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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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May 3rd, 2005

unixronin: Pissed-off avatar (Pissed off)
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 04:03 pm

....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!


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.