Acrostic
Our Vocab Word o'th'Week is a form of poetry you may have learned in Elementary school. Maybe this poet taught you how.
Bars and Poets of Yore: Me and Jack at Penny Lane
We used to call it Pretty Lame, we teen artsy elites who hung out at The Trident instead. The rough, dim, cavernous coffee shop was where undesirables hung out and reportedly got their drugs out back. This was way back in the late ‘80s, when I was a scary-looking gothy teen on the surface, but underneath was a naïve scared little socially anxious virgin. Later, however, in my twenties, during the late ’90s, when I worked in the copy shop and bindery nearby, I would frequent the wildly found-art-all-over-the-place cavernous coffee shop called Penny Lane. I spent my lunch hours there drinking their good strong coffee and eating cheese sandwiches as I edited my pirate and vampire fiction. This was when I was doing aerial dance thrice to four times a week, the swordfighter boys’ troupe was about to end, and my soon-to-be-husband began his wooing. He recalled, once, coming to Penny Lane to romantically stalk me, but saw me there concentrating hard, working on my writing, and so decided instead to leave me be.
I used to buy my clove cigarettes there, because they still sold singles. I was in denial as a smoker–I would never buy a full pack in those days. Would I smoke a whole pack? Sure, daily for a while there, but I never *bought* a full *pack,* so.
Not long after the clove days, it became a bike shop-cum-coffee and wine bar, then a tap house with craft beer and kombucha, way more scrubbed-steel pretentious, and way more of the current Boulder vibe than the punk institution of Penny Lane remained. I hadn’t crossed its threshold for a few years of that iteration, until the Blue Dime Cabaret variety show began, and me and my co-producer used it as our home venue up until the 2020 plague put such types of things on pause.
But that’s just the place. What about the poet?
It was on October 3rd, 1997 that I sat with eminent local (and internationally lauded) ecologist and poet and teacher extraordinaire, Jack Collom, at a worn wobbly table at Penny Lane. As was his wont, he demanded we write a pass-around poem together, and as was his particular talent, it was an acrostic.
Background: Jack Collom taught poetry to children of elementary through graduate school levels, for many glorious decades. He was consummate in getting the kids to appreciate the richness of language. How do I know? He taught me in 7th grade, then again in my undergraduate English major-dom at CU, and after that, it was his joyful supplication that convinced me, when UW in Seattle rejected me, to apply to the MFA program for writing at Naropa, where he also taught. My last semester there, not only did I take a course on writing instruction from him, but he demanded I accompany him as he guest-taught poetry to the kids in need in my Mom’s rough 3rd/4th grade classroom in Westminster. To learn those particular ropes. And so I have him to blame and to thank for the fact that I’m a writing teacher now. He was infectious.
He would read poem examples for the kids aloud, more than once, with such relish. It wasn’t that he made them listen, it was that you couldn’t not listen, the way he read. Then, when the kids themselves wrote their own, he’d read theirs aloud too, in front of everybody–two, three times over at least, as though it was the best thing he’d ever read.
To him, it often was. Over and over. Till the kids began to believe they were good writers. Because it was true. Because Jack said so. Because listen, oh listen, to how he reads those words I chose…
Whenever you’d run into Jack, he’d demand an illot-mollot, a pass-around, or an acrostic trade (or duel), no matter what. And it didn’t stop there: he’d then take home the scrawled relic and type them, improvised shared masterpieces, on his old typewriter. He’d give you a hard copy or two, next time he saw you. He was himself good at many genres of poetry, but he was a master of the sophisticated acrostic, playing with the form with a deftness I’ve never seen, and likely never will again.
Jack Collom died in 2017, in the summer. Surrounded by loved ones and peacefully, thankfully. I couldn’t bear to go to the viewing–not only am I squeamish, but I could not, *could* not bring myself to view his dead body. I needed to remember him as he was when alive: his wild hair, crazy crooked smile, shambling gait, gentle yet singing voice, how his eyes crinkled when he smiled at a child reading aloud, his love of birds…
On October 3rd, 1997, at a wobbly table at Penny Lane, he gleefully spelled out PENNY LANE down the side of a piece of paper, and we switched back and forth, line by line, to write this acrostic. That was more than twenty years ago, and sometimes I think I remember which lines are mine, which his, but at this far remove I am no longer sure. So.
I found this tucked away in a journal I was culling, and I saved it (written on Jack’s old typewriter, of course, the cheap paper slightly discolored). I hereby share it with you. A silly little autumn confection. Cheers, Jack. If heaven exists, you’re no doubt yodeling for the angels as I type this into a device unheard of when we both wrote this together. And thank you.
10-3-97
*
P osh ladies in velvet smoke cloves and sulk.
E nter a saturnine gentleman who casts no reflection.
N odding clouds of giant gnats slurry forth in gusts to land in crusts on the wall.
N o one comes or goes, yet the room becomes full, then overflowing, with talking punks and the
Y ellow gaze of the stranger.
-
L ight clots in the stranger’s eyes; whispers issue from his skin,
A nd silence hangs heavy as iron on the neighboring table. He smiles an inward secret, sips
N epenthine green liquid from his cupped, horny hand and offers some to the lady next to him.
E ven she, black as her eyeliner looks, is speechless.
*
