Poetry Forum

...in Favour
of Folk Taxonomy as Opposed
to Binomial Nomenclature.


I much prefer the mistle thrush
to the turdus viscivorus.

love it, one of my faves so far. has a Kennedy-esque playfulness to it
http://www.poemtree.com/poems/EpigramsT ... eetles.htm

Very good.

Geoff


I think you have got it the wrong way round

Gaius Julius Caesar, Imperator

Ha! Delightful!

B.

Cheers Brian and Geoff, glad you liked it.

Thanks to you too Raincoat. That's a real compliment, Kennedy's great isn't he? I love his 'Nude Descending a Staircase'.

Clever work, Nash. I also favour the "Folk Taxonomy", though I recall using 'lepidepteron' in place of butterflies! Smiles.

Found this an interesting read Nash. Afraid I'm going to demonstrate my ignorance here again though. What is the significance of the underlining?

Thanks Arunansu and Kev, the underlining isn't ideal is it, looks a bit ugly, but it's just the title. The poem title bar doesn't contain enough characters for such a ridiculously long title so I had to differentiate it somehow.

Now I just feel silly cos it's obvious now you've told me

Very good, Nash. Here's George (aka Eric).

An interesting illustration of this is the way in which English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, Snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.

I completely agree with you.

Cheers

David

Loved it-how to reclaim your world in words. The same happened with the names of acids-there are 'proper' names for formic acid and oxalic acid.

Thank you

jacq

Yep it hits the spot,

Elph

Kev, no need, I knew that it looked a bit confusing on the page but the layout was limited by the constraints of the site.

David, that's a great essay, I hadn't read that one before, thanks for pointing me towards it.

Thanks Jacq and Elph, I'm glad you liked it.

It was one of those ones that I wasn't sure whether people would 'get'. I've been reading the Jonathan Bate biography of John Clare and I read that he wasn't a fan of Linnaeus either. I know that scientific names have their place, I know that there is probably a need for them in a wider sense and I'm sure that they have their own beauty, but as I'm not educated in Latin or Greek (or much else) they are completely meaningless to me. They're just strings of letters and lack the poetry of what we have come to call English.

The John Clare biography is great by the way, if anyone's interested.

Nash,

I'm glad you posted this, would it read better if it was trimmed as it sounds like you are talking about separate things with "the" in each line?

I much prefer mistle thrush
to turdus viscivorus.

Now the reason I'm glad you posted it is this. I've been doing this poetry lark for a while, and have on many occasions wondered where I fail and this highlights the very essence of my own shortfalls, because I'd never see it as delivering any more than the battery fitting instructions on the underside of my laser mouse. I can google both and find equal satisfaction in reading the subsequent web entries. Mmmm I think I'm gonna have to re-evaluate my entire outlook, this is a real eye opener.

Thanks for providing me with a reason to question my entire approach.

Danté

Nash wrote:The John Clare biography is great by the way, if anyone's interested.

I've been thinking about reading that. I liked his Shakespeare book.

Hello Dante,

Thanks for your comments as always, it's always good to question everything! I originally wrote this without the 'the' in each line, but I put them in to give the first line a nice iambic rythm to try and hammer home the romanticism and to make the second line 'uglier' by comparison.

David, it's well worth a read if you like John Clare, I don't usually read biographies but I really enjoyed this.