An Immodest Proposal

A Birthday Surprise Ruined in 750 Words

By Geoffrey Dean

Cover Design by
Jennifer Dean Neumann

The project started in my mind as a collection of Moristotle poems that I could read to his granddaughter. Of course, he could read them to her himself, or record them for her, or even write new poems for her, but these are other projects and not how the one I’m writing about here evolved. I got my sister involved early, and we agreed that the goal was a full-fledged publication of the “Selected Poetry of…” sort that we would present to Moristotle on his birthday in 2018. I’ll call this Plan A.
    The first step in Plan A was to read through the Moristotle blog and extract any and all poems by Moristotle himself. We would then make a selection based on criteria that we thought would become self-evident as we read through the extracted poems. Then we would determine the principles by which we would organize the poems – by genre, theme, or chronologically? Along the way we would look into suitable design and printing options for the final product.
    During the months of September through November 2017, I completed Plan A, Step 1 through the year 2012, when Moristotle added the sestina to the poetic forms he favors. My sister, thinking that I had gotten through the next five years of blog posts as well, read through the extracted poems and indicated with yes, no, and maybe her opinions as to which ones to include in the final cut. She also investigated publishing options.
    When the month of December rolled around, we realized that Plan A was not something we could accomplish in time for an early January birthday, so we negotiated a Plan B. We would create a mock-up of a cover and the first few pages of poems and present this as a kind of “suggestion” to Moristotle, who could then (if he took the suggestion) make all subsequent decisions regarding the content, arrangement, design, and publication of the volume. We both liked the idea of Moristotle’s being the driving force and having the final say in whether he even wants to pursue the idea.

In my head, the project had already started to change in other ways. I began to imagine it as a sort of almanac, with all sorts of other types of “entries” – a kind of highlights book of Moristotle writings, with both poems and Moristotle’s own words about them, and also incorporating other writings he deemed especially important, meaningful, interesting, or amusing. Perhaps also peppered with Moristotle quotes and his version of the ten commandments. Something that offered a sampling of the full spectrum of Moristotle’s interests and creativity. I associated it with an almanac mainly because of the Moristotle method of determining what day of the week a given date in any year had fallen or will fall on. THAT should be in there for sure, I thought. Like the sestina, and like the Moristotle blog itself, the day-determining method seems to me to illustrate his relentless search for meaningful larger-scale groupings of things and ideas, and the people who have something to say about these things and ideas.
    The years missing from my poetry-hunting perusal of the Moristotle blog are ones where this meta-ordering became increasingly significant, as a growing community of contributors posted pieces in recurring rubrics on a variety of topics of mutual interest. Moristotle’s nurturing of this community is particularly evident in his moderating of the comments section of each post to both invite dialogue and encouragement to the author of each post. A selected writings publication might also incorporate a reflective essay on the overall vision for the blog, as it evolved over time. Pepper it with greetings and comments from the contributors? Turn it into a kind of yearbook, or Mega birthday card?
    These and other assorted thoughts on the eventual shape and scope of the project made Plan B look increasingly attractive, since it would release my sister and me from our unsolicited role in actually deciding on anything related to it, and would allow Moristotle an “easy out” if he did not care to collaborate with us on it. It is in that spirit that we offer this subtle suggestion as a modest birthday present for Moristotle. This gives him a generous ten months until my daughter’s 2nd birthday to assemble a printed collection that meets or exceeds her anticipated reading needs. Or he could improve the blog’s poetry search capabilities. But that’s a different project.

Copyright © 2018 by Geoffrey Dean & Jennifer Dean Neumann