Linguistics; stylistics; sf poetry being made, 2nd round; part 5...
I am more grateful than I can say for your help with this poem, and for all your contributions and criticisms and suggestions and inspirations; thank you. For me, the draft below is the final draft except for two loose ends: I still don't have a title that suits me -- the one shown is what's called a "working title" -- and I still don't have a name
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Now that the poem's essentially in final form, however, I see no reason not to clarify things: all "authorized water" is water for drinking, owned and processed and sold by the giant water corporations. "Unauthorized water" is water pure enough to drink that has been obtained from some source other than the water corporations -- drinking such water is illegal. And then there's "crude water," which is not fit to drink, but can be used for gardening and agriculture and industry and so on.
Making Lilani's father a gardener -- especially a gardener who used authorized water on plants -- would be a plot nugget for an entirely ( ... )
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You started an internet collaboration, partly in order to observe how it happens. Now here's something interesting happening, something very internet-like... my "alternate-universe" version of the Water Poem is starting to take on a life of its own, developing in a different direction from the original poem. In the Open Source movement for software development, this sort of thing is called "forking" the project, or a fork of the project ( ... )
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If I've offended you, I apologize; it wasn't my intention. My concern was to make sure you knew that there was interest in the version of the poem that I've been working with here, with help from all of you. You say that you have no intention of publishing your fork -- but you might well change your mind one day. I wanted to let you know so that you could format your version in a fashion that would leave that option open for you.
Long before the days of open source anything, poets were writing poems that were styled as "a response to" someone else's poem, or "a variation on" someone else's poem, and other things of that kind; poets have always quoted other poets, and translated other poets, and "sampled" other poets. There have been many projects in which a whole batch of poets were all asked to write a poem on a single theme. As long as the two (or however many) poems are sufficiently different, that's all that's needed ( ... )
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translatlantic jet-spray flights? Add a line of "(and no longer served complementary glasses in the first class of a 797 Niagra)"?
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Not Papa. When your comfort is at stake, everybody turns a blind eye.
We all know that.
Except my goody-goody sister.
I went around and asked the servants. No one answered.
They were all afraid of me. And Papa.
Except one man, a stern and righteous sort
Who looked me in the eye and said with some surprise
"He broke the law! The master wouldn't harbor criminals."
"Criminal?" I said. "How is it criminal?"
The footman sniffed."He broke the law," he said again.
He never understood why Papa fired him
Without a reference.
My sister never understood
How much alike they were.
Only the sentiments differ.
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Scarcity from Abundance
Government for the Corporations, by the Corporations
Precious Droplets (which could also be worked into the description of the necklace if you so desired.)
Law over Life
Rule of Law
Unauthorized Water
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The "Precious Droplets" suggestion is excellent, and would, as you say, refer to both the water situation and the necklace. The problem, to my ear, is that it would sound overwhelmingly as if it were the title of a Southern Baptist hymn, and if I were a reader my first thought would be that the droplets were blood. That puts it outside the set of possibilities, for me, but it doesn't make it any less excellent. If you ever write a poem that's about blood, there you are.
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