Your poetry is broken, please fix it

[j4]

A bug appeared in our tracking database the other day:

Title: Poem text is jumbled.
Description: Peter Reading's "And Now, a Quick Look at the Morning Papers".

Here's the full text of the (actually rather good) poem in question:

1 lled in
2 ar smas
3 e freed b
4 iremen from the wreckage of his Ren
5 fter both had been in collision wit
6 hrysler Avenger. The A49 was blocke
7 en to cut both drivers from their v
8 dition of the other driver as 'sati
9 rsday---the day after his fiftiet
10 or alcohol proved positive, a p
11 juries to his head and left l
12 mproving' said a hospital o
13 lso certified dead was Do
14 eaves a wife and two chi
15 aid 'He just drove ou
16 othing I could do.'
17 Parochial Church
18 early retire
19 any year
20 fini
21 ha

I spent the next 10 minutes alternating between re-reading the poem and trying to think of a tactful way of saying "It's meant to look like that, you philistine."

Future bugs expected include "Poem entitled 'Sonnet' has extra line"; "'Four Quartets' is missing 8 violins, 4 violas and 4 cellos" ...

Amused me, anyway, so I thought I'd post something amusing to counterbalance the previous miserable entry. Although, of course, the "amusing" post contains a more serious poem... does the comedy frame the tragedy, or vice versa? Half empty. Half full. Half past six, and time to go home.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I spent the next 10 minutes alternating between re-reading the poem and trying to think of a tactful way of saying "It's meant to look like that, you philistine."

I believe you, but I think I'll stick with Milton; it may be encroaching fogeydom, but I have limited patience for structures that depart so far from metre as I understand it, and people are actually doing stuff today with traditional form that have far greater impact for me. [ For example this (http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html). ]

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that poem lured me to reread it and I had forgotten just how intensely that breaks me up.

Does the comedy frame the tragedy, or vice versa? Half empty. Half full.

Half-dressed ? Half-naked ? As with the more commonly expressed question concerning angels and pins, it depends on the tune.

"What is life but an improvisation to the music ?"

[j4.livejournal.com]

Half-dressed ? Half-naked ?

Ooh, if you insist. ... No, wait.

As with the more commonly expressed question concerning angels and pins, it depends on the tune.

"...you might just as well ask how many demons can dance on the head of a pin. They're of the same original stock, after all. And at least they dance. [Footnote: Although it's not what you and I would call dancing. Not good dancing anyway. A demon moves like a white band on "Soul Train."]"
--Pratchett/Gaiman, Good Omens

"What is life but an improvisation to the music ?"

"Sometimes in life you've got to dance like nobody's watching."

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Half-dressed ? Half-naked ?

Ooh, if you insist. ... No, wait.

Insisting isn't me, but I can certainly encourage. Particularly in the cause of backrubs.

As with the more commonly expressed question concerning angels and pins, it depends on the tune.

"...you might just as well ask how many demons can dance on the head of a pin. They're of the same original stock, after all. And at least they dance. [Footnote: Although it's not what you and I would call dancing. Not good dancing anyway. A demon moves like a white band on "Soul Train."]"
--Pratchett/Gaiman, Good Omens

See A Quantum Gravity Treatment of the Angel Density Problem (http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/angels-7-3.htm), I think.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I believe you, but I think I'll stick with Milton

To each, as they say, his own. :) I confess that the end of Paradise Lost made me cry (Spoiler: Turl trg puhpxrq bhg bs gur tneqra ng gur raq) but the cynic in me says some of that was just relief at finishing it...

[110 stories (http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html)]

That, on the other hand, is awesome. I think I need to go away and read it somewhere quiet.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Wow. Hadn't seen that before. Bookmarked for later intensive reading, but first glance made me cry (oh it's all these hormones...).

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I believe you, but I think I'll stick with Milton

To each, as they say, his own. :)

And from each according to his abilities ?

I confess that the end of Paradise Lost made me cry (Spoiler: Turl trg puhpxrq bhg bs gur tneqra ng gur raq) but the cynic in me says some of that was just relief at finishing it...

I salute you; there are few who would think to spoiler-protect "Paradise Lost".

[110 Stories]
That, on the other hand, is awesome.

Ford is utterly awesome; that poem was what made me able to grieve for the fall of the towers, for which alone I am eternally grateful to him. There is lots more awesome poetry of his which.. is sort of stumbling awkwardly towards redistribution, will let you know if I hear more about it.

If you're not familiar with his novels, I really emphatically recommend The Dragon Waiting, which has recently had a Millennium Masterworks edition in the UK. Particularly if you like the Medicis, cool vampires, th Byzantine Empire, or Richard III.

[j4.livejournal.com]

> > To each, as they say, his own.
> And from each according to his abilities ?

Something like that. "Be conservative in what you generate, and predictable in what you sig-quote." :)

I salute you; there are few who would think to spoiler-protect "Paradise Lost".

<g> It had to be done, really...

Ford is utterly awesome; that poem was what made me able to grieve for the fall of the towers, for which alone I am eternally grateful to him.

Reading that poem made me think I might have be able to feel something about That Event, something other than a sense of obligation to express feelings I don't share. I'm not sure if gratitude is the right response to being made to grieve for strangers, though. To me, grief is ... well, personal. To feel grief for people I don't know seems like somehow fictionalising them; I can't feel for them as the real people they are/were, but I can make them into characters I can empathise with. I'm not sure that's a net gain.

Anyway, I said my piece (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~janetmck/rants/war.html) at the time, about how I felt then, and I found (unsurprisingly) that very few people shared my views. ... I'm not sure going over it all again at this distance from it will help anything.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I think part of why that poem resounds quite so strongly for me is that one or two of the individual stories referred to are ones I know; "the air's deciduous of letterhead" is I think a reference to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, at home way up the other end of the island, snatching a burning page out of the air and finding it to be from Jack Higgins' A Season in Hell. I have a few close friends and several acquaintances in New York, and a lot of the immediate impact of that day was people one by one checking in on the groups where I knew them to confirm they were all right.

I try not to talk about this much; partly because I got leaped all over for having the initial reaction "Twenty-five years of the Troubles in one morning", and partly because I get worked up about people comparing Boy George's little campaign to WWII; this is not WWII. This is one more step in the theft of the future we were unexpectedly graced with in 1989, and I resent the hell out of it. [ How old were you in 1989 ? The Berlin Wall coming down and suddenly realising that we didn't all absolutely have to die in the Cold War version of WWIII was incredible, to me, but I've noticed a definite generation gap between me and people who do not remember having that absolute surety of no future there, and having that paradigm shift. ]