N+π: The Raven

When we first mentioned constrained poetry in class, my thoughts immediately jumped to the poem "Near A Raven," Mike Keith's takeoff on Poe's "The Raven."

"Near A Raven" begins thus:

            Poe, E.
      Near a Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".

Perfectly, the intellect remembers: the ghostly fires, a glittering ember.
Inflamed by lightning's outbursts, windows cast penumbras upon this floor.
Sorrowful, as one mistreated, unhappy thoughts I heeded:
That inimitable lesson in elegance - Lenore -
Is delighting, exciting...nevermore.

Keith has imposed a purely mathematical constraint based on the number of letters in each word. Beginning with "Poe, E." and continuing throughout the poem's 740 words, each one represents a digit or two of pi. One through nine letters indicate the digits 1 to 9, ten letters indicate a 0, and eleven or more letters represent two consecutive digits (usually 11 or 12).

N+7: The Roanoke Not Taken

A few notes on form:

What follows is inspired by Robert Frost's "The Road Less Traveled." I have taken each noun - pronouns of four of fewer letters not included - and replaced it with the word found seven later on the wiktionary.org word list (link to "R"). If this word is not a common noun, I have advanced to the closest word that is.
A special case arises for compound words nearly right off the bat. There are 54 words on the list that begin with "road", so I have taken the last such word and advanced seven from it. This principle will be followed when the word given in the previous paragraph has the original word as a root.



Two roanokes diverged in a yellow wool,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one travois, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undeservedness;

Then took the otitis, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better clair de lune,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morocoy equally lay
In leaks* no sterculia had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another dazzlement!
Yet knowing how weakening leads on to weakening,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sighting
Somewhere aggies and (ggies hence:
Two roanokes diverged in a wool, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difficultness.

*Leaks, the plural of leak, replaces leaves, the plural of leaf. Leaves does not appear in the list.

I think I'll try this sometime with an abridged dictionary -- it should separate the original and the result a bit more.

Feeding the Pear

"Feeding the Pear" in Waldrep, Disclamor, Rochester, N.Y.: BOA, 2007; page 64.

In high school AP English, the guiding light of our poetry analysis was "stay as literal as you can for as long as you can." That approach is nearly useless here -- no logical person would attempt to feed a pear, which of course means it is the perfect subject for a poem. Similarly, carrot sticks are the first things offered to the pear; even without questioning why the poet has carrot sticks at church, I would have tried countless other things (up to and including Carrot Top) before carrot sticks.

Will we ever know for certain why the poet chose carrots and sugar as foodstuffs? Short of finding G.C. Waldrep on the street in Lewisburg, Pa., quite likely we will not. Will we ever comprehend what the pear represents or why it must remain in the room (or, for that matter, how the poet obtained sugar from the fellowship hall given that constraint)? The same answer above also applies to all three of those.

Of course, that will never stop me from making (slightly-)educated guesses. I think the pear could be an ego, soft and easily bruised; of course, if those had to stay in one place, the world would be much simpler ... and we'd stay out of Alaska. Is it a debate? Those, too, hurt feelings, but similarly are nearly omnipresent.

The identity of the pear hasn't yet come to me. Maybe it will soon. Or maybe it will come in a dream during the next 5 a.m. downpour.

Maybe that's too grandiose . . .

Maybe

. . .

"Battery Alexander" - Waldrep

After several read-throughs of G.C. Waldrep's "Battery Alexander," the clearest thing to me was that George Calvin Waldrep's first two initials are identical to those of Goshen College. Then I wondered if the poem would make more sense written backward -- though I did not know it at the time, this reformatting technique is similar to one used by my classmate John Miller. In a fit of 1:30 a.m. rage, I made the rather strange decision that this would be a good idea to test and see what happened.

I decided to simply invert the order of the stanzas rather than the words within them to avoid creating a hodgepodge of random sentences in out-of-order groupings. The result is linked here, as Blogger cannot properly handle the spacing required.

I feel like the reversed version tells more of a story than the original does! True, this may be a placebo effect induced by the fact that I had actual influence in the revised production, but the flow feels greatly improved when the stanzas (stanzae?) are reversed.  The spacing is unorthodox and really rather annoying, but I do appreciate the stairs-landing-stairs effect of the descending lines directly above the final dividing symbol.

Waldrep used a different symbol there -- I replaced it with the radioactive sign because it was the closest thing I had.