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comment by user-inactivated

I see your capitals are back.





_refugee_  ·  2460 days ago  ·  link  ·  

They come and go dependent. Written language is a method of communication - things like spelling, punctuation and capitalization are, to me, just elements of that method which can be manipulated, altered, or simply invoked to help convey shades of meaning in the same way as the use of bold, italics, third/first/&c. person, interjections, quotations, and etc are (more commonly) accepted and used to.

It would take a high level review of multiple of my published poems to maybe perceive the "big picture" of how I like to fuck with capitals and punctuation/lack-thereof, but it's a been long term fuckwiddit thing I like to do.

I imagine for a non-native English speaker it may make the reading more difficult.

I guess my real point is that if I misspell a word, it's more likely on purpose than not. Same with using incorrect grammar or unusual punctuation.

user-inactivated  ·  2460 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Eloquently put.

I must say: it's a bigger pleasure seeing a message written according to a higher standard. Your using "&c.", in particular, is an eye candy. Not that I expect it to change your ways: your choice of mistreating spelling is a conscious one, and I know you to be a woman of conviction.

As for me: a very high number of things I read - let's approximate it as 95%, for clarity's sake - over the last five years are in English in all of its various forms, including forums where people bother with spelling much less than most I've seen would. At this point, I find the concern of my having a hard time reading an English poem to be unreasonable as long as it uses modern English. I may stumble a time or two, but that's everyone's lot, and I think it does not disqualify me from the C1 I claim to have (if you don't know what it means, google "CEFR": you should know what the rest of the world is up to).

_refugee_  ·  2457 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think the difficulty a non-native English speaker might have reading an English-language poem would echo the difficulties any reader would encounter, when they delve into creative writing (& yes especially poems) in languages that aren't their inundated born-and-bred own.

That is to say I'd think the inherent difficulty there would center more around said poem's potential use of slang, idioms, bastardized idioms, mixed metaphors and one-off one-word half-references, than word-by-misspelled-or-poorly-grammared-word comprehension. I think poems especially offer great avenues for playing with words, language, sound and sense. They also beg to fill up with echoes of other rhymes, lines, poems, lyrics and evocative works.

So it's hard to learn all the fables & folk songs of a different culture which speaks a different language; it's hard to know their pop music and puzzle out whether a turn of phrase is a bastardized idiom or an original, surreal or imagistic or otherwise unexpected use of words language invention.

It would be hard to read a poem in a language you didn't grow up with because poems are more like quilts than they're like comforters - sure both of them make warm blankets but one's made out of blocks and patterns within patterns and fabrics from the clothes you grew up wearing out but couldn't part with.

The other one's like two colors or has the same generic printed pattern of lines or polka dots which Target and a $50 price limit combine to guarantee.

Both will keep you warm but one you'll throw out after it gets ragged and starts pooping increasingly-gross-graying cotton batting from its broken corners or side seams, approx 3-5 years after purchase.

Sure it might be dramatic but basically what I'm saying is, it ain't the text that I expect would throw you. It's all the murky subtext you can't look up on genius or urban dictionary.