Here is a brief (ish) site page that talks about the poem and its context. The original source is The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/ ... trite.html

The poet of this little piece is the surrealist Andre Breton. It is used in the article to represent dada (the D of your thread).

Perdus means lost. Gallimand is a name. I am sure it had specific cultural connotations to Breton and his crowd, but without further research, I do not know what they are. I don't know of any specific meaning of Gallimand as a word but there was a play about a M. Gallimand that has resonance with the world of illusion that dada addresses. See the summary: http://www.lasalle.edu/library/vietnam/ ... TERFLY.pdf

(as an aside, I have to say that the resonance between M. (as a short form of Monsieur) and the M. Butterfly which to us evokes Madame is hilarious given the gender mis/representation going on in the play.)

Lacher is a verb that means to release or drop. Tout means "all" or something like it depending on the context (i.e. tout un livre means "the whole book").

[title=""]Anyone know how to include accents with code? In Lacher there is a circumflex over the "a."[/title]

About my absence: a number of reasons, but the main one is that last Wednesday we (my job) finally got the new system online. In the last 3 months or so I have worked and slept with the occasional break for swearing. We now have a break (a couple of months) before we begin the next phase, so I can go back to a more normal work schedule. This means I can get back to some long overdue books.

Finally, DWill...hadn't thought about my signature viz the message of dada and the surrealists in general but, yes, I think you are right that it does fit. I am generally interested in what the surrealists, existentialists etc saw about the world even though I think their interpretation of the events of WWI etc suffered from an overabundance of self reference. In fact, I suspect people, in general, tend to read what happens to them as if it were a universal condition and assess their personally derived meaning of the particular as universally true.

Double dactyls. As I recall from possibly faulty memory (which I still savor even though faulty), at the opening of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan finds the "prefect dactyls" of Yeats' "Who Goes with Fergus" running through his head: "and the white breast of the dim sea."

This is so much fun and I'm leaning too! Double dactyl -- Now I know are two small feet and a verse form. Apparently creating double dactyls, also known as "higgledy piggledy," was once a pallor word game, like creating limericks.

Here are a few I copied from Wikipedia:

An example by Theodore L. Drachman

Small Problem

Higgamus Hoggamus
"Anton Von Leewenhoek
Has a small problem," con-
Fided his wife.

"Microbiology
Doesn't disturb me; his
Microanatomy's
Blighting my life!"

An example by E. Jaksch[2]:

Inheritance

Higgledy-Piggledy
Gay Caius Julius.
Tribune sojourning a
Long way from home,

Seeking distraction in
Nicomedophily,
Earned with his service a
Province for Rome.


A double dactyl by Paul Pascal on the subject of Antony and Cleopatra:

Tact

"Patty cake, patty cake,
Marcus Antonius,
What do you think of the
African queen?"

"Gubernatorial
Duties require my
Presence in Egypt. Ya
Know what I mean?"

A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes


What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

How about Dinggedicht (German: "thing-poem")

http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/ ... dicht.html)

examples by Rilke

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

Das Karussell

(this is a bit from the poem - see http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... 3292/pg_8/

Und auf den Pferden kommen sie voruber,
auch Madchen, helle, diesem Pferdesprunge fast schon entwachsen, mitten in dem Schwunge
schauen sie auf, irgendwohin, heruber
Und dann and wann ein weisser Elefant.

(And there on horses perched they circle by,
girls, too, bright, and for this horseplay
really overgrown, amidst the fray
they look up, any which way, over here
And now and then a white elephant.)

The whole poem in English (different translation) is here http://books.google.ca/books?id=3wGCCRm ... #PPA114,M1

Go, Mary! And now for the next letter --

E

Being a little bit of an antiquarian, I'd name "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," by Thomas Gray. This hits no. 20 on the charts, by the way (the 20th most popular according to William Harmon). It's a great populist poem, very sentimental, celebrating the humble people who lived and died unknown. Has some famous lines, including "Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest."

How about "Elegiac distich?"

"In Gr. poetry, a distinctive meter, consisting of a hexameter followed by a pentameter, which developed in the archaic period for a variety of topics but which came to be associated thereafter with only one, i.e. loss or mourning, hence elegy (q.v.) in the modern sense. It first appears in the 7th-6th cs. B.C. in the work of the Gr. “elegiac poets” "

You can see the rest of the entry here http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/ ... stich.html

Here are bits of three elegiac poems. Look at the difference between the use of feet and stress between them.

Schiller:

Mournful groans, as when a tempest lowers,
Echo from the dreary house of woe;
Death-notes rise from yonder minster's towers!
Bearing out a youth, they slowly go;
Yes! a youth—unripe yet for the bier,
Gathered in the spring-time of his days,
Thrilling yet with pulses strong and clear,
With the flame that in his bright eye plays—
Yes, a son—the idol of his mother,
(Oh, her mournful sigh shows that too well!)
Yes! my bosom-friend,—alas my brother!—
Up! each man the sad procession swell!

See the full poem here: http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/27262-Friedr ... -Young-Man

Christopher Marlowe's translation of Ovid's 5th Elegy:

In summers heate and mid-time of the day
To rest my limbes upon a bed I lay,
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the Sunne,
Or night being past, and yet not day begunne.
Such light to shamefast maidens must be showne,
Where they may sport, and seeme to be unknowne.
Then came Corinna in a long loose gowne,

Full poem here: http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/elegia.htm

and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard"

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Full poem here: http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/Elegy.htm

Or Encomuim - a praise poem of a person rather than a god but strictly "a Greek choral lyric performed "in the revel" to celebrate a person's achievements."

Encomium of Helen (Brian Donovan translation) is here: http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/gorgias ... onovan.htm

or Anne Bradstreet who wrote a poem to her dead baby granddaughter:
from: http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/bradstr1.html

In Memory of my Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet, who deceased June 20, 1699, being Tree Years and Seven Months Old

WITH troubled heart and trembling hand I write.
The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.
How oft with dissappointment have I met
When I on fading things my hopes have set.
Experience might 'fore this have made me wise
To value things according to their price.
Was ever stable joy yet found below?
Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe?
I knew she was but as a withering flower,
That's here today, perhaps gone in an hour;
Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,
Or like a shadow turning, as it was.
More fool, then, I to look on that was lent
As if mine own, when thus impermanent.
Farewell, dear child; thou ne'er shalt come to me,
But yet a while and I shall go to thee.
Meantime my throbbing heart's cheered up with this--
Thou with thy Savior art in endless bliss.

While an ecomium had a different feeling in classical times, things change. So Bradstreet was praising a baby who hadn't had time to achieve anything apart from existence itself. Now you can write an ecomium about paper. Neither good nor bad, but definitely interesting.