the apostrophe disqualifies

Another science museum picture.

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Mojo

Listening to the new Tom Petty record Mojo is like getting around to the rest of one of those old Steve Miller Band records, except its made by someone a little cooler than Steve Miller. It would make a great soundtrack to that last Thomas Pynchon hippie detective novel I never finished reading.

I did wind up reading about Oulipo (from here) a French mini-movement who sought out mechanisms to generate writing and was moved to try my hand at a "snowball", a poem where each word goes on its own line, one letter longer than the previous line. It works unless the apostrophe disqualifies me.

I
am
not
that
great
writer
writers'
tireless
searching
eventuates.

This cheery affirmation poem is in honor of the New Yorker 20 under 40 fiction issue sitting on my desk, and of my writing class tonight who gets to pitch stories at me, who should, like the story I linked to above does, have a better story sitting there in their back pocket should the first one not really take..