[Jan D. Hodge]

Nice try, Carol. And thanks for trying. But seeing what kind of post gets a reply, and what doesn't, sure takes the fun out of this for some of us. One last stab to retrieve both the thread and the reputation of a lovely little form:

Ponder our ancestor,
Australopithecus:
he'd no idea what
he would become;
maybe that proves that in
antediluvian
times it already was
smart to be dumb.

Cheers,
Jan

[Roger Slater]

Originally posted by Jan D. Hodge:

Ponder our ancestor,
Australopithecus:
he'd no idea what
he would become;
maybe that proves that in
antediluvian
times it already was
smart to be dumb.

Ponder our progeny,
children yet born to us,
living in satellites
up in the sky.

Hurling through Outer Space,
far from the Earth we loved,
they'll be the human race
after we die.

[Jan D. Hodge]

Originally posted by Roger Slater:
As far as metrics are concerned, I won't claim perfection, and I'll admit that the reader must play along somewhat and allow the line breaks to create a sort of comical dactylic cadence, but I believe you are once again mistaken if you think my ditty wasn't essentially dactylic. The first stanza, for example:

HARDly, Jim. YOU deceive
YOUR fragile EEgo if
YOU tell it TO believe
YOU gave as well

Any reader with any kind of ear would be willing to hear the double dactyls here. . . .

By contrast, let's look at your sterling example:

ROGery-DODGery
CRYing in THE kitchen
PLEADS to his MOTHer
that it's too hot

it's hard to justify accenting "the" in the second line. . . .

Not that any of this is a crime. This is the "fun" forum, not a place where we expect critique or perfection.

I choose to steer well clear of the personal exchange here, and I also agree that "this is the 'fun' forum, not the place where we expect critique or perfection." Still, I think I've demonstrated a fair mastery of this fine form in other posts and on other threads, and so offer an observation purely on the metrical argument here.

"CRYing in THE kitchen" is definitely a stretch, but any more so than "HARDly Jim YOU deceive" [my tin ear hears something more like: / - / | | / - /, which has a pleasant lilt of its own] or "YOUR fragile EEgo if" [I hear - / - / - ', nice iambic trimeter, though that last stress is pretty light] or "YOU tell it TO believe" [I hear - / - ' - /; hmmm, iambic trimeter again, that stress on "TO" surely being as hard to justify as the one on "THE"]?

This reader would be quite willing to "play along" and hear a dactylic cadence, even a "comic" one, but can't seem to do so. Alas, rhythm shouldn't reside SOLELY in the ear of the writer. Sorry. But all in fun.

Cheers,
Jan [member of OPIDD -- the Order to Preserve
the Integrity of the Double Dactyl]

[Roger Slater]

Withdrawn.

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited February 04, 2002).]

[Jan D. Hodge]

Hi, Roger--

I have precious little appetite for street brawls over trivia, and would never have commented on your metrics here had you not explicitly made exaggerated claims for your ditty at Jim's expense. Though your remarks on his metrical failures may well have been warranted, I sensed more than a bit of pot and kettle.

I too sometimes "stretch" natural readings to maintain dactylic cadence, relying on the momentum of the rhythm to span the chasm:

Fatal astronomy!
Nicholas Romanov,
last on the throne of the
great Russian czars,
must have been blind to the
incontrovertible
family fate written
red in the stars.

(I trust the reader to play along and indulge the attempt to avoid stresses on "Russian" and "written" here. Even so, this d-d is not entirely successful rhythmically.)

But there are stretches and there are stretches, and in this case your additional rhyme on "deceive/believe" ironically calls even more attention to those words, working against your wish to downplay the stresses on their final syllables. "YOU tell it TO believe" (natural iambic) is begging as huge an indulgence as "CRYing in THE kitchen" (natural trochaic), especially since in context the stress you want on "YOU" is dramatically and rhetorically highly suspect.

Yes, your "Ponder our progeny" works metrically and in other regards (though your waiving the "required" d-d word in l. 6 makes your triumph less than complete). My compliments on it, but that wasn't the issue here.

Cheers,
Jan

[Roger Slater]

Jan, I didn't know there was a required d-d word in L6. Live and learn.

[Carol Taylor]

Roger, here's a great link on dd's. You'll find out they do get in your blood.
http://www.stinky.com/dactyl/dactyl.html

Carol

[Robert Swagman]

Never tried one of these. Let me see...

Floppily - moppily
Old Albert Einstein had
Frizzy white hair like a
Janitor's mop.

He proved mathematically,
Quite catagorically,
What matters is inside
Not on the top.

[Roger Slater]

Titan of writing verse,
Emily Dickinson
hardly would budge from her
Amherst abode.

Draped in white garments she
agoraphobically
wrote secret books that she
secretly sewed.

She could not grasp the world
unmetaphysically
so she developed her
own special code.

I am so grateful for
Emily Dickinson
and for the poems her great
genius bestowed.

[Roger Slater]

<FONT >"Higgledy piggledy"
doesn't mean squat to me.
If you have something to
say please rephrase.


Don't ask a lot of me.
Since my lobotomy
words are no longer a
game my mind plays.

</FONT s>

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited February 04, 2002).]