posted
I'm sure you already do it naturally. Pronouns come in both subjective case (the case you use when the pronoun is the subject, of course) and objective case (the case you use when the pronoun is the direct object, object of preposition, etc.) For example, the subjective case of the 3rd person singular is "he" (used as the subject, "He ran.") The objective case is "him" (used as an object of a preposition, "Gordan ran to him"). This is why we have I/me, he/him, she/her, they/them. English isn't the most consistent language when it comes to this subjective/objective thing (for instance, you/you), but like I said, I'm sure you do it naturally. I don't think I've noticed any confusion in anything I've seen of yours.
(Edited to fix problem KDW caught. Must sleep more...must sleep more....<snoring sounds commence from vicinity of the keyboard> )
[This message has been edited by Minister (edited December 29, 2004).]
posted
Fortunately, in English we've mostly eliminated cases, except with pronouns. Since noun (but not pronoun) cases do not exist in English, the guy who wrote that is just trying to show off, but his statement is essentially meaningless unless limited to pronouns.
Posts: 1517 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
I think that he was just being funny, since the statement is tautological. The term "objective case" simply means the case taken by an object of a transitive verb or preposition.
It was probably part of the joke that what he was saying was obscure and essentially meaningless. Like when I said that in a certain case you could be sure that something strange was afoot, and then added that since feet are pretty strange, as long as there are feet something strange will always be a foot. I think that mine was funnier
posted
Thanks, KDW. And yes, yours is much funnier, Survivor. How come you never post anything for our general enjoyment? I trust that the reason has nothing to do with feet, even ones that aren't hot enough. Posts: 491 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
For a while it was because I was moving away from short stories. I've actually put a few of my stories online and linked them, but that was probably a long time ago. You can read one that I wrote years and years ago from the page listed in my profile, as well as some poetry that I wrote for English class back in highschool.
Here's something I wrote for an old member's milieu. And an X-Com based story I wrote one time when it was my turn in writer's group and what I had been working on wasn't ready.
There are also about four novels (all of which have different milieux and begin separate series) I have under development, but I'm going back to shorts while I work out some issues with voice and POV necessary to writing longer works. For those I'll prefer a group setting.
posted
Thanks, guys. I probably never should have signed up for a beginning poetry class...I don't know what I was thinking and this guy writes all his posts in poetry. Not good poetry, mind, but the cryptic animal feces that has kept me apart from that particular artform my entire life. It's as if it can't be good if you can understand it without blood spurting from your ears. Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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quote:It's as if it can't be good if you can understand it without blood spurting from your ears.
ROTFL!!
So fetching true! I took a few poetry classes in college. The classic poets ALWAYS made sense. But at some point in the development of the arts logic and beauty were abandoned in favor of 'pure art'. Check out the DaDa movement. Talk about not being able to understand it unless you have blood spurting out of your ears! The whole point of DaDa is that it, essentially, has not point. It's self destruction. It's meaninglessness. The art of the DaDa movement actually became less important than the philosphy behind it.
And if you're silly enough to want to write poetry that can actually be understood, you're labeled as old-fashioned or simple. Give me a break.
[This message has been edited by djvdakota (edited December 30, 2004).]
posted
You're not talking about my poems, right? I did write them for an English class, but I thought they were okay.
I think that poetry should be an expression that evokes feelings and experiences that are already part of the audience. So the relative brevity of a poem and metaphorical language are to concentrate on communicating something that doesn't need a lot of explanation.
That's probably why most writers interested in SF don't go for poetry, the whole point of poetry is to express something already known to the reader, where most of us want to take the reader somewhere new.
quote:I think that poetry should be an expression that evokes feelings and experiences that are already part of the audience.
Ah. So, modern poetry is about evocation rather than communication? No wonder I tend to avoid it. My life is so full of other people's attempts to evoke me to unload my wallet that I must perceive evocative modern poetry as advertising, and thus of no value.
Too bad they don't just attempt to communicate their insight rather than to evoke all over it. Gets messy.
posted
All poetry is about evocation more than communication, that's why it's poetry and not prose.
The problem with most modern poetry is that it is designed to appeal only to a very narrow group of people with similar experiences (basically, "brilliant but unappreciated" modern poets who live on the slender hope of being granted access to public funds in recognition of their genius). If you're not a member of that group, then they aren't trying to say anything to you (not with their poetry, at least). The really horrible and sad thing is that 99% of modern poetry is actually written by people that aren't in on the secret. They may know that they are being judged by the "b&u" set, but they don't usually understand that the only thing that motivates someone to remain a member of that group rather than rebelling against it is careerism (the "b&u", on the other hand, understand this and tolerate quite a bit of rebellion as long as it is fairly quiet, which is how they retain what talents they do claim as members).
But poetry used to be written to evoke the experiences that most people shared and valued. Read Shakespeare's sonnets, and you won't find any thing in them that you haven't already learned from your own experience.
In a sense, this is a distillation of the essential nature of language, in that before we can understand what a word means, we need to have experiences and learn to relate the word to our experience. But where most communicative prose seeks to overcome this by combining enough experience units together to allow the audience to imagine a situation that is not something previously experienced, poetry deliberately goes in the other direction.
This doesn't remove the fact that there must be both communication and evocation in both forms. It is obvious that communication is impossible without common experiences to evoke. Likewise, it is impossible to evoke a common experience without communicating some essence of that experience.
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