I have been reflecting on postmodernism and poetry, and came up with the idea of a quick, easy poll to help develop some of these thoughts.
Care to help me out? You don’t have to know a thing about poetry to participate. For each title in bold, simply click “poetry” if you think it sounds like the title of a poetry book, or “prose” if you think it sounds like a prose book’s title.
Ready? Here we go.
Are the following book titles prose or poetry?
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The results you see after clicking an answer, above, are the tally of votes. Here are the answers as to which book is which:
Poetry
Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films by Wayne Koestenbaum
Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird edited by Anna Skucińska
The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh
The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder
Prose
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka
Fast Beauty by Rona Berg
How to Survive a Robot Uprising by Daniel H. Wilson
People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead by Gary Leon Hill
Pocket Guide to Emergency Bicycle Repair by Ron Cordes
The Essential Beginner’s Guide To Raising Swans by Andrew Gray (e-book)
How did you do? Any surprises about which books were which? Any surprises about the poll results, above?
18 Comments
I think I hit about 50% of them, erroring on both sides equally.
Some reminded me of my poem, “A Guide to the Air-Dependent”.
Sounds like great potential for a list-oriented poem there. 50/50 with a 50/50 spread. You, sir, may be our median!
More ordinal (ordinary!?) than listy ~ link.
Interesting how normal straddles statistics and linear algebra (by way of geometry), well, and English too. Where Orthogonal is pretty strictly linear algebra (with some English usage); and they mean very different things, when “translated” to English. (well, just meaning one versus meaning two of normal). Eh.
This is me without caffeine.
reCAPTCHA: Mr entitled
Ha! =)
It may be early, but so far the popular vote is 60% right.
Enjoyed the poem, btw, Kaolin–and the musings.
I think they all *sound like* potential poetry collection titles, except that swans one. That would be a boring book of poetry, or at least one I would avoid based on the title alone.
How can there be any right or wrong when we’re just going by what a title sounds like, not what it actually is? Hmm?
My Captcha is “inanely is.” That’s a good description for my essence.
wow, i suck. 25%. thought some were tricks.
Great fun. Really depends on who you poll. I found all of them to be clever titles for books of poetry. That’s the trouble with poets. We watch the world through these eyes and find poetry damn near everywhere. My next collection simply must be “Pocket Guide to Emergency Bicycle Repair.” Fabulous!
I hate feeling dumb this early in the morning.
But I’ve read some of these! Great titles, too.
Thanks for the quiz!
Plenty more votes and the popular vote is still at 60% accuracy. So far at least one non-poet reports following the popular vote to end up with inaccuracies on both sides. I think poets, however, who have more exposure to contemporary poetry book titles, may end up thinking they ALL sound like good poetry book titles, which is fascinating. And, if you think they’re all trick questions, I can see how you’d have a low score. There’s no right or wrong–it’s really just an experiment in consciousness, and already I’m seeing some interesting trends. Hope you all are having fun–that’s the point!
And, once again, poets are commenting on the CAPTCHAs. Which may mean this little exercise has put them in a poetic frame of mind. Jolly good.
So I tainted the results by voting a couple times–but I made sure to vote all correctly once, and all incorrectly the second time. Still, on the one question where you see only one dissenting vote, that’s not legit–everyone so far got that one right.
Isn’t it amazing how a poetic mindset can make something like “Pocket Guide to Emergency Bicycle Repair” seem like such a great book title? Already I’m off on section titles, poem topics–fascinating.
Leave it to your blond sister to be the other wrong vote for Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird being prose! :/
Hey! I’m partly responsible for your blond-ness…
Since I was 50/50 on most of them, and forgot what I chose, the only one that surprised me, really was the jewish porn. sounds like something they would spotlight on the Daily Show
I loved this, Robert. My brain has been wired into poetry so long that all these titles sounded like poetry titles to me. In fact, many sounded like titles I’d give my own poems. The prose titles are so good I’m thinking of stealing them and writing a new poem for each one. Nice going!
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” T.S. Eliot.
Fun to stew over this.
I was tempted to make the titles all of poems. Delicious, all. I’m not counting, but I think I turned 3-4 prose titles into poetry.
I think I will write that poem about swans. Just to try it out.