I did not win a coveted place in the agent’s round over at
Cupid’s Literary Connection. C’est la vie.
However, I will forever be known for the “cockroach
incident”, which is something at the very least.
Today, for your reading pleasure, I am going to post a poem
I helped to "write" back in the dark ages in college. Well, actually, a
quartet of drunken English majors came up with it. After a night of drinking wine and hob-snobbing
our local college literary magazine for its rather “modern” taste in poetry,
someone came up with the idea to publish our Scrabble game we had just finished,
in order of words played, (and our scores) to see if it would get accepted and
published.
It did.Here it is:
Marla’s Voice
Bar )(Bad Mad Yarn
No Gem Gag
Our Gave Hem.
Help! Snotty! Mint?
Queen Snot-Rag:
30, 22, 69, 26…Date!
At The Oil Spit Is Wed: Scar, Cruel, Woe, Sex.
Cuz Art We Knife. Zip.
Liar!
We even went so far as to send in a recording to be played
at the poetry reading. (Someone knew someone in New Orleans who mailed it
in for us.) One of the Scrabble-poets (who does a bang-up Scottish accent) read it, and the recording speed was slowed down to sound like a 45 record played on 32. (This will mean nothing to many of you.) I recall it sounded a wee bit like Sean
Connery on downers. We were polite
enough not to attend the reading.
We owned up to the prank via a phone message a month after
graduation. My apologies again to editors
Rob and Carla. It was nothing
personal. Just college high-jinx. And who knows, perhaps it was—in its own odd
way, a literary achievement…of sorts.Well, that’s what I gotta do to get published, apparently. Any crazy blue-stocking stunts in your closet?