Or perhaps Thorne was seen as the missing thorn and an alternative to the emaculate conception of verse 1.

"bum-like face" is now the default -=Dark_Angel=- insult.

Incredibly funny. I suppose Thorne was a thorn in the flesh, Hayes the haze over Los Angeles, and Ohman was an omen of forthcoming doom.

No, I'm afraid the actual "poem" was: Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman (?) [rougly centered] "Jacobs was explicated as a reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a figure for the Christian ascent to heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students told me, the means of ascent is not a ladder but a tree, a rose or rosenbaum. This was seen as an obvious reference to the Virgin Mary, who was often characterized as a rose without thorns, itself an emblem of the Immaculate Conception." - Is There a Text in This Class, Fish, 1980

No. No, no, no, no. What you've got here is "An impossibly cliched, absurdly misguided exposition about the differences between humans and computers, littered with notation so baffling and unlike any sensible environment that the reader is almost convinced he is having a terrifying, unwakeable dream in which he is forced to understand code written in the worst language ever about the most suffocatingly gay topic ever". How you confused that with "programming", I've no idea.

I didn't write this before yours, you bloated fuckwurst. If you had the tiniest amount of sense behind your bum-like face, you'd have compared the dates before gushing your ignorance all over the steps like some foul lost hobo.

You know, you really should write something good yourself before you go around making smart ass comments on peoples' poems.

just a guess, maybe, but my user name used to be zzinnia.

I assume it was a list of five quotes from authors, not a list of five authors, and since it was from another class, the quotes must have been related in some way. It is interesting that he was able to perform this stunt thousands of times.

In 1971, SUNY-Buffalo professor Stanley Fish performed an experiment on his poetry class where he left a list of 5 authors on his blackboard from another class and told them it was a religious poem. The poetry students critiqued it surprisingly well, considering it was RANDOM and UTTERLY MEANINGLESS. He wrote about the incident, "My students did not proceed from the noting of distinguishing features to the recognition that they were confronted by a poem: rather, it was the act of recognition that came first - they knew in advance that they were dealing with a poem - and the distinguishing features then followed" (326). Fish claims to have performed this same experiment thousands of times on lecture audiences with the same result, even though he is now hideously famous for it.

It needs a rhythm of sorts, a lyrical quality about it to be poetry. We've given up the old rules, but poetic nature is not negotiable, not for me. You cannot take any piece of writing and call it a poem! That defeats the unique nature of poetry, which admittedly is emotional, not easily defined, but a real and separate entity just the same.

Is anything poetry then as long as it has line break because I have noticed something. J.K. Rowling writes two pages of prose a day. She should just put line breaks in and a couple of sentences would do.

Never said it wasn't poetry. I just agreed with the above comment that it's an essay. It's very well done, and if you notice, I gave you a 9. Poetry is an abstract thing and stating that it's an essay is just breaking it down into a smaller category. I never claim to know "what poetry is", which you could surely tell by reading some of the crap that I have written. I apoligize if you took my comment as an insult.