| HE PRETENDS TO BE A SENATORby O. Howard Winn HE PRETENDS TO BE A SENATORbut it is clear he is really a Mock turtle from Capitalist Wonderland and his song is a serenade to the Red Queen running the nation pretending to be a strong but twittering leader or is it Humpty Dumpty with its brittle shell for skin neither male nor female while the Mock Turtle takes money from his Chinese father-in-law as if it is earned to enhance his own career of singing the Mock Turtle melody and the confused Kentucky voters wonder who he is really representing or is it all for the Lobster Quadrille choreographed by the simulated senator to satisfy the Monarch in the White House THE POET HAD FAITH IN FORMfor he knew that without form it was not poetry since his masters of the genre preached with the sonnet or the villanelle where control of form was mastery of the poem and therefore, of life itself and even the Limerick design or the simple couplet was a serious poetic device when in the hands of the significantly creative poet although an unsophisticated aspiring bard cannot substitute form for a simple mind and construct an inspired original perspective to create a poem that is unique and complex for intelligence is vital for authentic creativity and an Emersonian impulse cannot provide the truth that intellect seeks MY GRANDAUGHTER HAS DECIDEDshe is not my granddaughter any longer although in her discovery she is also not my grandson either and wants to be referred not as she or he or him or her but them and their in clear violation of standard grammatical usage but a linguistic scholar has suggested in a letter to the New York Times “one” could be used with clarity and in keeping with standard English grammar although in realizing neutral gender do not use sex which seems to be a concept too prickly than just gender which does not suggest the damp and slippery moisture of cohabitation and desire when she wishes to crop her coiffure in ways despite her desire she appears closer to being an adolescent boy than the female person she clearly is attempting to escape About the Author:Howard Winn’s writing, both fiction and poetry, has been published by such journals as The Galway Review (Ireland),Dalhousie Review, Descant (Canada), Break The Spine, New York Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Borderlands, Beloit Poetry Review, Xavier Review and Toyon. His novel, “Acropolis,” has been published. His B. A. is from Vassar College. His M. A. is from the Writing Program at Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNY as Professor of English. |