Dan Albergotti
Twenty-Six Ways of Marking on a Blackboard
being an alliterative, assonant, consonant double-abecedarian, damn it
for Barbara Hamby
A plan of grand ambition should announce its aim with ample appellative pizzazz,
but beware boasting too boldly (see above). Better to be just barely brash, not brazenly
cocky. Critics care not for conceited craftsmen of characters, coyly cool, constantly prolix,
delving depths of dictionaries for arcane denotations, so damned desperate to draw
every eye to their elevated education, wrestling to make earnest effort seem mere improv.
(Five lines finished and fuck-all begun. Figures, eh? Time flies and then you fail. Then you
give up. Or…you get a glimmer, gear back up enough to go for good if not great.) That
Hamby has a gift I’ll never have, I fear. She holds keys to hidden, holy word-hoards,
invokes immortality via imaginative prestidigitation, turning letters into ideograms or
jury-rigging syntax to justify a jiggly, jelly-rich juggernaut of a sentence ending with Iraq.
Kennings kept in her word-kennel (along with the kitchen sink) are kernels keen to drop
like a lumberjack’s axe. I’m left looking like a loser, 12 lines into this lax little lay with no
more than a mite’s measure of momentum, mostly meandering through material in
no way noteworthy beyond nominal alphabet-ness. Though now I note I’m in line 14. I’m
on the downslope of our obligatory ode, only 12 (now 11!) lines to go. Oh, maybe now I’ll
pull this poem off after all, not end up pummeled by its plan like a punch-drunk punk…
Querulously, I now question our need for goddamn Q, again wish to quit this quixotic raj
rather than return to the rack of a ridiculous revolving alphabetic reverie that reels like pi,
smugly sliding always away, slipping past my swiping grasp. This scheme seems as though
the line total’s ten thousand, not twenty-six. I’m towed down by a tedious tidal drag
under the surface, ultimately succumbing to utterly unhinged, unbridled self-loathing. If
victory in vaudevillian verbiage came with venal reward (or vino!), maybe this venture
would be worth it. Instead, I wallow in wasted tongue-wagging. Words, words, words, said
xenophilic (he chose Wittenberg over Elsinore, yes?) Hamlet, vexed, overtaxed, dyspeptic,
yammering on in a yawning yodel as annoying as a Yorkie’s yelp. Got complaints, bub?
Zounds, me too! A zero, I’ve zigged, zagged, failed. I’m zilch next to your zenith, Barbara.
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as a limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry 2017, and two editions of the Pushcart Prize, as well as other journals and anthologies. He is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.
Return to March 2019 Edition
being an alliterative, assonant, consonant double-abecedarian, damn it
for Barbara Hamby
A plan of grand ambition should announce its aim with ample appellative pizzazz,
but beware boasting too boldly (see above). Better to be just barely brash, not brazenly
cocky. Critics care not for conceited craftsmen of characters, coyly cool, constantly prolix,
delving depths of dictionaries for arcane denotations, so damned desperate to draw
every eye to their elevated education, wrestling to make earnest effort seem mere improv.
(Five lines finished and fuck-all begun. Figures, eh? Time flies and then you fail. Then you
give up. Or…you get a glimmer, gear back up enough to go for good if not great.) That
Hamby has a gift I’ll never have, I fear. She holds keys to hidden, holy word-hoards,
invokes immortality via imaginative prestidigitation, turning letters into ideograms or
jury-rigging syntax to justify a jiggly, jelly-rich juggernaut of a sentence ending with Iraq.
Kennings kept in her word-kennel (along with the kitchen sink) are kernels keen to drop
like a lumberjack’s axe. I’m left looking like a loser, 12 lines into this lax little lay with no
more than a mite’s measure of momentum, mostly meandering through material in
no way noteworthy beyond nominal alphabet-ness. Though now I note I’m in line 14. I’m
on the downslope of our obligatory ode, only 12 (now 11!) lines to go. Oh, maybe now I’ll
pull this poem off after all, not end up pummeled by its plan like a punch-drunk punk…
Querulously, I now question our need for goddamn Q, again wish to quit this quixotic raj
rather than return to the rack of a ridiculous revolving alphabetic reverie that reels like pi,
smugly sliding always away, slipping past my swiping grasp. This scheme seems as though
the line total’s ten thousand, not twenty-six. I’m towed down by a tedious tidal drag
under the surface, ultimately succumbing to utterly unhinged, unbridled self-loathing. If
victory in vaudevillian verbiage came with venal reward (or vino!), maybe this venture
would be worth it. Instead, I wallow in wasted tongue-wagging. Words, words, words, said
xenophilic (he chose Wittenberg over Elsinore, yes?) Hamlet, vexed, overtaxed, dyspeptic,
yammering on in a yawning yodel as annoying as a Yorkie’s yelp. Got complaints, bub?
Zounds, me too! A zero, I’ve zigged, zagged, failed. I’m zilch next to your zenith, Barbara.
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as a limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry 2017, and two editions of the Pushcart Prize, as well as other journals and anthologies. He is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.
Return to March 2019 Edition