Gen: Incipiagram, the website, is a mother-daughter blog and archive project. Its goals are to digitize, compile, and share some of the incipiagrams that my mother has written over the past 35 years.
Alice: Incipiagram is a word I coined to express using a text, e.g., a seed sentence, phrase or name by using each letter in the phrase in sequence to start a word in an expanded text. It is not an original concept as many people enjoy anagrams or memory aids using acronyms. A high school friend in 1963 wrote an incipiagram for me as a graduation present which used my favorite poem of Theodore Roethke, “The Longing” as its armature. Verbal forms of dates including numbers were also a favorite way I kept a diary, by forming incipiagrams from them. In the 1980’s I wrote a long incipiagram using the Nichiren Shosshu liturgy of the Hoben chapter of the Lotus Sutra. There is a benefit to this technique in overcoming writer’s block or a lack of inspiration. Often, the expanded text has the same spirit as the original kernel, but I do not feel constrained to use it that way. I was reminded of this tendency to expand a microcosm into a macrocosm when visiting a papermaker artist’s studio at Brickbottom in Somerville, in which an exhibit legend explained that she only recycled paper with good messages, history, or vibes to make her paper, not newsprint ads or junk mail. That seemed to be a form of artistic integrity to me, but also probably led to more neutral colors in the paper produced, making it more useful to write upon.
There are occupational hazards, mainly in forming contextually natural sounding words starting with the letter X. This is best avoided by having seed texts without any x’es! The Nichiren Shosshu liturgy is in a phonetic Japanese version of Pali Sanskrit, so the letter and word frequencies are quite different than in English. Writing that incipiagram involved many different expansions of frequent words such as Butsu and Sharihotsu.
Incipiagrams are a form of meditation and a self-produced and/or curated inkblot of the idiom of our native tongue as we learned it from significant others in family or community. When an incipiagram sounds verbose I try to inject idiomatic humor into it and use shorter, less Latinate words. To me, a “good” incipiagram is not definable, but a better or more useful communication can always be crafted.
If I were incarcerated, incipiagrams would amuse me —and they are always a good way to engage the mind when I’m having trouble sleeping or waiting in a queue. Last night I wrote this one mentally to work on the ‘X” problem:
Bento Box Resume
Born eater, never tamed or bollixed;
Occupation: Xeroxing
References: excellent superiors, underlings, mentors, exemplars
Incipiagram 