Tutors' versions of (semi-) automatic poetry
Below is poem based on the form we have been using by Mick Short, a cat
lover (see the Author's Acknowledgements page to his Exploring the Language
of Poems, Plays and Prose to see what we mean):
cat in the basket
crying
in a long piteous wail -
veterinary check
I watch quietly
Mick says: 'I started off by substituting the dog of the original with
a cat (I do like dogs, by the way!). Then, once I got the verb it was
pretty easy to think up a situation to match the activity. I thought long
and hard about the final adverb, and almost chose "guiltily" and then
"parentally" to get particular aspects of how I would feel at the vet's.
In the end I chose "quietly" to get the contrast between my activity and
the cat's, which I felt also allowed by weak implication the possibility
of the other manner adverbs I had rejected. Can anybody improve the poem
for me?
If I try randomly choosing from the word lists in the exercise I sometimes
get rubbish and sometimes quite good poems. This shows you that you can
create some reasonable short poems without having any talent at all!
If you choose items from inappropriate word classes you sometimes get
really weird, if not impossible effects (e.g. "in a customised dangerously
dog"). This shows you the effect of grammar. The grammatical rules we
all intuitively know make some choices fine, others a bit odd (and therefore
often rather interesting), and yet others completely unacceptable. Choosing
from within the correct word class lists almost never produces this last,
unacceptable, situation.
It is interesting to see why it is that sometimes selecting what appears
to be an inappropriate word class still turns out to be OK. This is because
the particular form of the word involved can act as an exponent more than
one word class (e.g. the word "hit" can act as a verb or as a noun). So
you can choose an inappropriate word class but in context the word just
assumes its appropriate word class guise, as it were (e.g. if you try
to insert the verb "hit" in the phrase "a smash ____".'
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