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

[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. ]