Eddie Pensier writes:
From PopSonnet, whose author recasts well-known songs in Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Link via Maggie McNeill.
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Uncouth Reflections 
Reblogged this on Will S.' Sunny Side Blog and commented:
Awesome! 🙂
Thanks EP!
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Wow, nerds cannot write poetry for shit. Nor do they get what it’s even about. Apparently it means making shit harder to understand — every word coming from a thesaurus, old timey idioms, stilted syntax — and sapping the lyrical tone of all emotion and vitality. Like, who knew you could limpen the dick of “Livin’ on a Prayer”?
Here’s a howler of a line from the new “#SELFIE” —
“I spied a boorish rogue across the hall
Whose eyes again met mine in fleeting winks.”
What a Ren-Fair faggot. No one would talk like that in any time period, Elizabethan, Romantic, Victorian, whenever. Nerds have no identifiable voice, it’s like the original went into a computer program, the algorithm stultified everything, and it came out of a robot. Not very good for scientific prose, awful for verse.
These are the minds that would re-cast the Holy Sonnet to read, “Trounce mine heart, thrice-incarnate deity!”
I’m not objecting to the attempt at humor and irony by casting familiar pop songs in a different idiom, like translating Keats into German or something. But when a real translator does their thing, Keats still sounds like poetry — only in German.
These failed attempts at translating pop songs into any kind of old idiom show how little the nerd resonates with poetry. He can’t tell that what he just produced doesn’t feel like musical or poetic at all. It sounds like Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek trying to avoid plagiarism charges for his freshman creative writing assignment.
And no, the joke is not one level of “meta” higher — like, “these is how awful these songs (which are already written in meter and rhyme) would sound if nerds tried to make them sound old timey.”
It’s no wonder we don’t read much poetry, if our minds have become so numbed to its special powers in the first place.
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Guns blazing at some dude who writes silly poetry parodies? Man, you are unforgiving.
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I’m not objecting to the attempt at humor
Yeah dude, you kind of are.
Tell you what. Come up with a better one and I’ll publish it.
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“No one would talk like that in any time period”
Shit, no. Really? There weren’t Bon Jovi sonnets in Shakespeare’s day? You’re some kinda badass cultural observationist you are.
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I think that’s a clever idea, though it’s already old. There’s no need to ever write another one, because we get the joke. The current 21 popsonnets are more than enough, forever. I’d imagine traffic to that site will be a wicked bell curve.
My first problem is that I don’t know half the songs being sonnet-ized. With the others, I find them well done. Of course the sentiments are banal: they’re pop song sentiments. But doing this is not easy. It obviously doesn’t result in great poetry, but it’s clever craftsmanship.
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