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| _grassy, inning, oppose, lunacy, oddity, tattle, long attention span.Image(s) from the Internet.
The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed! And couching them in Poetry is definitely NOT required.
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.
"Sporting Values"
ReplyDeleteThe athlete chose not to oppose
other players as though they were foes.
Instead he preferred smiling and grinning
even if the inning they were winning.
The lunacy and oddity of fighting
he never found inviting.
And so he ignored all the prattle and tattle
in order to avoid a battle.
He refused to be nasty and sassy
and his temper was green and grassy.
Instead his attention span
focused on being a good man.
Let me pose a question to you.
ReplyDeleteWhy was it OK yesterday to “each other instruct”?
But NOT right today to say “… if the inning they were winning”?
You are such a master of poetry, Misty, with your best work setting a high standard, that you shouldn’t relax your efforts on a quiet Sunday. To STAY at your best, you need to be careful of falling into clichés!
Today’s piece is rock solid & makes for very pleasant reading. But it uses straightforward logic, unlike yesterday’s intentionally quirky fun-with-words. That Gecko verse showed a fine sense of verbal foolery, so it was fitting that you would throw a “mill” into the mix. But today there’s no reason (none I can see, anyway) to avoid a correct reading, “… if they were winning the inning.”
Now, you or others may very well ask, “Why make a mountain out of a mole hill?”
I can only answer that this small gaffe looms large against the background of your excellent artistry.
You often point to how you learned English as a second language, so let me show you how much I care by pointing out where the out-dated clichés of Victorian versification creep into your otherwise brilliant work.
~ OMK
Well, I was sure that if I got a criticism today, it would be for "his temper was green and grassy"--which makes absolutely no sense at all and doesn't belong in the verse. But what else could I have done with 'grassy'?
ReplyDeleteBut you're right that "if they were winning the inning" would have been much better. So thank you for pointing that out, Ol' Man Keith.
You overlook the right of the reader to make his own sense of what you print. The adjectives "green" and "grassy" made fine sense to me.
ReplyDelete"Green" is often used to denote something or someone that is inexperienced or (depending on context) either open to new development or naïve. "Grassy" is trickier, but a reader will assume the poet is coining it, and that's what I did. I went further and knowing you meant something positive, I thought you were describing a mind that is fecund, fertile, & able to take hints and turn them into good things.
I am glad you accepted my criticism. But I hope you understood what was behind a mere changing of the particular wording. In my actin g research I spent some time with Jerzy Grotowski, the celebrated Polish director/coach who created a method of improvisation.
One of Jerzy's key points was that everyone's first attempts at creation must be re-examined, and probably thrown out.
Why?
Because our first attempts are always riddled with cliché. Cliché, or standardized forms of expression, are anathema to any art form.
I much prefer your green and grassy mind!
~ OMK
Thank you for your kind and helpful comment on my "green" and "grassy," Ol' Man Keith.
ReplyDeleteI am determined to try to become a bit more unconventional and inventive in my verses this coming year, but am not sure how far I'll get. But your openness to experimentation is a help to getting me to try things. So we'll see how it goes.