Poetry Forum

So to me, gibberish poetry tends to cram words into syntax for effect. It can get adjective-heavy too. Clear, lucid syntax dies a death here, leaving you with turgid bombast.

Eliot generally writes clear, lucid syntax. He likes to write simple sentence fragments, which he then repeats ad libitum to achieve his effect: there's a lot of repetition. He also likes to achieve portentous effect with simple phrases:

Behind the third green door
a vision awaits you
de profundis clamavi.

I just made that up, but it's hard to beat this famous parody: http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingof ... hitlow.php

"As we get older we do not get any younger," writes Henry Reed. Now that is clear and lucid syntax. It's also portentous, as High Modernism tends to be. Compare this:

the round
synagogue of the ear of corn.

That's my Thomas. There's very little overlap between synagogues and ears of corn, and Thomas does violence to his syntax to put it in there. I'd call that approaching gibberish, but inspired gibberish. Imitators do this less well.

Cheers,
John

My motto: "What isn't clear, isn't French." Antoine Rivarol.

You've given me a lot to think about, John. In the mean time, I think I'll record Prufock to help me get to sleep at night.

Judson Jerome, who wrote a great deal about poetry, and who wrote my favorite book on poetry, was very much focussed on the techniques of formal poetry, and yet he wrote about how "The Waste Land" was a revelation to him. I never understood that. Apparently, Eliot's writing was hugely inspiring to a lot of poets, poets who didn't necessarily want to write like Eliot. But Jerome did write an Eliot-inspired poem, and it was nonsensical.

I think I understand The Waste Land without AI assistance thanks to Wendy Cope:

https://pctothepowerof2.wordpress.com/2 ... endy-cope/

Yes, Wendy Cope did a good Eliot! In limerick form IIRC?

I found myself unable NOT to write like Eliot. It took me some years to break the habit. It was all very bad stuff as well. Finding a voice, my goodness. But yes, Caleb, Prufrock sounds like a great way to get to sleep! Not Eliot's best work, but it has a certain organic coherence, and it rises at times to the splendid IMO.

Cheers,
John

Here is the Nobelist reading his poem:



Classic

Very nice! Thanks for posting that, Phil. Here's Dylan Thomas. I looked for Yeats but there was not a lot:

Good reading. Dylan can often sound 'posh'., a product of the English elocution lessons his parents forced on him, though they were fluent Welsh speakers. He could have sounded like Burton:



I have done that walk from Laugharne a few times, from the town, up through the woods, a view over the salt marsh, found a bench and listened to the quiet.

Lovely. Thanks for that Thomas story and link. Of course, Bob Dylan took his name.

Good stuff all round.

Cheers,
John

jisbell00 wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 12, 2023 4:30 pm

Lovely. Thanks for that Thomas story and link. Of course, Bob Dylan took his name.

I have often wondered about the fact that Dylan is Jewish. My wondering isn't about Jewish people, but about anti-Semites. Do they hate Dylan as much as they hate other Jews? Dylan for many years was the epitome of "cool", so one would think that they wouldn't dislike him. I wonder the same thing about Einstein. How can you claim that Jews are inferior when they produced one of the world's greatest scientists? (Sorry for going off-topic.)

Haters make exceptions. It's what allows their fantasy world to interact with reality. The term that best captures this to my mind is pretzel logic.

Cheers,
John