Category: Poetry

Did I miss the 28th Amendment to the Constitution where anybody making a horror movie is obliged to quote the last two lines of Yeats’ “_The Second Coming_”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)? Because by the Father, the dead gay Son and the Holy Spigot, that is beginning to drive me around the fucking bend.

I suspect Stephen King started it (for the horror genre, I mean, the Wikipedia page makes it obvious that everyone in the universe with an ounce of eruditory pretention has quoted this poem at some point) with _The Stand_–but you’d think people would also have noticed that he also quoted “Blue Oyster Cult”:http://blueoystercult.com/ and taken it somewhat less seriously.

I wish I had had “Rhyme & Reason”:http://rhymereason.net/ back when I was actually writing poetry. From the FAQ:

bq. Rhyme & Reason is a suite of online tools for poets and lyricists. It includes an editor for writing verse, an integrated dictionary, rhyming dictionary and thesaurus for finding words, metrical scanning tools for identifying meter and rhyme scheme, as well as features that allow you to share your work with others and comment on other writers’ poems or lyrics.

Now I don’t really give a damn about rhyming dictionaries and thesauruses–I already know too many words, who needs more–but I was always having to look up the metrical stuff (what’s the stress pattern in a “spondee”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondee again?), and having this done automatically would have been _excellent_.

“of _course_ the law has to be written in verse!”:http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/?p=631

I applaud the state of Minnesota.

“Via”:http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/02/extremely-short-legal-entry.html

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