of a type, or the word for which was, developed by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918, in which the words or letters make up a shape, particularly a shape connected to the subject of the text or poem.” (Wikipedia).

I had it all planned out – I was going to write a poem in the shape of a hand giving Apollinaire the finger for coming up with such a dumb idea, but I’m not going to (I suppose I still could if anyone was just dying to see it, but I suspect that you think that calligrammes a disgusting too) – there are three reasons why I’m not going to do it: 1) calligrammes are stupid – I’m sure that the original calligrammes that Apollinaire created were brilliant – I’ve seen them and they look really cool, but since I can’t read French, I have no idea whether or not they’re worth reading, but they are an interesting innovation and may have possibly remained so for a couple of decades, but to make a calligramme now is stupid and I’m not going to do it – 2) I’ve already written a calligramme in 6th grade – it was in the shape of a doughnut and it was about how much I like doughnuts – finally, 3) I’ve become inspired by the next Practice of Poetry exercise: “Select three entries from your journal, no two dated within four days of each other, and discover in verse the connections among them.” (Sydney Lea) – I went back to the oldest of these emails that I could find (2004 – the ones before that are lost forever) and they were really inspiring – I played around with it for a little while and suddenly I could begin to see the poem I’ve wanted to write since college – why would I bother to work on a really bad poem that I don’t want to write when I could be working on a merely not-very-good poem that I really do want to write – unless of course you want to see it, in which case it might be fun to play with it for ten minutes – as always, feel free to respond with ridicule, sincerity, silliness, keystrokes, or whathaveyou