I’m not surprised that after having a negative reaction before you even clicked the video, you did not have a deep experience. Maybe I should have substantiated my claims, as I now did in my reply to drethelin.
You are right that I do take this quite seriously, for two reasons that will only make sense for someone willing to take poetry seriously at all. First, this project is about raising the sanity waterline by replacing religion. All big religions have didactic poetry, so it might be an important component that any post-religion should feature! The last time atheism got something like this was Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which is 2000 years old, doesn’t rhyme and still had an impact that is hard to overstate. Second, nobody has done strict meter double rhymes for more than a few stanzas because it is really hard. (Please give counterexamples if you can. The ones people have named so far—John Donne, GK Chesterton, David Rakoff—all used laxer rules or wrote much shorter pieces) This kind of writing is essentially a prolonged search among hundreds of possible formulations of each stanza to find one that doesn’t violate any of the rules. This was a lot of work, and this is what makes it unique.
I don’t expect you to take this seriously, I’m merely explaining why I do. This is essentially an art project, and art isn’t what LW is about or should be about. But this is the bragging thread, where achievements that LW isn’t about may be celebrated, so that’s what I do.
I had a good experience, but not an astonishingly deep one.
Who knows whether it obeys a stricter set of formal rules than almost anything of its length ever published in the English language? That’s a vague claim (it’s hard to judge how strict rules are) and impossible to check.
Thanks for not mincing your words!
I’m not surprised that after having a negative reaction before you even clicked the video, you did not have a deep experience. Maybe I should have substantiated my claims, as I now did in my reply to drethelin.
You are right that I do take this quite seriously, for two reasons that will only make sense for someone willing to take poetry seriously at all. First, this project is about raising the sanity waterline by replacing religion. All big religions have didactic poetry, so it might be an important component that any post-religion should feature! The last time atheism got something like this was Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which is 2000 years old, doesn’t rhyme and still had an impact that is hard to overstate. Second, nobody has done strict meter double rhymes for more than a few stanzas because it is really hard. (Please give counterexamples if you can. The ones people have named so far—John Donne, GK Chesterton, David Rakoff—all used laxer rules or wrote much shorter pieces) This kind of writing is essentially a prolonged search among hundreds of possible formulations of each stanza to find one that doesn’t violate any of the rules. This was a lot of work, and this is what makes it unique.
I don’t expect you to take this seriously, I’m merely explaining why I do. This is essentially an art project, and art isn’t what LW is about or should be about. But this is the bragging thread, where achievements that LW isn’t about may be celebrated, so that’s what I do.
Fair points, I’ve upvoted this comment.
Upvoted because this is the bragging thread.
I had a good experience, but not an astonishingly deep one.
Who knows whether it obeys a stricter set of formal rules than almost anything of its length ever published in the English language? That’s a vague claim (it’s hard to judge how strict rules are) and impossible to check.