greenmountaineer
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2008
- Posts
- 2,442
That's a strange / funny piece, GM. I liked the original version, and thought it was pretty good. As for your changes:
1) I like that you've expanded the poem. I feel it is of the kind that can use more words, rather than fewer. The "padding" doesn't detract, here — it is part of the timing, in delivering the story.
2) Possible typo in stanza 4: "and wouldn't make it America," — did you mean in America?
3) I thought it was strange that you used quotation marks in stanze 5-8, but not in stanza 4. It also seems to be missing on the first line of the fifth stanza ("Indeed, not to worry", he repeated).
4) Why "Dadist"? "Dung Diddly Dada" seems to fit better (the sound), and I don't see the connection between dadaism and the rest of the poem (maybe I'm missing something, and I have considered that there is more here than cracking a joke at academia, but I can't see it — yet).
5) Why Little Rock? Is it similar to Australia, or are you making a joke with the people who live there?
6) I feel you've lost something when you replaced the original third stanza for stanze 4-8 in the edited version, both in the lines there ("Manhattan would soon fall in line"; "the art of post neo formal trogloraptors" — I'm pulling those from memory, which means they stuck with me) and in the tone. The conversational San Francisco piece doesn't carry quite the same punch, perhaps because of interruptions (he said, in that dark stormy night, etc.).
Thanks for the detailed feedback, Tsotha. I wrote this parody after Googling a search for "Modern Poetry Movements" and was not surprised to find something like 16 or 17 of them since the 20th century. Ezra Pound's famous quote "Make it new" apparently was taken to mean the type of poetry, rather than the poem.
About the same time, I read a story about a newly discovered spider by spelunkers in some mountain cave in Oregon, a very rare species. The parody, of course, is how rare modern poetry is, and how it manages to survive in academia.
Your 2) comment is correct. I made the change. Good catch re 3). It should have quotes. I'm anal retentive about good grammatical construction. It's a bit embarrassing when I miss something like that.
I've also changed "Dadist" to "Dadaism" because the former is misspelled, and I'm not sure that Dadaist" is correct. "Gradungulidae" is a rare species of spider found only in Australia. I chose "Little Rock" because, well, it's a "rock" where you might find spiders; it's in middle America and fairly rural; and it might be regarded as unsophisticated by intellectual snobs from San Francisco or New York of which the "scholar" in the poem is one.
I deliberately wrote the 5th stanza poorly. "On a dark and stormy night" is a literary cliché. Given your comments, I may have to re-think that, but I still like the 2nd version's ending lines because of the word play with "theses will fill up campuses," which, I confess, is my favorite line in the poem.
's to you both and I hope to be around again before too much longer.
