All night I watch the worst movies—musicals of the Nazi blitz, Zapruder films of my own assassination, the armada battles between the hideous face of my Aunt Priscilla and my young, beautiful mother, my bit part—sliding from the womb, coming out, infant debutante, the radio my own personal haruspex exorcising future devils hovering in the hospital room, out-of-sync disaster lodged in my baby-soft skull like a stuttering misanthropic crow, wild with rockabilly delusions of coming years. Old Everyman, Hamlet, says something apropos at the end of Act V See? Double-helix abecedarian. The alphabet encoded like DNA itself. Again, this form appears sporadically enough not to give itself away too easily, but frequently enough for the reader to suspect something is afoot. The bigger problem, though, is the sort of poetry it forces Hamby into. While some of the leaps Hamby makes are fun — ―sliding from the womb, / coming out, infant debutante‖ — and the reader is generally willing to play along, the notion of ―the radio my own personal haruspex‖ puts a sudden damper on the mood. Really? In what way is a radio anything like a haruspex? It does end in ―x‖ however, which the form demands. The middle section of Hamby‘s threesection volume presents us with an affiliated form, one Hamby names ―abecedarian sonnets,‖ but that I might rename ―abecedarian RNA (Ribonucleic acid*).‖ This riffs off her ―double-helix abecedarian‖ form and I like to imagine the sonnet — one of poetry‘s mainstay forms — as carrying encoded poetic information, if you will. Here, she presents twenty-six, thirteenlined ―sonnets,‖ the titles of which (presumably also the first ―lines,‖ thereby adding up to fourteen) proceed alphabetically themselves: ―Aloha, Dad, Au Revoir, Goodbye,‖ ―Betty Boop’s Bebop,‖ ―Caliban Passes His Driving Test on the Ninth Try,‖ ―Desdemona Resuscitated by Sir John Falstaff, EMT.‖ You get the idea. Again, these titles alone are worth half the price of admission. They are also far more successful than Hamby‘s ―Ode to…‖ poems, which give away the store, so to speak. If those were attic boxes with packing slips
attached, these sonnets are boxes with labels in curious shorthand. As such, we want to dive right into them and unpack their goodies. Similar to her double-helix abecedarians, these sonnets are single-strand varieties with the first and last letter of each line proceeding in alphabetical order. A brief example from the first poem in the section, ―Aloha, Dad, Au Revoir, Goodbye‖: All the mockingbirds in the world are in a hubbub, chittering, abuzz, because a good-looking man is dead, Elvis drawl drawing up inside his flat cocoon, not a little deaf.
In general, I find the poems in this section more successful than her double-helix abecedarians. We know what we are getting up front, and as these sonnets progress, the alphabetical order itself progresses. As a result, we feel the motion happening as we read. There is an evolution throughout the section that I find absent from the doublehelix variety. In these sonnets, the alphabet evolves. While an astute reader quickly latches on to Hamby‘s game in this section, it is a game worth playing, just to see what crazy mind/word/literary connections Hamby is cooking up. In the end, one sits down with All-Night Lingo Tango like one sits down with a friend over coffee. There is no real heavylifting going on here, per se, and there is great fun in making the mental language