The dream lover of Edward Zuminga (writing as Theodora Sitné Jones)

Tropical romance, late yesterday evening

Here is another pseudonymous poem from our false personas (OK personae) competition at Christmas.

Here I was adopting a more carefully realised character than Mr Three Eighths in that Theodora is known to be the eldest daughter of an ex-patriot English painter, raised on a smallish (unnamed) Pacific island, educated (badly) in Southern California, and finally settled back in the UK where she can experience properly grim weather...

This poem, however, dates from her earlier, more tropical, period.

Adopting a false persona can be strangely liberating.  The first instinct is, of course, to change gender.  No idea why.  Possibly we all believe (wrongly) that this conceals our identities.  Maybe we think (again wrongly) that it changes our writing more than any other factor.  Whatever the reason it is a fact the imaginary personalities in our competition showed the reverse ratio of sexes compared to the real personalities.

After that you try to change style, form and subject matter.  Not much I could have done about the middle one, as I use all sorts of forms.  Also I suspect I failed a bit at the first as reading this again it does sound rather like me (although I think almost nobody spotted me, so maybe I'm wrong...)

As for subject matter, well it's a guy with a strangely-described, imaginary lover.  I'd never write about that :-)

---

---

The dream lover of Edward Zuminga


is carved from butter and lives, besieged
by dishes, knives, napkin rings
and all that mundane paraphernalia
from a roadside eating-house that also isn't here.

She limps slightly and speaks
of it only when plied with quantities
of drink, over-priced from the only bar
open after the flies are all asleep.

She has never told the truth.
She wears deep cotton
colours, to contradict her skin.
She believes in coincidence,

that her sister's name is the same as hers
by chance, or possibly bribery.
Edward cannot love her
in the manner she deserves.

For all that she exists
only inside his noontime slumbered eye,
she visits infrequently
is cool about gifts
has never spent the night.

Loose change (with video)

I've made the effort to resurrect and revamp this old one of mine.


This is my single poem that attracts the most attention, and this is because I originally created it as an animated GIF and placed it in posts on poetry forums.  As people on those forums were unused to a poem that suddenly edited itself while they were reading, I managed to catch quite a lot of people by surprise.



You can see the original, e.g. here on Poet's Graves or you can just play the video below, where I've reworked it with narration.  The original plan for to release it as a niche art-house film fell through when my backers realised the niche was less than an atom's width across.

---

Go go gadget poetry magazine!

Antiphon, Issue 14

The War of the Words

No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various compositions they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a degree in literary criticism might scrutinise the transient creatures that declaim and versify in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over rhyme and meter...

...Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded our poetry with envious eyes, and periodically and excitingly published their on-line magazine.