Sunday, April 16, 2006

"Kafkaless delights"         [imaginal shrimpy]


Through a case of mistaken identity   I was thrown in the clink

only many Kafkas later   did they set me free

now I wash my dishes gingerly   at the kitchen sink

thanking God for the Kafkaless delights   of poetry




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The "Kafka" as a unit of measure is explained here:
"France raises Kafkaesque image to cut red tape" (Reuters)
From this, I extrapolate the notion of a "Kafkaless" experience (with no intended slight to the esteemed gentleman from Prague).

A kind of 4-line poem was termed Jue-ju in classical Chinese poetics, which means something like a "cut-short verse" (since it must unfold its full thought in half of the more-standard 8 lines). A way of carrying this idea across is to call such a poem a shrimpy. The genre "imaginal shrimpy" (hereby inatroduced) can involve a fictional situation or scenario, sketched in 4 lines.

1 Comments:

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Fri May 19, 12:22:00 PM PDT  

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