Clerihews In Merry Hues From Verse-a-Tile Readers
A few weeks ago, I featured the clerihew, a form of nonsense verse invented 125 years ago by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). The clerihew (usually lowercased) is a whimsical, pseudo-biographical...
View ArticleSan Diego Raises the Bard for Shakespeare’s Sonnets
William Shakespeare is alive and well and living in America’s Finest City. The San Diego Shakespeare Society, on whose board I serve, will soon be presenting its 14th annual evening of Celebrity...
View ArticleA Hair-Raising, Hideous, Horrifying Halloween …
‘Twas Halloween night, and all through the house, All the creatures were stirring and eating a mouse. The monsters had gathered to plan and prepare For all trick-or-treaters they wanted to scare. Each...
View ArticleSan Diego Raises the Bard for Shakespeare’s Sonnets
William Shakespeare is alive and well and living robustly in America’s Finest City. This coming Monday, October 10, starting at 7:30 pm, I’ll have the honor of emceeing the 15th annual evening of...
View ArticleAsk Yourself If There Is A Poem Hiding In Your Soul
April is national poetry month, so I will tell you a story that starts out long ago, perhaps 140 million years in the past, and maybe more. It is about a great gray dinosaur, and it starts sadly, with...
View ArticleMen and Women Exhibit Different Speeds of Speech
The average person speaks at a rate of 120 to 180 words per minute. Professional newsreaders speak at around 150 wpm. Women speak an average of 7.000 to 30,000 words a day and men an average of 3,00...
View ArticleEmily Dickinson Climbed the Hilltop of the Heart
The recent release of the powerful film A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson inspires me to share with you my passion for my favorite 19th century American poet. When she died on...
View ArticleSan Diego Raises the Bard for Shakespeare’s Sonnets
William Shakespeare is alive and well and living robustly in America’s finest city. The San Diego Shakespeare Society, on whose board I sit, will soon be presenting its 16th annual evening of...
View ArticleSonnet Honors a Great San Diego Oceanographer
The Elizabethan age was the age of the sonnet, a compact fixed verse form written in iambic pentameter, a metrical foot that captures the beating of the human heart — da DA, da DA — and consists of...
View ArticleGoblin Up a Full Corpse Feast of Halloween Puns
Falling on October 31, Halloween is the year’s spookiest holiday. On that day we carve faces in pumpkins, dress in horrible costumes and go out trick or treating. The traditions associated with...
View ArticleCelebrate Halloween With Some Monstrous Verses
What would you do if you opened your front door and saw Dracula, Frankenstein, a ghost, a ghoul, the Hulk, King Kong, a mummy, Quasimodo, a skeleton, a werewolf, a witch and a zombie standing on your...
View ArticleSanta Claws Wishes Us a Furry Meowy Christmas
In 1823 The Reverend Clement Clark Moore created “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” The poem, better known as “The Night Before Christmas,” from its first line, is largely responsible for the...
View ArticleSonnet Honors San Diego’s Legendary Oceanographer
This past February 8, Walter Munk, arguably the world’s greatest oceanographer, shuffled off his mortal coil at the age of 101 and made his last dive into what William Shakespeare called the “unpathed...
View ArticleSan Diego Raises the Bard for Shakespeare’s Sonnets
William Shakespeare is alive and well and living in America’s Finest City. The San Diego Shakespeare Society will soon be presenting its 18th annual evening of Celebrity Sonnets. On Monday, October...
View ArticleSteve Breen’s Cartoon Illustrates the Bard’s Legacy
This past Sunday, on the U-T editorial page, Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Steve Breen presented one of his signature political cartoons. On the left, labeled whistle-blower, was a whistle and above...
View ArticleA Timely Example of How Words Wander Wondrously
About two weeks ago, at the age of 101, Katherine Johnson slipped the surly bonds of earth. She was a brilliant African American mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits for...
View ArticleAll about handy dandy, super duper rhyming words
Very early in our lives as language users we start taking great pleasure in repeating playful sounds. In the crib and romper room we babble ma-ma , da-d, and bye-bye. Soon we are intoning such...
View ArticleLight verse from U-T readers will lighten your day
DEAR RICHARD: Perhaps you can find a place in your column for this anonymous poetic definition of a pun. -Rick Miles, Sorrento Valley Two disparate strings of thought, Tied together with an acoustic...
View ArticleThe Festival of Books celebrates news that stays news
The Union-Tribune’s Festival of Books will transpire next Saturday, August 29, 10 am – 5 pm. This will be the U-T’s first virtual celebration of the written word. In tomorrow’s paper you’ll find a...
View ArticleUnder the spell of the rule ‘I before e, except after c’
DEAR RICHARD: I am old, a few months from 90. So I have time to wander and ponder things., both significant and silly. Recently a rule of spelling popped up in what’s left of my mind, namely “I...
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