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

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:

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