Poetry meme

[peteryoung]

Everyone's posting poetry. yonmei posted a poem by Howard A. Landman about the poet Marilyn Hacker, so here's a short one by Hacker that I like, about her ex-husband Samuel Delany (found in Delany's The Motion of Light in Water).


There was a young man called Delany
whose verse wasn't overly brainy.
When you start to get with him,
he completely drops the concept of rhythm,
and after a while he doesn't even bother to rhyme.

Comments

[numbat.livejournal.com]

Yes but why is everybody posting poetry?

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Because we are at the mercy of benign self-replicating memes.

[numbat.livejournal.com]

Ah, so memes are spam.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

But spam is not benign...

[numbat.livejournal.com]

Benign? Merely an unprovable assertion.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I rather go with this unattributed quote about spam: "Never in human history has so much misery been caused to so many by so few."

[numbat.livejournal.com]

Yes but that entirely avoids demonstrating why the poetry meme is so benign as you assert.