Cool Plums

  Words Gone Wild! 

John Lehman

 After you finish this article you will never read a sentence like this first one quite the same way as you did before. Guaranteed.

 I first read about “Fabulous Realities” in Ken Macrorie’s 1970 book, Telling Writing. Now almost forty years later, there is a vital new significance to the concept. He said, “Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday and we find it, to our half-realized disappointment. But the person who daily expects to encounter fabulous realities runs smack into them again and again.” In other words keep your mind open for new input from your eyes and ears.

But it’s only when I became familiar with Twitter—that medium limited to 140 characters (including spaces)—that Macrorie’s concept began to resonate with me. Most of the messages I received (and sent) dealt with finding a parking spot, what I had watched on TV the night before, rants about the economy. Then I realized a 140 character piece of unexpected reality could avail me and my readers to so much more on and off the screen. 

Neither a poem nor strictly prose, these observations yoke two or more things together that do not belong, but touch in some way. And their touching creates waves of further suggestions that are not stated. Here are ten examples: 

1. HUNGRY  Along the road a boy dressed as a hot dog waves us into a drive-in diner. My car turns toward a snickering gas pump instead. 
2. HAIKU  Next year consider getting yourself a haiku. It gets over 5.7 syllables per line.  
3. THE SHADOW KNOWS  Where shadows overlap other shadows a new shadow appears. Of what? From where? 
4. FROGS  Frogs burp, crickets twitch, birds poop from incredible heights. May, sick of April’s poetry, tells it like it is tonight.  
5. TEACHING THE BLIND YOGA  I slump in an E-Z-Boy as they, breathing in and out, imagine a muscular me leading stretching exercises on a beach. 
6. CREATION  Did God program the world in seven days? No, in only six days and six nights, then he went home to find his girlfriend had left. 
7. AN OLD DOG GOES DEAF  The sound of an ax in the distance, a whippoorwill, computer hum, cats, nothing, your lips saying goodnight. 
8. NOEL  April 1st, I took down the Christmas tree today. It was brown. I just knew the joy wouldn’t last.  
9. FATHER’S DAY  Father’s Day is that quiet when your wife and kids visit her parents on Mother’s Day. 
10. TRUE CRIME  Marry Higgins Clark has murdered more people than all the poets ever living on this earth combined. 

I quickly saw that these were falling into three groups: A) The Clever—1,3,4,6; B) The Fantastical—2,5,10; and C) Biographic—7,8,9. But I didn’t worry about that as I jotted them down in a notebook while watching TV, driving down the interstate or waking up with a start in the middle of the night’s sleep. It’s easy putting them into the computer and having the “Word Count” tool tell you the number of characters with spaces. Then put one in your Twitter “What are you doing now?” box or in the signature block of your e-mail and low and you not only will get some comments but others who are reading them will also give it a try. 

I call these little treats “Cool Plums” after the William Carlos Williams’ poem, “This Is Just to Say,” because they are “delicious, so sweet and so cold.” Rather than fight the mineralization of Twitter and Facebook, why not embrace their challenge. Now, go back and count the characters in the first sentence just to get an idea of your parameters. Start your own little notebook of Cool Plums. Send them to your friends and the best of them to me here (John@coolplums.com). I’ll try to post the best of these. Until then here’s one final Plum from me (106 characters including spaces). 

COOL PLUMS  The rural mailbox, from a distance, looks like a skinny dog, sitting up, begging for a letter. 

JOHN LEHMAN is the founder and original publisher of Rosebud, a national magazine of short stories, poetry and illustration for people who enjoy good writing. He is the poetry editor of the Wisconsin People & Ideas as well as managing partner of Zelda Wilde Publishing. John was a finalist for the Wisconsin Poet Laureate position in 2004 and again in 2008. Dramatic readings of his plays, A Brief History of My Tattoo, The Jane Test and The Writer’s Cave have been presented in Milwaukee and Madison. His collections of poetry include Acting Lessons, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, Dogs Dream of Running and Shorts: 101 Brief Poems of Wonder and Surprise. His latest nonfiction books are America’s Greatest Unknown Poet: Lorine Niedecker Reminiscences, Photographs, Letters and Her Most Memorable Poems and Everything is Changing: How to Gain Loyal Customers and Clients Quickly.

John grew up in Chicago but for the last twenty years he has lived with his wife, Talia Schorr, their four dogs and six cats in Rockdale, the smallest incorporated village in Wisconsin.