Archive for Verse
Another chat with ChatGCP. This time, I asked it for a one-stanza parody of “The Raven.” It replied: Once upon a midnight dreary, As I pondered, weak and weary, There came a knock upon my door, From a creature, small and poor, Who begged for just a little more Of the bread and cheese I […]
I recently chatted with ChatGPT (on December 9), just to see what sorts of things it would say in response to various prompts. Here’s a transcript of some parts of that chat. (The first response paragraph is a little long and dull, but I’m including it here in its entirety for comparison with the next […]
Yesterday, a friend pointed me to a brilliant three-page linguistics paper, published in 1994: “The perception of rhythm in language,” by psycholinguist Dr. Anne Cutler. Here’s the beginning of part 1 of the text: The orthography of English has a very simple basis for establishing where words in written texts begin and end: both before […]
I’ve been hearing Ezra Pound’s name for decades, but it recently occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about his life or his poetry. So I went looking online for more information about him, and quickly came across an entertainingly written 1958 takedown of Pound’s and Ernest Fenollosa’s approach to translating Chinese poetry: “Fenollosa, […]
Recently tried to search for the origin of the following limerick: The limerick, peculiar to English Is a verse form that's hard to extinguish Once Congress in session Decreed its suppression But people got around it by writing the last line without any rhyme or meter. Which led me to a page of Limerick Myths, […]
(Content warning for referring to, and writing out in full, a specific racial slur.) Back in column ggg, I attempted to piece together the famous poem about English pronunciation “The Chaos,” based on a bunch of fragmentary online sources. And then in 2013, I came across the website of the English Spelling Society, which provided […]
I've long had a fondness for certain poetic forms oft-derided as doggerel. One of my favorite such forms is the Double Dactyl, also known as the Higgledy Piggledy. A dactyl is a poetic foot which consists of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Words like "turpitude," "menopause," and "aspirin" are dactylic—their stress pattern […]