Week 2: Charles Bernstein experiments

Experiment 2: He Do the Police in Voices: Dialect & Idiolect. Dialectise a poem using the dialectizer.

1- Sonnet 116 à la Elmer Fudd

Wet me not to the mawwiage of twue minds
Admit impediments. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit! Wove is not wove
Which awtews when it awtewation finds,
Ow bends wif the wemovew to wemove:
O no! it is an evew-fixed mawk
Dat wooks on tempests and is nevew shaken;
It is the staw to evewy wandewing bawk,
Whose wowth's unknown, awthough his height be taken, uh-hah-hah-hah.
Wove's not Time's foow, though wosy wips and cheeks
Within his bending sickwe's compass come:
Wove awtews not wif his bwief houws and weeks,
But beaws it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be ewwow and upon me pwoved,
I nevew wwit, now no man evew woved.

reflections: perhaps didn´t work quite as well as the meaning is little changed. However visually it´s rather harsh due to the excess amount of w´s. Perhaps the meaning is changed a little though, as its Elmer Fudd taking about that scwewwy wabbit, Bugs Bunny, who he perpetually hunts, so it´s rather a different type of love!

2. When ah' am an old honky chick (in "jive" dialect) by Jenny Joseph

When ah' am an old honky chick, ah' shall wear purple
wid some red fedora dat duzn't go, and duzn't suit me.
And ah' shall spend mah' pension on brandy and summa' gloves
and satin kindles, and say we've no bre'd fo' butter.
Ah be baaad... I shall sit waaay down on de pavement when ah' am tired
and gobble down samples in shops and press alarm bells
and run mah' stick along de public railin's
and make down fo' de sobriety uh my ya'd.
I shall go out in mah' slippuh's in de rain
and pick de flowers in oda' sucka's's gardens
and learn t'spit.

Man! You's kin wear terrible shirts and grow mo'e fat
and feed da bud dree pounds uh sausages at some go
o' only bread and pickles fo' some week
and ho'd pens and pencils and bea' nuts and doodads in boxes.

But now we gots'ta have clodes dat keep us dry
and pay our rent and not swear in de damn street
and set some baaaad 'esample fo' de kids. 'S coo',
bro. We gots'ta have homeys t'dinna' and eyeball de sheets.
But maybe ah' ought t'practice some little now?
So's sucka's who know me is not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly ah' am old, and start t'wear purple.

reflections: this poem works much better, probably because it is contemporary, allowing it to be believable in this dialect.

Experiment 17 - Alphabet poems. Write a poem where each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Do it again, though the next time with the letters jumbled up.

Ants bundle carefully
down each flimsy gstring
hovering in
juxtaposition
knowing love might never offer
peculiar questions. Roaming
sideways
they uncover violets whispering
XL yoddles zealously.

Jaded nettles often frollick
hugging pansies in shades,
aware dragonflies zoom by
under tutelage.
Yet grass will linger
cursing xylology.
Quietly vicars mutter
repeating eulogies.

reflection: It seemed to work rather well! It was a struggle to keep some sort of theme flowing through them as the ordered structure was constraining. The first one flowed out easily. The second one was a bit of a struggle, and admittedly I changed some verbs (eg. move became mutter, fight became frollick, xenophobes became xylology) to allow some semblance of meaning.