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A very similar trend shows up in poetry fairly often across many cultures. Adherence to a strict form, like a sonnet, breeds creativity because of the constrai
by hprotagonist 6y ago
A very similar trend shows up in poetry fairly often across many cultures.
Adherence to a strict form, like a sonnet, breeds creativity because of the constraint. (a little known fact is that e.e. cummings wrote more than a few very good ones)
Much earlier in time, scops and skalds -- the epic oral poets of anglo-saxon and norse cultures -- were renowned not so much for their ability to come up with new things as such, but by how cunningly they could weave together stock phrases and allusions to speak to the current moment.
Parallels to the midrashic traditions should be fairly obvious.
You see it in greek epic poetry too: the opening invocation of The Odyssey ends with "tell the old story / for our modern times".
- bschne 6y agoI know it's silly, but this just reminded me of Magnetic Poetry, and the hilarious/delightful unexpected creations it leads to sometimes. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_Poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_Poetry
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago> A very similar trend shows up in poetry fairly often across many cultures. Adherence to a strict form, like a sonnet, breeds creativity because of the constraint. Its hacking equivalent is demoscene and hand-tuned assembly.
- ionwake 6y agoGood analogy thank you
- watwut 6y agoYou see it in action mivies and thrillers and superhero and generally Hollywood who basically evolved to be the same movie again and agaim and again and again with slight variations.
- tjchear 6y agoI don't know if this is considered poetry, but speaking of constraints breeding creativity, I'm reminded of the verbiage from V for Vendetta which uses mostly words starting with the letter V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.
- travisgriggs 6y agoInteresting. Could it be posited the same is true in programming languages? I did Smalltalk for 20 years, a language that constrained you to think about things in a consistent paradigm. And I felt I was much more creative there than the handful of multi paradigm languages I use today. I get the impression that adherents of Forth, Lisp, Haskell, also seem to claim creative empowerment with these single paradigm languages. I'm not sure how one would make this observation less anecdotal. I'm also not sure that I'm not mixing causation with correlation in my observation (e.g. supposing my thesis is valid, it may just be that more creative people are drawn to single/consistent paradigm platforms).
- fellow_human 6y agoAn obvious example of this is pop music. Often following the verse chorus form and also different genres having different constraints in terms of instruments used.
- hprotagonist 6y ago"same tune, wildly different lyrics" is as old as rocks, too. some trivial examples involve roughly every hymn, "god bless the queen"/"my country 'tis of thee", "john brown's body"/"battle hymn of the republic", "to anacreon in heav'n"/"the star spangled banner" .... The other big case are missals: same words, vastly different settings. You know the lyrics are the Mass, but how they're sung is where you show off.