OED OD - OCD?

When this theme arose last year, I imagined a dessert island.  It was a good place to get stranded.  There was custard and, legend has it, rhubarb crumble.  This year I am feeling, sadly, a little less pudding.  My partner in cake is no longer around and I'm off my tea loaf.  But enough of my soggy semolina...

I would want only one title with me on the desert island.  Currently it runs to 20 volumes, contains 22,000 pages, and weighs 140lbs.  Behold, the mighty tome which is the Oxford English Dictionary!

Blackpool Library Service has signed up to give every one of its members online access to the OED online and I feel that this fact should be advertised more often.  For me, it is worth joining the library for this feature alone.  Hours and days can be happily resigned to history while dallying among nykins (sweethearts) and babbarts (hares), kichels (small cakes (damn, they snuck in again)) and stushies (disturbances).  It's like getting to know loads of interesting people without having to feign an interest in their preoccupation with cake...

Behind every word is the story of its origin (as far as it can reasonably be traced) and a selection of uses.  To support the historical context and usage, there are excerpts from diary entries and newspaper clippings, novels, novellas and scientific journals.

For a poet, what more could you possibly need to while away your remaining days?  To take a random example, below is the partial entry for a single word, nonced into life by the exquisite Charles Dodgson:

nyctograph, n.

Pronunciation:  Brit. /ˈnɪktə(ʊ)ɡrɑːf/ 

A device invented by Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) with which a person can record ideas (esp. those remaining after sleep) at night in bed without fully waking up.

1891   ‘L. Carroll’ Diary 24 Oct. (1953) II. xiv. 486   Today [sc. 24 Sept.] I conceived the idea of having a series of squares, cut out in card, and devising an alphabet, of which each letter could be made of lines along the edges of the squares, and dots at the corners... I shall call it ‘The Typhlograph’. (24/10/91. Instead of ‘typhlograph’ I have adopted ‘Nyctograph’ at the suggestion of Warner).


And here is what I make of it:

Nyctograph

Nyct slips stars behind my peepers
Locks them under heavy lashes 
If I write before I wake
Those stars quick Nyct is sure to take

Straight lines to fish
Round spots for bait
Square box to store
Starlight I'll make.

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Here Kitty, Kitty...

For me, the most wonderful thing about poetic form is the ability to abandon it.  To know that your words slip off the tongue but refuse to rhyme.  To know that they look like a poem on the page but that their metre is rebellious, out of sync.  To know that there's a thread tying the language together which doesn't have a name, which has been created specially for this poem, because it fits.  

Limericks work when you want to have fun with ideas:

There was an old woman whose cake

Was a hit at the Veganfest Bake

When they pressed for the key

To her sticky green treats

She revealed jars of 'jus de grass snake'.

Villanelles are inextricably linked to villains in my mind (due to an obvious lack of imagination).  The repetition is fab if you have a cracking line that you're really proud of and want to share again and again and again:

Richard III

Rude ragged nurse blurs inky star to smear

Numb, sobbing Liz disrupts conjecture’s thrust

Dick bores through swells of corpses clutching Lear.

Drunk Clarence sings of regal mutineers

Mad Margaret taints each act with bitter rust

Dick bores through swells of corpses clutching Lear.

Round bishop calls for berries, feigning cheer

A messy end awaits his fruitless lust

Rude ragged nurse blurs inky star to smear

York's setting sun yields to a frost-tipped spear

Brash, gnashing boar's impatient dash through dust

Rude ragged nurse blurs inky star to smear

Brave Billie frames Dread Dickie; motives clear

Spiced nest retains wet seal for lack of trust

Dick bores through swells of corpses clutching Lear.

No pony for the king who perseveres

Bloodline of John of Gaunt smeared with mistrust

Rude ragged nurse blurs inky star to smear

Dick bores through swells of corpses clutching Lear.

But these poems don't speak in the same way my free verse speaks.  They are tied down.  The ideas chase the shapes rather than the other way round.  Which is why I love to pervert form, to know it and then abandon it - with abandon:

Fat Cat Demands

Every day he must feast on the fishes, consume the cream,

or small corpses will be written on the doorstep:

a head, a limb

a baby, a foetus.

Veiled threats scribbled in net curtains with claws.

Damp stains in the corner that soap won’t shift.

pivotal puss

penned population

Selfish Kitty – too vital to die, too big to break:

Roll him down the steps of St Paul’s and he purrs,

The cat got the cream and came back for the herd.

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