At the Siege of Kaffa, a catapult (trebuchet) was used to hurl rotting
corpses into the city thus spreading disease among the inhabitants. I
chronicled this stellar advance of science and technology, supposedly
the first successful confluence of trajected ordnance and biological
warfare, in my poem Empiricism in the Glossomorph(unpublished). Bodies
as bombs; how poetic. Missile delivery systems no longer require meat as
the 'shells' (vessels) for the bacteria and viruses, but it doesn't it
seem something has been lost in the modern 'refinements'. CP
[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> All:
>
> Yesterday I purchased second-hand an Erector set (aka Meccano)
> manufactured in 1959 (the Rocket Launcher set) and straightaway pedalled
> home to build a trebuchet, a medieval counterweight catapult. I just
> perfected the sling mechanism (hardest part). It can now throw a
> small polyurethane ball about ten feet (as I calculated it would). It's
> throwing arm is just about two feet long.
>
> Does anyone know of poems that mention or are otherwise "about"
> trebuchets and other sorts of catapults? I wrote one about two years
> ago. Anyone else?
>
> Gabe Gudding
--
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Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 20:11:31 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
Sender: poetryetc
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Wendy Cope
In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
On Wed, 31 May 2000, Mark Weiss wrote:
> I take it that it's politically ok to post inaccurate, hateful and stupid
> cliches about men but not about women?
I don't have any hateful stuff about women on hand. And I'm not really
sure that the Cope piece is, well, hateful. I wouldn't go so far as to
call it stupid either. As it's addressed to "men," I suppose you could
call it inaccurate if you wanted to assume she meant all men. Hateful's
a bit strong: maybe slightly snide.
And, Joe, I expect I wouldn't call the piece satire either: "a plain and
slightly witty derisive attack" would be more accurate. You're right:
really good satire draws reluctant agreement from a hostile reader. This
doesn't do that, I'd guess. But it makes me fond of her a little.
On Wed, 31 May 2000, Joseph Duemer wrote:
> The Wendy Cope poem is:
> as a profound failure of imagination.
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