Happy Bloomsday!

Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there: quiet dusk: let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have been, strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper: fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of the well stonecold like the hole in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and more: all. Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.

Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter then all sank.

James Joyce. Ulysses. Lotus Eaters.

(no subject)

Rhyming verse still dominates Russian poetry. One explanation for this phenomena would be the prevalence of oral vs written poetry distribution mechanisms within Russian/Soviet cultural environment. A long history of political and ideological censorship favors information replication modes that can work around official prohibitions. Rhyming poems are easier to remember or put into a song, which means they can be easily communicated when their publication is either prohibited or limited due to, e.g. a government policy that allows printing of officially approved literature only. It would be important to note here that the official literature, being a creature of conservative literary tastes, tends to favor rhyming verse as well. Therefore we get an environment that for a variety of reasons selects rhythmically "packaged" verse vs its all other varieties.

cf haiku as a predominantly written or even painted verse.