"A Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes about Poetry" (1926); translation from Chris Jenks Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 86-7
“The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, let’s say, or Doc Williams’s Patterson…. The game is definitely an epic … formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.”
“A Kind of Love,” The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed (1993).
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Andrei Codrescu 6
American writer 1946Related quotes
On how losing his mother affected his writing in “You and I Have Peril in Common: The Millions Interviews Saeed Jones” https://themillions.com/2019/11/saeed-jones-qa.html in The Millions (2019 Nov 21)
“The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry.. it paces the poem.”
'Five points' vol 4 no 2 Georgia State University Press Winter 2000
“Poem: Lines on the Death of my Husband”
De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 107
from posthumous publications
It has been dated to at least 1927 http://www.fun-with-words.com/shortest_poem.html, as published in the Mt Rainier Nature News Notes (1 July 1927).
Misattributed
Preface
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717)
"PL/I as a Tool for System Programming", Datamation, 15 (5), 6 May 1969, pp. 68–76. This has been paraphrased variously by others as Corbató's Law:
Productivity and reliability depend on the length of a program’s text, independent of language level used.
Albert Endres, H. Dieter Rombach, A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering: Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories (2003), ISBN 0321154207, p. 72
The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.
[citation needed]