[lit-ideas] Re: The History of Effects
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:41:55 -0600
JK: "I've received replies from the handful of people I shared it with heavily
criticizing the style, form, etc."
I didn't give up Literary Studies because I was good at it. : ) But I suspect
that even if I had been good at it I still would have run away screaming.
Literaturists are like pathologists and criticism is autopsy. I prefer messy
life.
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: Julie Krueger
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 9:05 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The History of Effects
I'm smiling. I'm glad someone else loved it! I've received replies from the
handful of people I shared it with heavily criticizing the style, form, etc.
Here's one response from a retired editor in NY:
<<One of my copywriters fancied himself a poet (and was a Yeats scholar
working on a grad degree) and tried to develop my ken of poetry. He'd recite a
line or two and asked me what I thought and I always seemed to say the wrong
thing. Exasperated, he would say: "But can't you see? It's so obvious!" And
I'd reply, "Not to me." I guess I just don't have that kind of mind.
He was attending Columbia at night and taking a class with a noted Yeat's
scholar whose name I have forgotten. He claimed to have seen something new in
a set of three short poems by Yeats. His teacher doubted that anyone could
find something new in Yeats, but let him do a grad thesis on the poems. The
poems added up to a few hundred words. He did a fifty-page monograph on them
that I could not even begin to understand. It was the slow season, so I let
him work on the thesis on company time. How industrious he looked! LOL.
He left Ronald Press for academia. The last I heard of him was that he had
married a very wealthy woman. Way to go!>>
I guess I just don't know enough to not love that poem.
Julie Krueger
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thank you, Julie. I loved that.
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: Julie Krueger
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 4:24 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] The History of Effects
From today's "Writer's Almanac":
The History of Effects
by William Greenway
The Bible was created by Bishop Ussher
in 4004 B.C. Then Galileo cooked the universe
too long, and the earth, like a yolk, slipped off
center and everything began to wobble.
Freud needed a reason to talk about sex,
and Marx wrote a bestseller
so he could retire rich.
When the species started to hunt
for their origin, they discovered Darwin.
So now the ears of corn put down
tethers to the earth, trees rake
the wind into piles, the sun turns the world
like a ballerina, the way a magnet whirls
a rotor. Silence squelches the radios,
and darkness the bulbs. Automobiles are invented
to reach the malls, and choppers to haul
body bags, and animals come to live with us
to quench our loneliness and nourish our hunger.
We've begun to love the people who need us
as dandruff rises from sweaters to infect our hair,
and parachutes are the white flags
of suicides that fail.
Julie Krueger
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