Rybka
Nit pick; pearl too!
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2002
- Posts
- 2,449
The American Book Review has published a list of their choices for the:
Hopefully some of you may enjoy reading the list. How many of the books have you read? I find I have only read 42 of them.
Here are two first lines from their list that I found somewhat applicable for Literotica:
"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?" —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
"In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point." —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
***
The real reason I posted this was to ask you to start our own lists of poetry favorites.
List #1. What is your all-time favorite first line of a poem?
List #2. What is your all-time favorite line of poetry?
Who is brave enough to start? (I'm still trying to choose my favorites.)
Hopefully some of you may enjoy reading the list. How many of the books have you read? I find I have only read 42 of them.
Here are two first lines from their list that I found somewhat applicable for Literotica:
"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?" —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
"In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point." —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
***
The real reason I posted this was to ask you to start our own lists of poetry favorites.
List #1. What is your all-time favorite first line of a poem?
List #2. What is your all-time favorite line of poetry?
Who is brave enough to start? (I'm still trying to choose my favorites.)
