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Former US poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about this sort of thing: The Effort Would anyone care to join me in flicking a few pebbles in the dire
by philips 7y ago
Former US poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about this sort of thing:
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
It continues on for a few more stanzas; consider purchasing a copy of Ballistics for the full poem. The rest of the book is filled with memorable insights as well.
- derp_dee_derp 7y agoToo bad I can't read it because HN quotes suck on mobile and don't work with the brave browser in Android. @dang fix your mobile css and styling.
- lenova 7y agoTry this instead: https://hackerweb.app/ https://hackerweb.app/
- akvadrako 7y agoIt’s not much better. Still requires scrolling left and right for each line.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Too bad I can't read it because HN quotes suck on mobile HN quotes are fine on mobile. But, just to be clear, this is how HN does quotes: “quoted text” And this is how HN does code blocks def this_is(code) not_a_quote end HN code blocks abused for long prose quotations suck on mobile (and aren't appealing on desktop, either), but that's abusing code blocks.
- Veen 7y agoYou'd have a point if the quote in question was a long prose quotation. It isn't; it's a poem and code formatting is often the only way to get poetry to appear reasonable.
- JasonFruit 7y agoPoetry is not a particularly common use case on Hacker News, though, and I'm not convinced anybody needs to optimize for it.
- snazz 7y agoHN gobbles up literal new lines without code blocks so either the poem would all run together or have blank lines between each line.
- dragonwriter 7y agoCode formatting does not get poetry to appear reasonable. That's actually the whole issue being discussed. On the other hand if you don't like each line spaced as a paragraph, as it would be if you try to keep the line structure I. HN non-code text, you can, on HN, use the same convention used everywhere else that it is impossible, impractical, or undesirable to set poetry while preserving the line structure: “this is a line of poetry / and this is another line / each separated from the next with / a solidus set with space / on either side.”
- derp_dee_derp 7y agoThe whole issue being discussed is that HN made a terrible design desicion when they implemented quotes and code styling for Mobile.
- leggomylibro 7y agoI once asked a co-worker what they liked about poetry. "It's like reading a short story, but the author has less time to make their point." That was a fun place to work.
- lisper 7y agoMy own effort, written when I was in high school: A poem is a thought that tried In vain, just once, before it died To reach the page's right-hand side
- rahuldottech 7y agoI like this!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- btrask 7y agoPast the right margin a poem may poke, With the help of HN's mighty block-quote.
- mherdeg 7y agoMy two reference materials on this topic are: (1) Bruce McAllister's symbolism survey - a 16 year old high school student straight-up asked bestselling authors whether they put symbolism in their work, with various replies - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-... (2) Ogden Nash's "Very Like A Whale" - Nash wrote a short, rhyming essay about how frustrating it was that authors sometimes try to use rhetorical techniques to convey meaning obliquely - http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pahk/poems/021221.html http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pahk/poems/021221.html . It always makes me giggle.
- jacquesm 7y agoExcellent! I wonder what he was trying to say with that poem ;)
- V-2 7y agoI found it at http://jatodd.pbworks.com/f/The+Effort-Billy+Collins.pdf http://jatodd.pbworks.com/f/The+Effort-Billy+Collins.pdf and I got a strange delight out of the irony seeing it dissected (on page 2) :)