I'm delighted to be hosting this discussion, because I love Golias' Razor, which I'd never heard of, of course, until Wiley introduced me to it here. I think it is not infallible, but I'll be damned if I can think of a great poem which would flunk the test. I just ran through Nightingale in my head, checking out the lushest of the lush. I haven't enough fingers to count very far, but the first two stanzas pass with flying colors. Then I did a couple of Shakespeare sonnets. Same result. I suspect I could find some Hopkins which would flunk, although so many of his modifiers are OE kennings, containing nouns, that surely some allowance must be made.
I can't say I've made use of The Razor, but I'm partial to it perhaps because I always score so high. Here's the shortest poem in The Deed of Gift:
Center Pivots
Fields of canola
on the plains of Montana:
slices of banana
in a bowl of granola.
Here, with no modifiers (no verbs even!) the Ratio is Infinity. I think it was Bob Clawson who posted Last Sodbusters over at Mastery, and Wiley pointed out that it scored 23. And yes Roger, there is less room for modifiers in short lines. Thinking about that I counted some pentameters, such as this poem in Deed I wrote 20 years ago:
Razing the Woodlot
Here stands the grove our tenant plans to fell.
The homesteaders who planted this tree claim
fled North Dakota when the Dust Bowl came.
Their foursquare farmhouse is a roofless shell;
their tended shelterbelt, a den for fox
and dumpground for machinery and rocks.
The woodlot seeds its pigweed in our loam,
and windstorms topple poplars on the field;
but for a few wasted acres' yield
we'll spare the vixen and her cubs their home
and leave unburied these decaying beams
to teach us the temerity of dreams.
Correct me if I've miscounted, Wiley, but I think it's 40 to 8 or 5 to 1. (Lineation freak that I am, I notice that by age 32 I've a poem in which ten lines end in nouns, two in verbs, none in modifiers, or God help us, pronouns or prepositions.) So I thought hard, and searched old drafts, and sure enough, most of the pentameter I wrote in my twenties flunks the test. You don't see that in the book, because when Alan edited the Early Poems section of Deed, he cut most of the pents to tets by eliminating guess what? The excessive modifiers.
When I was 28 Wilbur told me "Just because you're writing on the themes of Cavafy doesn't excuse from the charge of sufficiently charging your language." At the time, that comment felt like a bullwhip in the face, but I set about taking his advice, and I succeeded in no small part because over the course of five years my Razor Ratios rose from, say, a flabby 2.5 to 1 to an austere 5 or better. A very useful tool, old friend, and one which I think we can all profit from.
Forgive me for simply talking about the poet I know best. I challenge our members to identify some great poetry which proves the fallibility of the Razor.
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