From 643d9ceb308c206a6e572c7c555168ff0ca60bc1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Case Duckworth Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2015 15:40:42 -0700 Subject: Fix #5: Verse typesetting Thanks to the pandoc-discussion thread at , line breaks in verse have been converted to s, which enables the CSS to style them with hanging indents, given a too-small viewport. This commit also includes a makefile edit to reflect this change, and the Haskell source and executable of the pandoc filter. --- on-genre-dimension.html | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'on-genre-dimension.html') diff --git a/on-genre-dimension.html b/on-genre-dimension.html index 7ed4749..5f0d9fc 100644 --- a/on-genre-dimension.html +++ b/on-genre-dimension.html @@ -44,7 +44,7 @@

This is because poetry has more than one dimension, due to its linear nature—those line breaks are intentional, and the poem can’t just fit into any-sized book or web page. If prose is a liquid, filling any container it’s placed in with a constant volume, poetry is more like a crystallized form of prose, or to put it another way, poetry has between one and two dimensions. I wouldn’t say that poetry has fully two dimensions, except for some of the more conceptually visual stuff that I’d call a word-picture anyway, because from line to line that unidimensionality of prose remains. Poetry has a higher dimensionality than prose, though, because it’s crystallized there on the page; this fractal-dimensionality of poetry has interesting side effects on the genre itself.

For one thing, poetry isn’t as bound by time as prose is. It can, as Marianne Boruch writes, resist “narrative sequence,” or “the forward press of time itself,” due to its repetitions and diversions, which are in turn made possible or more apparent by its line breaks. It’s able to meditate on a subject, or expand on it lyrically, exploring the emotions connected with the images in the poem, or the connections between images. Through repitition of sounds, the poem builds meaning through resonance and rhyming, something that’s harder to do in prose. Take, for example, the first lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:”

-

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

+

LET us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherized upon a table;Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,The muttering retreatsOf restless nights in one-night cheap hotelsAnd sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question….Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”Let us go and make our visit.

And here it is again, without line breaks:

-- cgit 1.4.1-21-gabe81