Thursday, February 21, 2019

did I falsely accuse Jeff?

In a recent comment over at Jeff Hodges's excellent blog, Gypsy Scholar, I jokingly brought up an old bone to pick with him when he put out a poem. You can see our exchange here. For the TL;DR crowd: I accused Jeff of having critiqued some of my past poetry by saying that every line of a poem needs to begin with a capital letter (a "rule" with which I and e.e. cummings vehemently disagree). Jeff claimed not to recall having made such a criticism and, rightly, asked for proof. The problem for me is that I've written plenty of poems on this blog, and they're all buried in a pile of blog posts that, after nearly sixteen years of blogging, is over 12,000 strong. When I told Jeff that digging around for the comment in question would take some time, Jeff replied that "Sometimes, Google works."

Except it doesn't when it comes to searching for specific comments. Blogger comments don't register on Google—at all. I just tried an experiment in which I asked Google to search for a specific comment by John McCrarey: "Um, could this be the beginning of a true romance? Has all the makings of a love story..." Ideally, such a search string should return exactly one search result, but I got nothing, as I knew I would because I've tried using Google to search comments before. And Blogger itself has no tools for searching a blog's comment threads.

Anyway, I'm determined to find Jeff's comment, which I'm pretty sure I didn't hallucinate. (Besides, it's in keeping with Jeff's other occasional attempts, in my comments section, to correct my English. He's a critical one, that Jeff.) An intra-blog search of the word "poem" didn't produce any results, but I'm not done digging. Eventually, though, I may have to concede defeat and retract my accusation, however unjust(!) such a retraction might be.



3 comments:

Charles said...

Poetry has rules?

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

If
I
Criticized
Your
Poetry
For
Not
Capitalizing
The
First
Letter
Of
Each
Line,
I
May
Have
Been
Joking.

Jeffery Hodges

* * *

Kevin Kim said...

Charles,

Some would say yes.

Jeff,

Damn. I was hoping for an acrostic.