Robert Frost and Darwin | Metamorphosis

Visual metamorphosis

Above Fr. Schmidt, Table 2. Evolution of household articles, animals, etc. according to Darwin's doctrine. Hand-colored lithographic, c. 1870s. Courtesy the Wellcome Library. Creative Commons license CC by 4.0.

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Louis Untermeyer, Bygones: The Recollections of Louis Untermeyer. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965—

[As a young writer]…I was much given to a style that employed epigrammatic checks and balances, appositions, paradoxes, and puns. I remember dismissing a rather commonplace collection of Gaelic poetry as "A Child's Garden of Erse" and characterizing the author of an abortive American epic as "A Yankee Doodle Dante." I referred to a Dowson-Beardsley pastiche as being "less erotic than Pierrotic. I inquired, since much of the Restoration comedy of manners took place in elegant country houses, was it not a comedy of manors? [p. 44]…

[His friend] Robert Frost, the most penetrating as well as the most profound poet of our time, might be expected to have been an anti-punster. On the contrary, he made point after point by punning; one of the favorite games during our fifty-year friendship was hurling word-plays at each other. He insisted that the most American trait was a combination of patriotism and shrewdness; he called it "Americanniness." He made fun of Mussolini and his cultural pretentions as the poet's dictator, "the great Iamb." He wrote about the liberal lugubrious poetry of Conrad Aiken and spelled the name "Conrad Aching." Ezra Pound was, he said, a glittering confuser of showmansip and erudition, a "Greater Garbler." "T.S. Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences," he wrote to me. "We are both poets and we both like to play. That's the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre; he likes to play Eucharist." [pp. 45-46]

Game, Stamps and Cash | Jake Manternach

Game parody © Jake Manternach (2016)

Above Hypothetical redesign of Mastermind code-breaking game, with the addition of a narrative theme, by Jake Manternach (2016), graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Roland Penrose (British artist and Picasso biographer), quoted in Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006—

Autumn 1956
Don José [Picasso's father, artist and professor of art] became almost blind before he died. When shown a blank sheet of paper at art school he said to the pupil, "You should make your drawing stronger." He retired from post at school because of blindness. (p. 175)

12 May 1964
[While visiting Picasso in France] Before leaving we watched all-in wrestling on T.V. He makes a point of watching this program twice a week. J[acqueline, Picasso's wife] cannot stand it. So he usually watches alone. Affectionate goodbyes and inquiries about our next visit. (p. 264)

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Below Design for a block of postage stamps and the paper currency for an imagined country named Qualm (2016), by Jake Manternach.

Stamps and currency © Jake Manternach

The What If Method

From American type designer Ken Lew (designer of Whitman), as quoted in Karen Cheng, Designing Type (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 8—

For me, ideas generally come from "what if" scenarios. What if Joanna had been designed by W.A. Dwiggins, instead of by Eric Gill? What if Mozart had been a punchcutter—rather than a composer?

Compare that with an excerpt from Sid Caesar's account of how he and his colleagues wrote jokes for The Show of Shows (c1949), from his autobiography, Where Have I Been? (NY: Crown Publishers, 1982), p. 86—

We sat around tossing ideas back and forth, and we developed material of what we called the "What if?" category. Someone would say, "What is Christopher Columbus were an usher at Roxy Theatre?" and we'd take it from there, with Columbus navigating people to their seats. Or, "What if Leonardo da Vinci worked as a short-order cook?" and we'd have Leonardo sort of painting sandwiches together like each one was a work of art.

Or this by Robert Fitzgerald about a game he sometimes played with his friend James Agee, in Fitzgerald, ed., The Collected Short Prose of James Agee (NY: Ballantine Books, 1970), p. 23—

On one of these Sunday excursions when I went along I remember that we amused ourselves during the long black blowy subway ride by playing the metaphor game: by turns each describing an inanimate object in such a way as to portray without naming a public figure. Jim developed a second-hand flute into Leslie Howard, and a Grand Rapids easy chair into Carl Sandburg.