“National Poetry Month” #14: Stephen Cain
ABC: AN AMAZING ALPHABET BOOK!
A is for Althusser
B is for Barthes
C is for Capital
D for Descartes
E is for Eliot’s mermaid that sings
F’s for Foucault who wrote The Order of Things
G is for Gramsci who in prison still wrote a book
H is for Hegel who’s well worth a look
Ideology begins with I
Jouissance is J
K is for Kristeva on L, or Linguistics,
(Which is also Lacan’s way)
M is for Marx who put workers ahead
N is for Nietzsche who said god is dead
O is an Object and
P is Plato’s Perfection
Q stands for Query
And R’s the Reflection
S is for Said
Who troubles the border
T’s for Teleology
Which means it happens in order
U is Understanding
V makes us Vexed
W stands for Wondering
What then rhymes with X?
Y is a Yoking which leads us to Z
Which also means Zeugma
As you have just read
“ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book!” is taken from Stephen Cain’s 2011 book I Can Say Interpellation which reframes well-known children’s verse for a more discerning audiences, both now and in the future. Each poem in the book is illustrated by a terrific collage by Clelia Scala, which is not represented here but looks great in the book!
STEPHEN CAIN is the author of three poetry collections – American Standard/ Canada Dry (2005), Torontology (2001), and dyslexicon (1998) – and a collaborative series of micro-fictions, Double Helix (2006), written with Jay MillAr. He is also co-author, with Tim Conley, of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (2006). He lives in Toronto where has been a literary editor at the Queen Street Quarterly and fiction editor at Insomniac Press.
