Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Poetry Generators, Stylometry & I Corinthians 13


                      “Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado.”*

                                                                     Juan Ramón Jiménez

Typically one hopes
to explain as much
variation as possible.

We look for snapshots:

                                    Night rises on a great crow wing
                                    bearing the half-lifed moon....

Once functorial, however,
multidimensionality is underrepresented:

                                   glows like an apricot
                                   blossoms salacious as a tiger lily

Thus and so one explanation
of many things goes astray:

                                   asphodel
                                   sandal beams
                                   tears of honey

If this seems to do the trick, it is strictly a trick
of triadic line.

Therefore let us say
in variable syllables
there may be untold many
in each with his, her, or its own ways:

                                  lyre-voiced
                                  last moan of spring
                                  breast to breast as one

In conclusion, then--Who authored I Corinthians 13?

Ultimately Corinthians, for without them

no Corinth
no column
no bronze
or isthmus
no pink
no spirit
no epistles
no echoing horn
no clashing cymbal

& also no rash formulas and answers off the scale.

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa      November 2, 2016     Granada, Nicaragua
_____________________________________________________
N.B.: *”If they give you ruled paper, write on the other side.” Interestingly
enough a very similar quotation is often attributed to William Carlos Williams,
“If they give you lined paper, write the other way”. There can be little or no doubt
that if Williams said this, he got it from Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet
who won the Nobel Prize in 1956 and after the Spanish Civil War taught at the
University of Puerto Rico. In fact, Williams, who was Spanish on his mother's
side, with ties to both Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York
City, was physically in Puerto Rico in 1956 when Ramón Jiménez won the prize,
though he never mentions meeting or otherwise knowing him. Williams in Puerto
Rico was close to the poet Luis Palés Matos, several of whose poems he imitated
and one of whose works he translated into English. It is inconceivable that
he did not hear about and read works of Ramón Jiménez, either in New York City
or Puerto Rico.