Lewis Carroll Society of North America » Poetry

We’re mad as hatters down in Hatteras

James — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 18:54:22 +0000

The October 2010 issue of the tri-quarterly poetry journal Blue Unicorn ($7), out of Kensington, California, contains an Alice-themed sonnet, “Hatteras Time,” by Gregory Perry. It has a quotation from Alice and the Hatter’s conversation on time as its epigram. The poem begins “We’re mad as hatters down in Hatteras.” Ruth Berman reports that the piece “draws on imagery of teatime, the Queen of Hearts, a lack of ‘much of muchness to pursue,’ and having ‘buttery time to kill.’”

“All over a rattle”: Tweedle poem in The Benevolent Otherhood

James — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:01:48 +0000

Volume 1 of a new zine from Oakland and Berkeley writers, The Benevolent Otherhood, contains a nonsense poem by S. Sandrigon mentioning Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. The new “chapbook” was released this week at a reading at Oakland’s Mama Buzz before a packed house. A limited number of the zines are available, but there is a free digital version (embedded below.) The poem in question, “Sacred Massacre”, took some inspiration from Jon A. Lindseth’s article in Knight Letter Number 83, “A Tale of Two Tweedles.” Lindseth traced the etymology of ‘tweedle’ and ‘dum/dub’ back to poems referencing “the sound of the bagpipe” and “the roll of drums”. “Sacred Massacre” uses these military sounds in every stanza, and compares the dangerous biblical feud between “a king & a baby” to Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee’s argument, “All over a rattle”. (Full disclosure: the poet is also an editor of this blog.) “Sacred Massacre” is on page 32:

“Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly”: Wonderland-referencing poems in Asimov’s Science Fiction

James — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:09:15 +0000

The September 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction hits newsstands today. The two poems in this issue both use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland themes as their central metaphors. “The Now We Almost Inhabit” by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier uses the Cheshire Cat and Alice’s changing size “as images of changable realities”, and Ruth Berman’s poem “Egg Protection” (mistakenly called “Egg Production” in the table of contents) uses “the pigeon’s opinion of long-necked Alice as a predatory serpent as the opinion of birds in general regarding humans.” (Quotes describing the poems from Ruth Berman.) Here’s an excerpt from “Egg Protection”:

For about two weeks, two robins
Kept yelling at me
Every time I appeared outside the door
In (apparently) a cloud
Of flames and brimstone
Visible to birdseyes,
To grab the paper or the mail.

[...]

Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly,
But I don’t want theirs.
Birds consider only the first bit.
They don’t take a human’s word for the rest.

To read the whole poem, please consider purchasing September’s Asimov’s Science Fiction, where all fine magazines are sold!