The fishmonger joke

Once upon a time there was a tree with seven hats, also five noses. But then, perhaps one couldn't call it a tree. It didn't. But then it didn't call anything anything, even though anything was, which it probably wasn't, which just shows you. Not much. Never mind. Anyway, there was this tree, but it had four legs as well. In fact it is so confusing I am not going to write any more about it.

        Spool spool (oops!)

"There was this tree, right, with seven elephantine probosces and eighty-seven washing-machine attachments, and it went into a pub, right, and there was a goat in there buying a packet of crisps, and the tree went up to the bar, shouting 'Where's the money?' and this old bloke, right, sitting at the bar in a puddle of beer-belly, he said, 'Stop shouting, you old tree!', and the barman says 'Not today thanks, I'm a fishmonger!'"
        (Martian Joke Magazine 1993)

"Thou art a fishmonger!" said Hamlet, and with that historic utterance, spotted the audience. "Yikes!" he said, in anticipatory citation.

Limericks at dawn

A girl by the name of Beaumont Bissell
Once accidentally trod on a thistle
She cried out in distress
"This isn't a text"
And went back to listen to Harrison Birtwhistle.

An optimistic chap called Greatrex
Had an inadequate appreciation of context
He wasn't very good with rhyme, either
And metre caused him problems as well
He still wanted to be world dictator. Whatever next!

Raving other

"The rains in Spain fall mainly in the plain" (Shaw)

            "Not so!" (Sure?)

"Is Spain anyway?" (Uncertain)

"Boo!" (Trad.)

"Boo boop-i-doo" (Marilyn Monroe)

"Yikes!" (Scooby-Doo)

"How!" (Geronimo, attrib.)

"Wibbly wobbly plibble splonge" (Rolf Harris)

Anyone who smothers their brother with their mother — raving other!"

Return of the Pope

2 more approaches

"Extraordinary" — D. Coleman

"Great, smashing, super" — J. Bowen

"representative fractions of the mind" (Northern Expo)

"Barcelona! When the wind comes rolling down the plain" (Oxpo 92)

"Grunge the bastards" (The Pope)

The Pope has returned! Exalt! Exalt! Oh ye who have no hair!

And the third day he rose again from the bed, and ascended in a milkfloat, crying "Wholly, wholly, wally! Inconsistent and insane. Thou art nothing like Ken Dodd! Heaven and earth are full of thy beetroots. Amen. Are they?"

    And the firmament fell back into the sea
    Except it didn't, for our very God
    Had omitted the invention of gravity
    Hallelujah! And how very odd.

Edna's approach

"A poignant, yet hopeful lament over a dying metaphysic, upon which a bleak sun rises once again. Elegiac in the mode of enigmatic Old English works such as "the Wanderer" or "The Seafarer", the poem enacts its own collapse, and the collapse of the assumptions which sustained it, forcing them to their logical conclusion in the conclusion of their own logic, yet salvaging from the hermeneutical detritus a new and an Other logic." (Edna.)

Twixt one logic and the next

Two Critical Approaches to Geoffrey's Poem "Untitled LVII"

With optimism tentative he ends
(Rather concludes contingently) his verse —
Which for its force ambivalent depends
Upon the text he is inclined to curse.

What can one say — "hypocrite!" is an option
It has been said so many times before!
Or else, "'Tis sport to see," (as in citation);
"The engineer hoist with his own petar."

It's certainly unfair to deconstruct it —
In metrical decay overdetermined
It lies in ruins utterly unstructured
Overambitious and unselfexamined.

Unlike itself it lies like certain fossils,
Last decadent product of its generation,
Like Keats's or like Sylvia Plath's Colossus
Not even adequate to its resignation.

Travestied, fragmented modernist text
Just failing, elegiac, to go down fighting
Suspended twixt one logic and the next
End of the book and the beginning of writing!

Discarded dogmas

Dawn rose with her rosy fingers
Scattering her light across the land
Yet that hideous stench still lingers —
of corruption worse than the African rand.

The débris of discarded dogmas
Strewn across the floor
The works of failed philosophers
Thrown right of the door.

They had claimed it was no ideology
"A project only" they cried
However they offered no apology
To the thousands who yet had died.

"Iterability" was their rallying cry
Deconstruct or die
But no one stopped to ask "why?"
There was no one to stop the lie.

It ravaged throughout the land
Sweeping all in its path
Resistance to the text was aband-
oned for fear of its awful wrath.

And so I shall cease from my verse
Hesitant which way to turn
I fear lest my sanity get worse
When there's so much to learn
(shurely shome mishtake — Edna).