Floofverse(floofinition) – 1. Poetry about animals, especially housepets. 2. A housepet with a base that’s narrower than their top. 3. A pet that has the opposite personality or exhibits the opposite behavior from another.
In use: “The cat and dog came from different places but arrived at the same time. Firecracker, the cat, was all white, social, and energetic, while Drury, the black puppy, was Firecracker’s floofverse in all ways: quiet, shy, gentle, and retiring. Despite this, the two animals loved being together.”
Today’s music choice began with a Billy Collins poem.
I don’t know what neuron decisions forced the stream of a Billy Collins poem to intersect with a 1989 song, but after a bit of that music, the Billy Collins poem moved aside, like a little Fiat 500 moves aside for a semi-tractor bearing down at seventy-five, its horn blowing like a child with a toy.
Wondering about the switch, I wondered if it was about faith and expectations running up against experience and reality. Maybe that was far-fetched.
For the record, the Billy Collins poem is “Nostalgia”. I can’t say that it’s my favorite B.C. poem because I like so many of them so much. I think that if I had to recommend just one B.C. poem, it would be “Forgetfulness”. It begins,
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
h/t to PoetrySoup.com
Love that poem. Anyway, here’s the song, “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode.
I worked with an officer while stationed at Shaw AFB, SC. He was a navigator who graduated college with a degree in Literature, and he wrote poetry on the side.
Music of the era set him off. He thought the lyrics were shallow and the liberties taken with grammar annoyed him. People used to sing in full, coherent sentences, telling a story, he would say, and the songs were often very poetic. He was my age, and it amused me that this upset him, because that’s not what popular music is about. It’s a reflection of the times and how language is used. It’s dynamic. Those were exactly some of the things that he mourned as going wrong.
I remember once we were getting ready to deploy to Egypt. Killing time as we had to do in those situations, we talked music, and he singled out this song, which had been released a few years before, as one that he particularly disliked – his exact words. His diatribe made me laugh.
Here is Eddy Grant with “Electric Avenue” from 1982.
Floofryu(catfinition) – short poetry form, similar in structure to haiku: three lines, with twenty-three syllables. Floofryus deal with the foibles of cats, also known as floofs.
Michael Seidel, writer 