Word: stanza
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nonsense saves the radical political themes of the poem from didacticism. An attempt at high seriousness would blunt the sting of the poem's political barbs, but irreverence sharpens them with a fitting context. A poet who can build an atmosphere of emotion in three short lines of a stanza, and then juxtapose two words in a way that completes the emotional setting while slyly turning against it, is a poet to be admired. In one stanza of "Checkers," Boudin does just that...
...stanza...
Well, no great mystery; the caprifole stanza continues botanically: "Downward a leaf inclines its tip/ and drops from its tip a pearl." It is clear that Nabokov is describing a rain-wet shrub, but has his own good reasons for leaving indefinite precisely which shrub. It is as if he had written of a cavalryman saddling his ungulate (horse? cow? moose?) and riding away...
...song's final stanza is a footnote to 1968, when James left New York trying to escape heroin and personal squalor, and thus brought to an end The Flying Machine, a struggling group started by his friend Danny Kootch...
...most self-revealing effort. Knocking 'Round the Zoo, which tells what it was like in a mental hospital, where James spent nine months, comes out heavily armed with witty, riffy musical irony?at least until the end, when Taylor tacks a chilling descant of bedlamite sounds onto the following stanza...