Poems Getting near the Limit

I think these are excellent poems, imaginative & inventive. But I can sympathise if you think they aren't poems, or not worthwhile poems. They are all from Jeff Hilson's anthology, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street Editions, 2008). The Spahr poem could probably be classed as a specimen of "Conceptual poetry", where the interest is in the act of processing of existing texts, data or language - though I think more than that is going on in it than that.

Juliana Spahr, from Power Sonnets

After Kendra Mayfield

“Why Girls Don’t Compute,” Wired Website, 3:00 a.m. Apr.20, 2000 PDT

Educators must change the way that they teach to attract girls

to technology. With the rise of technology-related jobs, experts fear girls

who lack computing skills might be left behind. It’s imperative that girls

who are under represented, have computer fluency. Girls

have misconceptions of what computer fluency would lead to. Girls

are getting a distorted view. Yet there are ways to get girls

into computer culture. Reports urge educators to teach girls

sophisticated technology skills. Teachers can re-engage girls

who might be disinterested in traditional computing courses. Girls

are also turned off to technology through computer games. Girls

dislike violent video games. But some researchers think girls

don’t need pink software. But others think software should go straight to girls’

interests. “Software is primarily aimed at boys. To counteract that, we desperately need software out there for girls”; “It’s not really violence that turns girls

off”, repetitious, boring games are more likely to turn girls off than violence. Researchers also stressed educating girls.

 Jen Bervin, from Nets

5

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting Time leads summer on

To hideous winter, and confounds him there;

Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnowed and bareness every where:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:

   But flowers distilled though they with winter meet,

   Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

63

Against my love shall be as I am now,

With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'er-worn;

When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow

With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn

Hath travelled on to age's steepy night;

And all those beauties whereof now he's king

Are vanishing or vanished out of sight,

Stealing away the treasure of his spring;

For such a time do I now fortify

Against confounding age's cruel knife,

That he shall never cut from memory

My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:

   His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,

   And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Abigail Oborne, from lovebaby