Recent posts on found poetry reminded me of several OED entries I bookmarked out over the years because they gave me more than the usual pleasures of etymology, definition, and commonplace-book-like selection of previous uses. So I decided to work up a couple of these into poems. Other than acts of lineation, punctuation, elision, and a word inserted here or there, none of what’s below is mine. Each comes from one headword entry in OED2 or OED3.
Three OED Poems
I.
Serum, serus, soirée, serenade—‘tardive’:
A light fall of moisture or fine rain
after sunset, formerly regarded
as a noxious dew or mist, called serene.
‘A foggy mist or dampish vapour shall
from the moon’s moist influence fall’.II.
The calm abiding of the issue of time, processes, etc.;
Etc., etc. … the quiet and self-possessed waiting for something;
Longsuffering, longanimity under provocation. The quality of expecting long
without rage or discontent. Patience, hard thing! My patience! Patience! Have patience!God grant me patience to endure.
III.
Fantasma: illusion, unreality, vanity.
Vain imagination; delusion clothed in a vain
semblance of form. Something that appears
to sight or other sense,
but has no material substance.Or, a material image of something,
a ‘ghost of his former self’, a cipher,
the visible representative dwindled to nothing.Image which appears
in a dream, which is formed
or cherished in the mind;
also, anything that haunts
the imagination:
some incorporeal
body politic, a model
infant devised by way of pretence.Phantom flesh, phantom pain,
phantom limb, phantom life,
phantom child, phantom tribe,
phantom nation, phantom land.
In all seriousness… let’s talk about having these published in Poetry Northeast.
A very little bit of talking led to this:
http://poetryne.org/3/d-a-williams-three-oed-poems.htm
… though now I can’t get talking about fixing up the typos.
[…] in the “kind of poem” series [see here and here], this one based on false positives that turned up in my list of invented lexical combinations in […]