And now (after several unreadable copies with bad fonts) I present an illuminated digital book for the nonsense poem Consideration Song. The photographs were taken by Miss Minnie Molly Mary at the Belgum Sanitarium in the hills above Richmond, California, and the cover photo was photoshopped by my brother.
With these scribd books, I recommend F11 to fullscreen your browser, and then fullscreening the scribd document (there's a button). The original text of the poem was published here. My epic 163-pg 2009 illuminated poetry book Prophecy & Doggerel has been up for sale for $2.15 at scribd, after being on the market for twelve months, you can still be the first person to ever buy it!
It would be an exaggeration to say we're working hard on the extensive endnotes for our illuminated poetry book Prophecy & Doggerel. But I got several e-mails wondering about the reference to "Hart Crane the Hobo" in the recent nonsense poem Evacuate the Species Prayer. The full line - "Flying over Brooklyn like Whitman or Hart Crane the Hobo" - is a reference to how both American poets wrote about crossing into Brooklyn, Whitman by ferry, Hart Crane by Brooklyn Bridge.
We had looked up Brooklyn Bridge poetry because for our William McGonagall projects. He famously disses the Brooklyn Bridge in his poem "An Address to the New Tay Bridge", which inspired us to set it to hot hip-hop beats & ignite a rap battle between Dundee's Tay Bridge (once the longest in the world) & the mighty Brooklyn Bridge. Turns out there's plenty of poetry about the latter, but none quite as doggerelesque as McGonagalls, & certainly none that call out challenges to lesser bridges. Gold Diamonds rapped a lyric by D. B. Steinem, Brooklyn Bridge at Nightfall. But Hart Crane's poem we deemed too good. The whole battle is at our Department of Bridges.
Hart Crane published The Bridge in 1930, two years before he jumped off an ocean liner at age 33. I was trying to echo The Bridge's westward train trip in "Evacuate the Species Prayer", & I couldn't resist the hobo passage in "The River":
Behind
My father’s cannery works I used to see Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery, The ancient men—wifeless or runaway Hobo-trekkers that forever search An empire wilderness of freight and rails. Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch, Holding to childhood like some termless play. John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight
—Memphis to Tallahassee—riding the rods, Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.
Yet they touch something like a key perhaps. From pole to pole across the hills, the states —They know a body under the wide rain; Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates With racetrack jargon,—dotting immensity They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast Snow-silvered sumac-stained or smoky blue— Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west. —As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too...
I'm not sure is the breast is twelve-year-old Pocahontas's (as the symbol of Natural America), or some sort of Grand Teton. I wondered, considering the hobo connection, if John Hodgman had jumped on any reference in his "Here are the 700 Hobo Names You Have Requested". I don't see any Harts or Cranes, but there's plenty of Johns, Jakes, & Charleys. "Humpty-Dumpty Clods", from the poem, would be a good hobo name. You know there's a website called E-Hobo.com where people have been posting their illustrations of the 700 hobos. Here's #112 Lois "Charles" Ladyfingers:
The illuminated poetry book on Scribd is undergoing some subtle adjustments, but still no endnotes. Believe you me, you'll be the first to know. I'm still having trouble with some of the pictures (some of them aren't supposed to have that annoying gray border.) It's been expanded to include Remember Artie Wongay. You could be the first costumer to pay $2.15 for the complete version. E-mail me if you want the whole thing for free. (Push F11 for fullscreen, then toggle to scibd's fullscreen - beautiful!)
Years in the making... 150 pages... over fifteen hundred really good words (including "proboscis" & "stalactickle")... With over a hundred original illustrations by Grainne Proinseas, Olaf Mary Mohammad, & James Quill... I am proud to publish - ONLINE only - on scribd.com PROPHECY & DOGGEREL All the poetry published on the website www.itwaslost.org over the past three years, in one colorful poetry book - Nonsense, doggerel, prophecy, songs & a few long poems. After long consideration, I have decided to SELL this book for $2.15, altho I'm making a bit of it visible for free. I realize it is quixotic to dream of making any money off a non-physical collection of weird & sometimes dense nonsense verse, BUT I reckon I'm offering a pretty good product which we put a lot of work into. You could e-mail me (o [[at]]itwaslost .org) for a trial copy. Please support the nonsense vanity press! And a lot of the poetry is still on www.itwaslost.org here or there, just not with the classy layout & fancy illuminations, which is well worth two dollars & fifteen cents. Maybe convince a wealthy friend to purchase the digital edition from scribd, curl up with a cup of hot cocoa & your uncle's color printer, & print a nice double-sided physical copy. I believe in physical books. But this one will doubtful never be published as one. Meanwhile, a new hardcover copy of Barbara Walters' Audition: A Memoir sells for $29.95, & she doesn't do things like rhyme "cuddle" with "butthole." Tell your friends & loved ones! Prophecy & Doggerel is published.
(I recommend, if you're in firefox, clicking F11 to full-screen the browser, then clicking on the full-screen toggle on the upper-right-hand corner of the scribd box.)
I've uploaded a third short illuminated poetry pdf-book to Scribd.com. Saga of Jenny is a quasi-narrative two-part, fourteen-stanza nonsense rhyming poem. This is, like, one of my favorite poems. It was originally published on this weblog HERE, but this illuminated pdf has a much more beautiful layout. I'm working on a larger collection of these rhyming poems from the last few years, Prophecy & Doggerel, but since it won't be available for awhile, I'm putting up these samplers - Saga of Jenny, for instance, will be spread across fewer pages in the full book, but look more or less like this. Toggle to full-screen with the little button on the upper-right-hand corner. (Also, F11, at least in firefox, makes the browser window full-screen.) Saga of Jenny - S. Sandrigon
The pdfs at scribd are available for download, put on your fancy Amazon kindles & soon other devices. This one isn't downloadable yet, until I iron a few formatting glitches. The other two I put up, as an experiment, I'm selling for ONE DOLLAR (they wouldn't let me sell it for 75¢). Support the cause of illuminated nonsense poetry!
I've been working on an larger illuminated version of "Prophecy & Doggerel", a collection of all the rhyming poetry that has appeared on this website over the past few years, for the Vanity Presses. I'm trying to create a beautiful pdf file to put up on Scribd, illustrated with artwork from my friends, most of which was also posted sometime on itwaslost.org. To test this Scribd, I just put up our illuminated book "Seven Prayers", illustrated with Olaf Mary Mohammad & Cosmo Wernicky & some very ripe fruit, which will be included in "Prophecy & Doggerel". I recommend the little full-screen toggle button in the upper right-hand corner to see the book better. I'm impressed with the slickness of their pdf viewer. This shit will be downloadable to your fancy Amazon Kindle & soon iPhone book-reading capabilities & the FUTURE of BOOKS.
Seven Prayers is now FOR SALE. The cheapest they would let me sell it is one dollar, cheaper than a can of coke & MORE BEAUTIFUL by far. Buy it, download it, print it on high quality, re-read it at bedtime to help you fall asleep. If you don't want to pay me a dollar, all of the original illuminations are around this blog somewhere in the archives.
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