A Quick Mea Culpa for the Typos & Co., All 3,000 Loving Ones

Emily Carr

A quick apology.  This morning I was alerted to a new comment to my blog posting on Marianne Moore's poem "A Jelly-fish."

The comment is interesting, a student's take on the poem, and after reading the insight, I reread my very short posting. And saw that I had misspelled a word IN SPITE OF SPELL CHECK.  Spell check sends little wavy lines under questionable spellings. And, yes, there they were, the little red warnings wavy as the Pacific. And yet, like the captain of the Titanic (to mix up my oceans) or that fool who sunk a ship off the coast of Italy, earlier this year, I ignored the signs.

And also, in terms of mistakes made: I had not used hyphens in a consistent manner in this remarkably short posting. The spacing between paragraphs was, furthermore, inconsistent.

As anyone who uses blogspot (a child of Google) knows, the blog has a mind of its own, and that willfulness can explain the occasional lack of breathable spacing or, conversely, huge blank crevices between paragraphs.  But only Sarah can make a typo.

Or mess up syntax or create other pretty darn egregious grammatical eyesores. My commitment to myself in creating this blog was to write quickly, not spend more than five minutes searching out an illustration / picture, and then get on with my day, a commitment which is understandable to anyone who has a day to get on with, i.e., all of you.  And yet, I was committing to writing a blog posting, which means communicating with some vague public by means of the tools at hand, which include spell check, native proofreading skills, and common sense.

Enough with the mea culpa. There's always that umbrella excuse, "Life happens." It's no justification but it is an excuse. I have, I hope, corrected the Marianne Moore mistakes and added a link to her bio on poets.org.

Poem: Slight Confusion: Why not 1 M&M, 2 M&Ms?

Louis, the Grand Dauphin

This is ends up a proofreader's poem. Wherever I was headed when I began writing, the annoying apostrophe in M&M's was an endstop. Why not 1 M&M, 2 M&Ms? I observed the "turtleneck /descending a three-year old who / yanks and stretches" on the west coast.

Much of this short poem, unfairly asked to bear up under the weight of my commentary, was intended as reaction to a book I'd read about Grimm's tales (which my ma burned, as I wrote in When My Mother Burned a Book). The analysis was written by a professor at Santa Cruz.

The brothers Grimm, folklorists, embellished many stories, perverted source material which they alleged true to the folk, volk, peasants they'd interviewed. And that's why, okay, conjecture, those stories are so violent a testament to the human imagination gone wild and mean. I didn't complete that poem. This poem emerged from its ashes.  And the M&M's?  In the seventies I spent an afternoon ferrying them back and forth, one-by-one, while my friend R. drew circles. Hallucinogenics were involved.

Slight Confusion

Wait’ll you hear this one pulled
over your head like a turtleneck
descending a three-year old who
yanks and stretches against her
world briefly dark as brown bears
in a skyless cotton firmament
claiming to be all she’ll ever
know of horizon. Wait’ll you
hear the wolf snicker and wait’ll
Sleeping Beauty over there lights
up while you escort M&M’s across
choppy waters of your bungalow.
A nobleman eyes that apostrophe
wrested from the grieving Dauphin.
___________
Sarah Sarai. From The Future Is Happy. Buy it at SPD or Amazon.