Runcibl'd Spooner, Black Lives Matres by Ulysses Poe

In his influential “Exercises in Style,” Raymond Queneau displays a hundred plus prose versions of a single tale – its mundane specifics spelled out in the book’s “Notation” chapter – versions which might issue from any author’s imagination constrained by categories suggested by the book’s chapter titles. “Riffs” shows how Poe’s poetic expressions, drawing on a range of standard poetic forms, expand on some of those same specifics. Each “Runcibl’d Spooner” draws a moral from metrical expansions of Spooner-type eccentricities, leaving a new form in its wake. “Black Lives Matres” heads up some nonsense verses celebrating the imagined lives of multiple black heroines contributing to the BLM movement.