Hi Gareth, Thanks, those comments are helpful. Mike Stay also said that Alan's original had better meter. I don't disagree, but don't care that much either. These are not the days of Tennyson, and the idea that a lyric poem needs iambic tetrameter is, to me, anachronistic. I was telling Mike that a famous counter-example is Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers", and see also: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse To get back to the matter, compare Alan's poem with the following prose: "Due to COVID-19, spring and summer terms have been cancelled. If COVID-19 cases persist until fall, classes will be cancelled again, and students might not be able to graduate." Changing the language slightly or adding a meter and rhyme scheme does not really fix the problem that the subject matter is prosaic. We are disputing what poetry really is, not the constraints it could obey. My idea was to introduce some ambiguity into the word choice, and allow for multiple valid interpretations. This can backfire, but oh well, no harm in trying. I still think the two alternatives are roughly equal. There probably will be good or even great poems written for dealing with death and poverty, especially in segments of the population disproportionately affected. As hinted by Cris Moore's comments, black inner-city populations have seen the worst of it. So if some grammatically-incorrect rapper comes up with a few interesting lyrics on his or her experience, should we then complain about formalism, or that the writing is not mathematically clear due to non-standard usage? Personally, I don't. Another lyrical work I like is Kendrick Lamar's "Sing about me, I'm dying of thirst" (warning: this song is horribly explicit in its description of urban poverty). The meaning of "dying of thirst" is not clear, but that is a poetic virtue. It can be taken literally, but also has obvious biblical overtones. --Brad On Sat, May 9, 2020 at 7:06 PM Gareth McCaughan <gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com> wrote:
On 09/05/2020 16:59, Brad Klee wrote:
It’s perfectly fine to have an opinion, and I don’t care who you like more. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings or stop me from writing. Alan’s is the original, and that is important.
The only thing relevant to the list is what is your procedure for deciding P2 << P1 for two similar poems P1 & P2?
I run them both through a large and complex neural network trained on a modest-size of highly relevant data and a colossal amount of other training data that presumably informs the weights in the net somehow.
Understanding the reasons for a neural network's judgement is notoriously difficult even when the network in question is implemented in wetware and coupled to sophisticated communication hardware, but I think some of the things that make the difference for me are:
- "These COVID" is not grammatical.
- "COVID" is the name of the disease, not the germs. (Allan has "the COVID virus", which I think is OK; the virus that causes COVID[-19].)
- Antecedent of "they" in line 3 is unclear. I guess it's meant to be the germs? "Attend" seems a weird word to use for them, even with humorous intent.
- Too many syllables in line 3.
- Metre of line 4 is completely wrong.
- "mightn't commence any at all" seems ungrammatical to me (but this may just be a usage I'm not familiar with; do universities commence students, rather than students commencing intransitively?)
Please also notice that I did not say “my poem >> Alan’s”, because first of all, it is rude to say such a thing, and even then it isn’t provably true.
I thought that was the clear intention, and it was exactly because it seemed kinda rude that I felt OK offering my contrary opinion, quod erat disputandum.
-- g
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