Remind you of any projects you might be working on? How’s this for an interpretative slant:
His report on the assassination of a governor-elect:
The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on his bier.
The Wikipedia has a nice summary of the events that led to this poem:
On January 30, 1900, before the committee had formally published its findings, [Democratic candidate] Goebel was shot by a sniper as he was walking up the steps of the State Capitol building. Incumbent Republican governor William S. Taylor declared a state emergency, called out the militia, and called the General Assembly into special session. In the immediate aftermath of the events, the legislature certified the election in Goebel’s favor, although the Republicans in the General Assembly refused to accept the commission’s finding.
And speaking of death, here is how Bierce put things in his last correspondence:
Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia.
Sometimes I wonder if people living in the United States ever think about what life was like 100 years ago, or how things could end up if they don’t think about it…
On a slightly related note to my earlier comment about NSA data mining, I just read a rather amusing paragraph by Peter Preston in the Guardian:
The New York Times’s own search wizard recites his golden lessons for search referral. “Don’t get cutesy. Put yourself in the mind of your audience. Use the words your audience might use to seek your content.” Don’t say “Mourning crowds converge on Vatican”, say “Pope dies”. And don’t wander deep into the forests of argot, where Macca chases Mucca, where Big Ron used to be a footballer manager but may now be a tubby Brazilian centre forward, where German fans signal their enthusiasm for their English counterparts via “Love is in the Herr”. None of that is grist to the Google mill. All of it is search repellent. Bring me boring heads on chatty blogs. Computers don’t do jokes; it’s just pun of those things.
Nicely done Peter! Sometimes I wonder if the best writing in London comes after closing time on the Strand.
But more importantly, I also wonder if puns are not only classified by cryptographers as unbreakable to artificial intelligence, but whether they will find their way to clever linguistic acrobats trying to fly below radar. Imagine underground groups all speaking in puns. Oh, poetry, wherefore art thou…
The rustling of leaves
as a language of trees
…
A whole poem came to me as I was riding under a canopy of trees along a mountain highway, but unfortunately a motorcycle is not very conducive to writing things down. The above phrase is all that stuck, but I sure enjoyed it while it lasted.