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Unread 01-23-2008, 12:10 AM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Plum Island, MA; Santa Fe, NM
Posts: 11,175
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Can I vote for "None of the Above"?

It's really impossible to comment on this totally out of context, but I'm probably as good as you can hope for in a "general" reader - well read, but not in the classics, decent vocabulary, reasonably unstupid - and neither word means a thing to me.

"Catasterize" is also, unfortunately, close enough to "castrate" to create unfortunate connections.

But answering this well without the poem in front of me is impossible. Is the context such that the meaning of the word is quite clear anyway, and it's essentially in there as window dressing? Then you have less of a problem? And how does the sound of the word work with the rest of the poem? Does either nestle in there sonically, or play some helpful chords? And do the associations help? "Catasterize" sounds vaguely Greek in origin, and has a certain apocalyptic sense to it; "stellify" sounds dull, nerdy and scientific to me - based on that, i would be very much inclined to reach for "catasterize" in a poem about constellations.

But neither will do you any good if the meaning is not apparent in context. If understanding the word is critical to the flow of the poem, it's gonna crash the poem.
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