Calling Vogon Prostetnic Jeltz

[unixronin]

....now acrostics are apparently being considered to be poems for school homework purposes.  Give me a break .... an acrostic is a word puzzle.

I suddenly find myself with a new-hatched dread of waking up one day to find that "Cat, dog shit oops I ment cow" [misspelling intentional] is now considered a poem.  The criterion of poetry seems to have dropped to "If someone, somewhere, regardless of whether or not they know anything about poetry or even about grammatically correct English, says it's a poem, then it's a poem."

Come back, Vogons, all is forgiven.  At least the "freddled gruntbuggly" poem had ... something.  (I'm not certain what it was, nor whether I really want to find out, but it had something.)

Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!

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Clarification:  I am taking issue not with the idea that an acrostic can be a poem, but with the idea that merely being an acrostic is sufficient on its own to qualify a collection of words as a poem, which is about as silly as saying that having doors is sufficient to classify an object as a car -- the quality "has doors", as a distinguishing attribute of car-dom, is neither necessary, nor sufficient.  So it is with "is an acrostic" and poetry.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not suggesting acrostics are new. I'm just grumping at the idea that an acrostic -- with no requirement that it have anything whatsoever poetic about it, just any old plain, vanilla generic acrostic -- now satisfies a poetry assignment.

As for haiku .... we did tech support completely in haiku for about half an hour in undernet #callahans once. :)

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Lazarus, now known as Jubal, sent me the log. I've got it at /home.