October 19, 2007
License
I read license plates. Especially do I read those that are not all that obvious, but reveal some unique and creative warping of symbols into words which I take to challenge my deciphering skills. The writer Toni Morrison said that language is what makes us human. Maybe she doesn’t read license plates.
I was struck by one yesterday. Keeping within the seven space limit and without any double entendre or need for deciphering, it said, simply, WBYEATS. But it wasn’t that so much as it was the implied literacy of it all.
Advertising a poet of William Butler Yeats’s caliber on the back of one’s car is not all that common around our town. We tend more to things consistent with Music City USA, Buckle on the Bible Belt, and the like. Of course, there is the thing about our also claiming to be the Athens of the South prompted by our life-size copy of the Parthenon in Centennial Park and the number of higher education institutions per capita in our population. Even so, if we only had major league baseball instead of football, hockey, and so many sockermom-driven SUVs, I’d feel better about it.
But I should complain. Driven as I am to continue producing all this stuff almost daily from out of nowhere, I occasionally take poetic license myself.
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