<<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.>>

It makes me not fond of her at all, Gabe. It's cliché, the sort of easy language any creative writing teacher would try to coax toward the actual. And it is a metrical horror--that's why I was willing to admit it might be satire, satire often employing bumpy meter as a foregrounding devise, a sort of "nudge, nudge," as the old Monty Python skit has it. I usually don't offer my own work on the list, especially not as a counter example to something I am criticizing, but here are the first & last stanzas of a much longer poem, the title poem of a new collection I've just begun peddling. I offer it because it tries to imagine with language situations similar to those in the Cope & Ryan poems. A companion piece to this poem, titled "Pornography," appeared in the last number of Stand.

Magical Thinking
Du nombre des amoureux sains . . .
—VILLON

“Dick-for-brains,” I heard a woman say under her breath, contempt
streaking her voice like staphylococcus. It’s true the man walking
away with shoulders pitched forward was graceless—a doofus—or
an honorable fool—some of us grow up never learning where to put
our hands when talking to a woman, or whether the jacket ought to be
buttoned or unbuttoned & under what circumstances, ergo cit.

[ . . .  ]

That is why we also hate him, for he engenders disgust with ourselves.
For he puts everything we’ve earned to the test—Dick-for-Brains demands
we prove ourselves against the Devil, who is willing to admit he likes crawling
into bed with women & likes thinking about it as much as doing it,
though he recognizes, because he is the Devil, the ontological differences
between doing & thinking. He knows it is here that thinking matters most.
 
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Joseph Duemer
School of Liberal Arts, box 5750
Clarkson University
Potsdam NY 13699
315.268.3967
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http://web.northnet.org/duemer
http://www.grammarbitch.com/ppp/index.html
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