A new bookmash. It has been weeks since I made one.
[click to enlarge]
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A Pagan Place
The idea of prehistory, a pagan place –
Land of milk and honey, the white goddess;
Cows, pigs, wars and witches,
Women, fire, and dangerous things.
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Again this one is top-heavy with non-fiction – I tend to notice the ratio only after putting them together. See my previous one on language evolution for stats on fiction vs. nonfiction.
Thanks to the authors: Glyn Daniel, Edna O’Brien, Bríd Mahon, Robert Graves, Marvin Harris, and George Lakoff; and to Nina Katchadourian for the idea.
For more like this, see my archive of book spine poems (25 at last count), which includes links to other people’s. If you want to join in the fun, do – send me a photo or put a link in the comments. Remarks about, say, my inconsistent use of the serial comma are also welcome.
Sentence first 
Hi Stan, you might like the idea I saw at a conference the other day; poems made from every single word from the first paragraph of a novel. Difficult to achieve but great results!
The Swamp Angel,
Olive Kitteridge,
On a black box
Atop Wuthering Heights
Reflects on:
Friendship
Hateship,
Loveship,
Courtship
Marriage
With thanks to: Ethel Wilson, Elizabeth Strout, Michael Connolly, Emily Bronte and Alice Munro.
XO
WWW
Sarah: Oh, that sounds like an interesting challenge. Filed for later.
WWW: I like it, especially the repurposing of Wuthering Heights.
There have been suggestions from academia that its quite likely impossible for humans to speak nonsense so long as the constructs were grammatically allowed, with words from everyday usage. An example in case is Chomsky’s grammatically correct but purported semantic nonsense : ” Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.
Many attempts have been made to provide a context in which the above sentence could make sense. The following is one by C M Street:
“It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.”
In passing….
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with nonsense.
Not at all. Just that there perhaps is nothing we could call nonsense.
Nonsense is in the eye of the befuddler.
Interesting idea. This is the first time I’ve seen something like that. Nicely done, sir!
Thanks, NinjaSteve! It’s a fun way to kill time with books.
I feel like this book could fit into your poem somehow!
ASG: It might, but whether my poem could withstand the irony is another question!
[…] to read it, but the film adaptation is an old favourite. Earlier bookmashes featured other books by Edna O’Brien, Peter Temple, and Sinéad […]