TWO SYLLABLE LIST

Another alphabet list, this one sparked by being woke up in the middle of the night by the garbage trucks emptying the dumpsters from the restaurants next door to my apartment.

It took a while to get back to sleep. So I went to my usual alphabet list making.

To make it a little more challenging, I remembered the one I made of titles of works of art I dug that only had one syllable in them. So I thought, why not a list of two word titles of art I dig in which each word has only one syllable.

I instantly thought of Gary Snyder’s first book of poems, RIP RAP, and went from there:

ALL BLUES (from the Miles Davis album KINDA BLUE)
BLUE MOON (Elvis version from the Sun Sessions)
COOL WORLD (Shirley Clark’s c. 1960 movie from the Warren Miller novel)
DRUM TAPS (Walt Whitman’s book of Civil War poems)
ED WOOD (not my favorite Johnny Depp or Tim Burton movie, but still…)
FREE JAZZ (the Ornette Coleman album that defined the late 1950s early ‘60s progression in jazz music)
GET BACK (though attributed to Lennon/McCartney, Paul says it’s all his)
HIGH NOON
IN TIME (one of my favorite books by the poet Robert Kelly)
JACK FROST (a corny kids’ movie with Michael Keaton as a father who dies and is reborn as a snowman!—but it actually works, and is worth it, also, for the cameos by Henry Rollins and Ahmet and Dweezil Zappa)
KING KONG (the original)
LET’S GO! (the original title in Spanish has more words and syllables, but this is translator Margaret Randall’s title for this book of poems by the Guatemalan revolutionary Otto Rene Castillo—Randall was one of the few women Beat poets, she lived in exile in Cuba for decades after their revolution)
MEAN STREETS

NOT YET (one of the first works of art I saw by Eva Hesse and immediately got and dug and was inspired by, a group of teardrop shaped hanging things created by some kind of organ like objects in giant mesh bags, difficult to describe, in some ways almost nondescript, but evoking human organs, sex, bodily functions, abstract concepts, etc. etc.) [found this illustration this morning!]
ODD JOB (Mark Terrill prose poem from one of my all time favorite books: BREAD & FISH)
PLEASE TOUCH (English translated title of a collage of a woman’s breast by Marcel Duchamp that might have been ‘sexist” but opened my mind—more—to the possibilities in art and attitude)
QUIZ SHOW
RIP RAP
ST. ROACH (great poem by Muriel Rukeyser)
THREE KINGS (a terrific George Clooney movie, and best movie to come out of the first Iraq war—were there any others?)
UP FRONT (Bill Mauldin’s collection of cartoons and dispatches from the front lines of WWII, one of the greatest books you could ever read about that conflict, outside of Martha Gellhorn’s reporting and Lee Miller’s reporting and photographs, and thanks to poet Ted Greenwald turning me on to this decades ago, I knew who Maudlin was and remembered his cartoons from when I was a little boy and my two oldest brothers had just got back from WWII after it ended, and this book brought all that back)
VAN GOGH (Joe Brainard’s essay/prose poem in his often faux naïf style that ends up expressing profound truths and insights as usual)
WHAT’S NEW (Sinatra’s version from the album ONLY THE LONELY)
X? (X is usually the problem, we should all write some books and movies and songs with titles beginning with X!)
YOUNG LOVE (the Sonny James version that epitomized my romantic life c. 1957)
ZOOT SUIT (a failed movie musical, I think, but a noble and unique attempt)

I did that so quickly and was still not asleep, so I did another!

AT LAST (Etta James version)
BLUE SKIES (Irving Berlin’s standard that still makes me smile, including Bill Charlip’s relatively recent instrumental version)
COP LAND (underrated terrific movie)
DANSE RUSSE (my favorite W. C. Williams short, stand-alone poem—I identified completely with it when I was a young husband and father)
EBB TIDE (corny song that I played on the piano when I was a kid, with lots of show off-y long runs up and down the keys, indicating the tide coming in and out!)
FOR LOVE (first book of poet Robert Creeley’s I read as a young man and dug)
GREEN CARD (one of my favorite romantic movies with two of my favorite actors)
HARD TIMES (maybe you have to be a guy to get this James Coburn-Charles Bronson flick about bare knuckle fighting for money during the Depression, but whatever the reason, I totally dug it when it came out in the 1970s and probably still would if I saw it today)
IS AS (one of my favorite short poems, by me [!] included in IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE)
JOE KIDD (Clint Eastwood Western with Robert Duvall, not their best, but still…)
KING LEAR
LES GIRLS (Not a great movie musical, but Gene Kelly was naturally the dancer I identified most with as a kid, since he was more of a street Mick than any other man who danced, as far as I knew, and I wasn’t crazy about Mitzi Gaynor, but I still found this flick sexy as a kid, probably just because of the title, which translated to us teenagers of the time as “lay girls”!)
MEAN GIRLS
N? (drew a blank this time)
O LOVE (great, succinct little poem about love by Ted Berrigan)
PEACE PIECE (my favorite Bill Evans tune)
Q?
ROB ROY (the movie, one of my romantic favorites)
SHOW BOAT (parts of both film versions, 1936 and 1951 [I looked up the dates this morning], are classic, especially the latter with Ava Gardner, whose heart was broken when they refused to use her singing voice, she never gave herself completely to a movie role again, but instead, on screen and in life, played the cynical star they turned her into as a result of her disappointment over her singing being dubbed by someone else in SHOW BOAT)
TOP HAT
UTE NOTE (a Merrill Gilfillan poem from his SELECTED POEMS, all of which are great but I remembered this title, not even sure if “Ute” is one syllable, but it is, in my pronunciation!)
VROOM VROOM (my personal title for a poem by Ray Bremser, a lesser known Beat poet who was an ex-con street guy I identified with a lot when the Beats were first coming to prominence, especially because he wrote a poem about the then relatively new New Jersey Turnpike, in which that two word phrase figured prominently in my mind, even though he may never have put it exactly like that, but every time I think of that poem and it’s impact on me as a teenager I think “Vroom vroom”!)
WOOD STOVE (one of my favorite artists is sculptor David Nash, who works with wood mostly in its natural state, and for this piece had a tree stump that smoked like a wood stove, maybe you had to be there)
X? (once again)
YOU BET! (one of poet Ted Greenwald’s early books and one of my favorites)
ZONE GONE (with an upper case Z and the rest lower case and a period at the end, as though a sentence, this is the last piece in Kenward Elmslie’s THE ALPHABET WORK, and easiest to remember)