watching him with her

she sang
and he danced–
he is mad
or I am much mistaken



From The Philosophy of Grammar by Otto Jespersen (New York: The Norton Library, 1965), p. 90. Submitted by Catherine B. Krause.

From the clods

i
Flocks of seagulls are flying with the rooks and starlings
white plumage makes them visible.
The grass has not grown,
would hardly hide a mouse.
The smallest bird injured by
how bitter the weather is.

ii
Sharp against the sky
four oxen draw the ancient wheeled plough
to and fro on that open ridge
like ploughing on the dome of St Paul’s:
nothing for the rooks.
Now and then a lark sings in despite of
the bitter wind shaking to pieces
agriculture generally
while the house is falling.



From Field and Farm by Richard Jefferies (Phoenix House, 1957), chapter V 'On the Farm'. Submitted by Rebecca Gethin.

We make, methinks, a mistake

we do not enough
trust
Heaven
with our affairs, and
pretend to
more
from
our
own
con
duct t
ha
n appertains to us



From a section of Montaigne's essay On Physiognomy. The finished layout comes via the freeware text-generation program JanusNode. It was set to 'eecummingsfy'. Submitted by Chris Westbury.

Without conscience

He will choose you,
disarm you with his words.

Control you with his presence.

He will delight you with his wit and his plans.
He will show you a good time.

You will always get the bill.

He will smile and deceive you

and he will scare you with his eyes

and when he is through with you, and he will be through with you,
he will desert you and take with him
your innocence and your pride.

You will be left much sadder but not a lot wiser
and for a long time you will wonder what happened and
what you did wrong.

And if another of his kind comes knocking on your door,

will you open it?



From The Psychopath in Prison, an essay by Dr Robert Hare. Two conjunctions removed. Submitted by Deborah.

A day without deference

Let the nation’s doormen do their jobs without smiling
Let waiters at suburban restaurants leave their flair at home
Let the janitors at Princeton mop no vomit from the dormitory stairwells
Let retail greeters of every description call in sick
Let the first-class passengers board at someone else’s leisure
Let the nation’s limo drivers require their passengers to open their own damn doors
Let the production interns at CNBC send the on-air “talent” to fetch the coffee
And, for just one day, let the talent ask their interviewees hard questions



From the essay Servile Disobedience by Thomas Frank, February 2011. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Hamlet R.I.P.

Hamlet was a young man very nervous.
He was always dressed in black because his
uncle had killed his father, shooting him
in his ear. He could not go to the
theatre because his father was dead
so he had the actors come to his house
and play in the front parlor and he learned
them to say the words because he thought he
knew best how to say them. And then he thought
he’d kill the king but he didn’t. Hamlet
liked Ophelia. He thought she was a
very nice girl but didn’t marry her
because she was going to be a nunnery.
Hamlet went to England but he did not
like it very much so he came home. Then
he jumped into Ophelia’s grave and
fought a duel with her brother. Then he died.



From 'English as She Is Taught: Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools, 1887,' as featured on Futility Closet. 'By' removed from line 3 and 'he' from line 12 to keep the decasyllabic pattern. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

The summers of his youth

In Algiers, you don’t talk about ‘going swimming’
but ‘knocking off for a swim’.

I won’t insist.

People swim in the harbour
and then go rest on the buoys.

When you pass a buoy
where a pretty girl is sitting,

you shout to your friends,
‘I tell you it’s a seagull’.

These are healthy pleasures.
They certainly seem ideal to the young men.



A quote from Albert Camus found in this essay. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

This is the cow

This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.
–Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'

The cow is a successful animal.
Also he is quadrupud, and because
he is female, he give milk, but will do
when he is got child. He is same like God,
sacred to Hindus and useful to man.
But he has got four legs together.
Two are forward and two are afterwards.

His motion is slow only because he
is of asitudinious species.
Also his other motion is useful
to trees, plants as well as making flat cakes
in hand and drying in the sun. Cow is
the only animal that extricates
his feeding after eating. Then afterwards
she chew with his teeth whom are situated
in the inside of the mouth. He is
incessantly in the meadows in the grass.

His only attacking and defending
organ is the horn, specially so when
he is got child. This is done by knowing
his head whereby he causes the weapons
to be paralleled to the ground of earth
and instantly proceed with velocity
forwards.

He has got tails also, but not
like similar animals. It has hairs
on the other end of the other side.
This is done to frighten away the flies
which alight on his cohoa body
whereupon he gives hit with it.

The palms
of his feet are soft unto the touch. So
the grasses head is not crushed. At night time
have poses by looking down on the ground
and he shouts his eyes like his relatives,
the horse does not do so. This is the cow.



From a supposedly genuine essay on the subject of 'the cow', written by a student for the Indian Civil Services Exam. Undated. A few minor words have been removed to maintain the natural decasyllabic rhythm: so (from line 3); much (10); the (22); great (23). Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Dissertation and Independence

The problem of ‘ideology’ and ‘politics'
influencing statistics
affects not only their reliability
and validity,
but also their availability.

In some cases this problem was insurmountable,
and statistics on, for example,
the number of young asylum seekers,
were simply not available;

the discussion section deals with this.

However, rather than allow the availability
of statistics – a political issue -
to shape which variables
I chose to present
data on, I felt a moral

imperative to present the findings with 'gaps'
since, in any case, the gaps
in these statistics spoke perhaps
more, than the statistics
which were available.

From Emma, who sent this excerpt from her 2009 dissertation.