Soundless Self-Indulgence
sarcasm, sound, humor, poetry
Published on:
June 17, 5:24amWord Count:
205Last Edited:
June 17, 6:12amWork Description
Whenever I write poems I feel like I inevitably end up being sarcastic: playing around with words and sound in ways that please my concussion cracked sense of language. I'm obsessed with the concept that our alphabet possesses unnecessary letters while remaining at least 12 letters short.
This was for my final in Intro to Creative Writing.
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Letting Lily's long lost lover
forget Fred's frozen pheromones
alarms Ann and antecedents
thoroughly, thoughtfully, thrashing thespians
Proceeding on in alliteration lacks
my mannered, discursive tone
for what it's worth. (It's not)
Somehow my meaning abdicates
being, seeing, feeling, thinking
and all my thought goes straight to why
"ing" makes its own
peculiar
sound.
ng!!!!
aftin taimz ai wunder wut
aor linguists wr wundring win
thei that so mini saundz
shud hav so fiu letrz
For then it all comes down to
sound.
Or not, if you think about it.
But
sound.
A round sound sound has
as if the whole word
wraps around the sound it found
And chokes out its last
disjuncted
grasping
dying
breath
Becous-in to me, sound
is a truffle, Mr. Tree.
And Rhythm, rhyme
bee hinder the thyme, Khan Vince is
me that the hole
Mother-fricative
conscept(re?) lacks a
a
a
a
a
a
Which 'a' am I using?
"a"ffirmative?
"a"typical?
"a"cceptable?
"a"nimate?
"a"rchetype.
You don't, font, women, worsen
Get the picture yet?
It's evolutionarily vowel-tastic!
Why we have
5 letters for 10
sounds.
And don't get me started
on you, 'ghoti',
whom I cannot shave
because of all the scales.
The end
justifying the" means?
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Having many problems with the English language myself, I definitely enjoyed this. It was fun, in a mocking sort of way. And it was very easy to read. Can I ask what grade you received on it?
My submission for the final was three poems and one short story, hopefully all of which I will eventually get submitted. My grade on the final was an 'A'. Because I was more focused on prose in the class, his final commentary focused on the short story, so I actually don't know what he thought of this.
Ha. I like this a lot. It made me smile. ^_^
I liked your use of consonance in this piece. It as humorous and enlightening. I liked how you played with the words like the Modernists did. I know how the narrator feels. When I write something, certain words do not "sound right." I am always burying my nose in a thesaurus to find the "right word." Oftentimes I want to make words up, but then the computer doesn't recognize them. So I can see why you wrote this piece. It was brilliantly constructed. The only thing I would change is
aftin taimz ai wunder wut
aor linguists wr wundring win
thei that so mini saundz
shud hav so fiu letrz
I would have put another section in there explaining what this says---because any reader will say "What the?" and not understand its meaning. Your satire will not work. Overall, very well done. I look forward to reading more of your poems. I like your satire and humor. Keep up the good work.
This assemblage of text is a nice piece of fun. I was a bit put off by the first four lines, and the next four are pretentious, but once we get through that and into the meat of it, all is better.
Conventional English spelling was made up -- as is most of English -- by foreigners. I think it was Dutch printers who are mostly to blame (unless you want to blame the English themselves) because despite the fact that most of Dutch comprises words like "hodebodddoee bo dooo deoee eddj" they found it difficult to render English vowels. This I can accept -- but I will never forgive them for removing the "eth" letter from the alphabet just because they couldn't be bothered to fashion that beautifully crossbarred "d".
I mention this in the critique because the writer really ought to have alluded to it, punned on -- or made reference to -- G.B. Shaw for the "ghoti" line. To disregard a seminal writer like that... well... it's a bit fishy.
To improve, the writer needs to do some research. There's a feast of people at the god-awful-English-spelling banquet. It's not enough (to be intellectually satisfying) to give it a mere lament.
But the work is fun, and light (once you disregard the cannonballic sound effects), so thank you for raising a smile.
Having many problems with the English language myself, I definitely enjoyed this. It was fun, in a mocking sort of way. And it was very easy to read. Can I ask what grade you received on it?